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This chapter reflects on xCHANGE, a month-long festival marking International Women's Day (IWD) at Birmingham City University, UK. The author first problematizes expectations of IWD and then outlines the origins of the festival, detailing both practical aspects and program content. The chapter then considers the festival through a lens of “power geometry” (Massey, 1993) in which female academics are positioned in distinct ways in relation to flows and interconnections of power within the university. Does the xCHANGE festival disrupt or merely reflect this power geometry? Does it create conditions for women to thrive in academia?

In this chapter, we examine historical and contemporary debates about the position and situation of women in Myanmar (and to a lesser extent gender and sexual minorities). Specific reference is made to the patriarchal character of the military coup of February 1, 2021, and the emergent forms of feminist resistance that turned social norms inside out in protest against lethal repression. The way women, as well as sexual and gender minorities, are unequally positioned and face structural and social discrimination in society serves to contextualize our presentation of the findings of a collaborative case-study conducted in 2018 on issues pertaining to gender and imprisonment in Myanmar, based mainly on interviews with former prisoners in three research sites. The aim was to generate field-based knowledge about the carceral experiences of women and LGBTQIA+ persons in Myanmar – focusing on their needs and vulnerabilities, their capacities and rights, their relationships and identities, and their modes of survival as they encounter penal regimes. Findings are summarized focusing on former prisoners’ experiences of legal bias; perspectives on encounters with the criminal justice system; the inadequacy of health provision (posed as lethal neglect); and the way certain behaviors and identities are criminalized. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the degree to which there might still be space for critical scholarship in the post-coup world and poses some questions for future research.

The issue of women’s under-representation in male-dominated occupations has been a topic of research for the last few decades. The extant literature has identified gender differences and social and structural discrimination based on a theoretical lens and sensitising concepts around which career barriers were experienced by women within a developed nation’s context (Eaton et al., 2020; French & Strachan, 2009; Hernandez & Ritchie, 2015; Miner et al., 2018). While there has been research on women in transport in developed countries, there has been little research on women employees’ career experiences within Indian Railways. To address this gap, this chapter explores the career barriers of women employed in male-dominated occupations within Indian Railways, in relation to gendered cultural norms. In-depth semi-structured interviews have been undertaken to understand the lived experiences of women employees. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. The findings highlight the interplay of barriers such as gender roles, limited empowerment and occupational segregation, working conditions, lack of role models and mentors, backlash by men, queen-bee behaviour, beta career priorities and restricted informal networks that collectively restrict women in achieving senior level positions in such occupations.

In this chapter, I revisit an important debate about dalit feminism that took place in the pages of the Economic and Political Weekly, a leading publication in India, from 1995 to 2000 (Datar, 1999; Guru, 1995; Rege, 1998, 2000). Reexamining this debate in the context of contemporary dalit and savarna feminist activism, I show that while the debate was key in making visible (1) the heretofore unmarked savarna nature of autonomous feminism and (2) the male domination of dalit politics, in the decades following the debate, dalit politics remains primarily male, and autonomous feminism while cognizant of and in conversation with dalit feminism is not necessarily transformed by dalit standpoint. Further, dalit feminism itself while visible nationally and transnationally has focused at home largely on “difference,” from savarna feminism without adequately addressing the differences among dalit subjectivities in neoliberal India, limiting the possibilities of radical, coalitional politics.