Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India's Professional Elite

In a book talk moderated by Lalita du Perron, Swethaa Ballakrishnen will discuss their new book, Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India’s Professional Elite.

Drawing from observations and interviews with more than 130 professionals, Accidental Feminism examines how a range of underlying mechanisms—gendered socialization and essentialism, family structures and dynamics, and firm and regulatory histories—afford certain professionals egalitarian outcomes that are not available to their local and global peers.

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Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen is a socio-legal scholar whose research examines the intersections between law, globalization and stratification from a critical feminist perspective. Particularly, across a range of sites and different levels of analysis, their work interrogates how law and legal institutions create, continue and counter different kinds of socio-economic inequalities. Ballakrishnen’s writing has appeared in, among other journals, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Fordham Law Review, International Journal of the Legal Profession, and the Journal of Professions and Organization. Accidental Feminism is their first book.

Lalita du Perron is Associate Director of the Center for South Asia.  Her broad research interests range from song texts and courtesan performance in colonial India to gender and LGBTQ issues in contemporary South Asia. 

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If you need a disability-related accommodation, please contact us at southasiainfo [at] stanford.edu (southasiainfo[at]stanford[dot]edu). Requests should be made by April 21st.