Gender Equality : Constitutional Challenges and Competing Discourses

Abstract

In this essay I address the issue of equality in the context of postcolonial India and some of the structural and normative obstacles encountered by women when bringing constitutional challenges in the bid for greater equality. These challenges cannot be measured in terms of whether women in the postcolonial world are better off or worse off. Such evaluative judgments tend to reinforce an “us and them” binary, where the situation of women in the west are regarded as the civilizational and cultural standard to be achieved. Such a position obscures the ways in which the history of the colonial encounter has partly produced this binary that continues to inform the contemporary responses to gender in the postcolonial world, as well as the ways in which global economic structures and neo-liberal models are implicated in producing and reinforcing some of the gender stereotypes that we are witnessing in the workplace both here and there.