A Feminist Clothes Reading: Undressing Hindu and Christian Gender/Caste Relations in Kerala, India

This Gender Plus Caste seminar is part of the Women's Studies Research Centre's GENDER PLUS series. The state of Kerala, India has been of interest to development economists for decades. The "Kerala Model of Development" has been lauded by many, as has the supposed high status of women gleaned from statistics like high literacy rates, male to female population ratios, and low fertility rates. In this talk, Sonja Thomas critiques and contextualizes the Kerala Model through an examination of women's everyday lived realities of caste and religion. She examines communal, caste, and gendered clothing practices that once united dominant caste women across Hindu and Christian divides, and simultaneously demarcated dominant caste women from lower-caste/Dalit women in Kerala, India. She then discusses the change from communal- and caste-based clothing to the pan-Indian sari. Did gendered communal- and caste-based demarcations of identity suddenly disappear with the sari? What do alliances between dominant caste Hindus…