Dr. Avnish Jolly, Chandigarh, 18th August, 2008 :A lecture on Scope of Women’s Studies in the USA was organized by the Centre for Women’s Studies and Development, Panjab University, Chandigarh today. Delivering the lecture, Prof. Inderpal Grewal, Professor in Women’s Studies, in the University of California, Irvine, stated that “Women’s Studies are the need of the hour, particularly in the highly patriarchal states of Punjab and Haryana”. She identified the multifarious issues taken up by Women’s studies in the USA.
In this context, she asserted that women’s studies research was increasingly focusing on issues of war, religion and colonialism. Issues of sexuality and the intersectionality of gender with race, religion and other parochial identities were also significant, for gender always exists in conjunction with various other identities. Study of gender and sexuality, she stated, has taken us beyond feminism.
Earlier, welcoming the guests, Prof Meera Malik, who has recently taken over as Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies, emphasized upon the need to widen the horizons of women’s studies by attempting to integrate the research in the east and the west, for although there is a wide divergence in the societies, yet there is also a large similarity which can help us to arrive at policy solutions to the problems encountered by women worldwide.
The lecture was attended by over 40 persons from the faculty and the
students of Panjab University and was followed by an intensive discussion in which issues of Bollywood, globalization, religion, social work and in particular the scope for jobs in women’s studies in India and America came up according to Prof. Meera Malik, Director, Centre for Women’s Studies, P.U.