Performing Representation

Breaking new ground in scholarship on gender and politics, Performing Representation is the first comprehensive analysis of women in the Indian parliament. It explores the possibilities and limits of parliamentary democracy and the participation of women in its institutional performances. Offering a new, multi-method analysis of the gendered nature of India's parliament through an examination of electoral data, media reports and life stories of women Members of Parliament it sheds light on the performance, aesthetics, and norms of parliamentary life. It explores how the gendered axis of power underpins the performance of parliament and its Members as well as the political economy in which they are embedded. The book makes a strong case for taking parliamentary politics seriously in these times of populism, without either a utopian framing of women MPs as challengers of masculinised institutional politics or seeing them simply as docile actors in a gendered institution. Performing Representation raises critical questions about the politics of difference, claim-making, representation and intersectionality. It addresses these questions as part of global feminist debates on the importance of the women's representation in political institutions.

Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and development in academic journals and her latest books include New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy ; Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (ed.), and The Grammar of Politics and Performance (eds. with Janelle Reinelt). She has consulted with the United Nations' Division for the Advancement of Women and UNDP. She is a founder member of the South Asia Research Network on Gender, Law and Governance, and she was Director of the Leverhulme Trust programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2007-2011). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an executive committee member of the International Political Science Association. She has also been a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics (2012 -2015). Carole Spary is Assistant Professor at the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK. Prior to this she was Lecturer in Politics at the University of York (2011-2014) and Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick (2008-2011). She has published on democratic politics and development, particularly gender, development, political representation and political institutions in India, including journal articles on women's political leadership in India and candidate nomination in elections, a comparative study of first female Speakers, and on disruption and ethno-linguistic representation in the Indian parliament. She has also written on gender, development and the state in India, and she teaches on gender and development and Asian politics. She has guest edited two special issues of the journals Democratisation and Contemporary South Asia.