Publishing Against Power: Feminism, Print & Memory

“For women, writing is a subversive activity in patriarchal societies.”

— Fatima Mernissi

About the Lecture

The wonderful Moroccan sociologist and feminist, Fatima Mernissi, used to say that, for women, writing is a subversive activity in patriarchal societies. Why should this statement ring so true, for so many women, no matter how privileged they may be, or how well educated and articulate and independent? Or indeed, how secure they may be within such a society?

It rings true because we know that not much has changed since Fatima said this, more than 40 years ago. In fact, Ritu Menon would even argue that as we seem to be witnessing a resurgent, hypermasculine patriarchy these days, what we say and what we write, what we think and what we do, are even more subversive today.

Feminist publishing across the world, was born of this fire of consciousness. It was a product of the women’s movement, and of women’s lived experience. It was a result of the realisation that the personal is political.

Feminist publishing is, first and foremost, a political project because it is publishing for social change: Through our activism. Through our research. Our literature. Our rewriting of history. And of sociology and political science and economics and religion and development and the environment and…. because every issue is a women’s issue.

And once we have done that, things can never go back to what they used to be. That is the power of print and memory and writing.

The session explores:

• Why feminist publishing is, at its core, a political project
• How writing, research, literature, and the rewriting of history become tools for social change
• Why every field, history, sociology, economics, religion, development, the environment, is also a women’s issue
• How memory, once recorded and circulated, makes reversal impossible

This lecture reflects on the enduring power of print: once words enter the world, once memory is made public, things cannot return to what they were. That irreversibility, it argues, is precisely where feminist power lies.

About the Speaker

Ritu Menon is one of India’s most influential feminist publishers, writers, and public intellectuals. She co-founded Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house, in 1984, and is the founder-director of Women Unlimited, an associate of KfW.

She is the author of several landmark works, including Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography of Nayantara Sahgal, Loitering with Intent, Address Book: A Publishing Memoir in the Time of COVID, and ZOHRA! A Biography in Four Acts. She has edited numerous anthologies of prose, poetry, and memoir, and her most recent books include India on Their Minds: 8 Women, 8 Ideas of India and A Stone Thrown in a Pond: Essays & Poems on the Enigma of Leaving.

Across decades, her work has shaped how feminist history is written, published, and remembered in India.

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About unLecture

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