[Reader-list] Feminine Forms: Ideal Womanhood and Early Women's Magazines in Kerala

[sabitha t p]

Feminine Forms: Ideal Womanhood and Early Women's
Magazines in Kerala
Abstract 
My work for the Sarai project has been on women’s
magazines in Kerala from 1886 to1926 and the ways in
which different kinds of femininities (sometimes
contrary to each other) are discursively produced,
circulated and determined in this period. 1886 is the
year in which the first magazine – Keraliya Sugunana
Bodhini – that is primarily intended for women readers
comes out. I have chosen to end my study in 1926
because that is the year of publication of
Vanitakusumam, the first overtly political women’s
magazine that addresses the question of women’s
“rights”, thus taking it into a different discursive
realm from the earlier magazines which are mainly
engaged in an educative and moral agenda (similar to
that of conduct magazines in Britain).
In my presentation I will concentrate on two aspects
of my work, viz., the logical and ideological types of
arguments that are mobilised in order to advocate or
oppose certain modes of education for women, which
then further endorse or construct certain notions
concerning ideal femininity that are themselves
culturally and historically determined. Some of these
argumentative forms are: the idealist, the rational
humanist, the rational-scientific, the pragmatic, the
moral and the aesthetic. After dwelling on these kinds
of arguments and their various intersections, I will
look at the ends to which they are employed. I then
intend to trace the chronological changes in these
arguments and look at the points at which they
metamorphose into related, but discursively different
modes of arguments. In the last part of my
presentation I will attempt to identify the indigenous
and colonial sites from which these seem to originate,
thus trying to understand the location of gender in a
larger framework of colonial modernity that is
specific to Kerala.



	

	
		
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