The Report, or, Whatever Happened to Third World Feminist Theory? -- Lecture by Professor Durba Mitra
Thursday, February 9, 2023, 5:30pm to 7:00pm
One Bow Street 330 / 3rd floor Kitchen area

Policy reports on the “status of women” constitute one of the most abundant archives on the
world’s women in the second half of the twentieth century. This talk offers an account of and a
reckoning with the promises and limits of the social scientific report through an analysis of
archives of early “status of women” reports, focusing on reports produced in South Asia from
the 1970s to the 1990s.

Durba Mitra is the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and
Acting Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in
America at Harvard University. She is the author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial
Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020).