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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteIn Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India, sociologist Srila Roy asks whether feminist politics disappeared under globalisation and neoliberal capitalism—or took new forms. Her account follows feminist and queer organising in West Bengal, showing how changed methods and settings can coexist with older political ideas and practices.
What question does Roy’s book ask?
Roy’s starting point was the rise of newer feminist and queer movements in India, often led by young people across genders and sexualities and frequently organised in urban and digital spaces. In a June 2, 2024 interview with Anjali Chauhan for Scroll, she explained that she wanted to test claims that feminist struggle had been lost under globalisation and neoliberal capitalism. Her question was: “was feminist politics all lost? Or was it being recast into something else?”
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The book examines that question through ethnographic work on two organisations in West Bengal: Janam and Sappho For Equality (SFE). Roy’s approach is not to treat contemporary activism as either wholly new or simply a diluted version of what came before. Instead, she asks how political work changes as it moves through different generations, places, and conditions.
How do Janam and Sappho For Equality frame the inquiry?
Chauhan’s interview describes Janam as an NGO that brought neoliberal development practices into conversation with women’s empowerment. It describes SFE as an organisation that began as a support group and later became a funded queer feminist organisation. These brief descriptions situate the book’s cases; they are not comprehensive histories of either organisation.
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Together, the cases let Roy consider a tension that is often framed as a stark choice: feminist organising is either autonomous or co-opted by institutions and development agendas. Her account instead treats these forces as entangled. The question becomes how feminist concerns are negotiated within particular organisations and political settings, not whether institutional involvement automatically cancels political purpose.
What changes in activism, and what continues?
Roy distinguishes changes that are easy to see from continuities that can be harder to notice. A march and an online petition are different forms of mobilisation. But a change in the medium or venue does not, by itself, establish that the ideas, relationships, or organising practices behind the action have disappeared.
That perspective also complicates claims that younger movements are entirely unprecedented. Roy’s account asks readers to look for older political ideas and practices as they persist among new participants and in new settings. Rather than equating novelty with rupture, she follows how activism is adapted and carried forward.
Why does place matter to a study of globalisation?
Globalisation and neoliberalism shape the political and economic conditions Roy examines, but they do not make local history irrelevant. The interview places the organisations within West Bengal’s longer context, including colonial legacies and leftist politics, as well as more recent liberalisation, urban economies, and digital technologies.
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For Roy, those contexts affect what activism can mean and how it takes shape. Her emphasis on place and time resists a single account of “global” change that would flatten differences between regional histories or national political settings. She put it this way: “I hope the book returns the reader’s gaze to the importance of place and time.”
What does “women’s empowerment” mean in this account?
Roy cautions against treating empowerment as self-explanatory. As she describes it in the interview, neoliberal approaches can shift attention away from structural poverty and inequality and toward individual self-help and entrepreneurship. In Janam’s case, the issue is how development-oriented ideas of empowerment meet feminist concerns about women’s rights.
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That distinction matters because the word “empowerment” can cover different political aims. Roy’s account examines the work of negotiating those meanings rather than assuming that a development programme is either inherently feminist or necessarily incompatible with feminist politics.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How long did the research take?
Roy told Scroll that research and writing for the book took a decade. She began with a pilot study in India while teaching sociology at the University of Nottingham, then moved to South Africa and joined Wits. Family and career changes—including maternity leave and fewer field trips after having children—also shaped the project’s pace. Roy reflected that the extended timeline helped her see trends and dynamics that a shorter study might have missed.
She also described a separate project, tentatively titled Dissonant Intimacies: Transnational Feminism in the Global South, as work in progress for Wits University Press. In the June 2024 interview, she characterised it as a theoretical project drawing on her experiences of feminist teaching, research, and institution-building, particularly between South Africa and India. That is its status as reported at the time of the interview.
How does this book relate to Roy’s earlier work?
Roy described Changing the Subject as both continuous with and a departure from her earlier research on the gender and sexual politics of the Naxalbari revolt. Her work on that history, along with her interest in changes in the Indian women’s movement, helped lead to the book. The newer project also questions simple stories that present contemporary movements as wholly new.
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