While FII’s work has evolved and the scope of what we do has expanded, one thing has remained constant: our commitment to our core values. As we celebrate 12 years of FII today, we reaffirm our commitment to feminist ethics, truthful journalism, asking difficult questions, and sparking conversations that matter.

The resurgence of the 'heroin chic' aesthetic, widespread availability and publicity surrounding GLP-1 agonists, and the construction of the 'yoga' or 'pilates' body have made the message unquestionably clear: being extremely thin is, once again, admirable, coveted, and endlessly rewarding.

Protection is a word the Indian state liberally uses with regard to women, because that word justifies treating women as a separate class of workers, requiring management. 

From a very young age, I could see how the garment was used as a marker of obedience. As a result, I associated sarees with patriarchy and promised myself I would never wear one; I would never limit myself.

Explore the character of Chitra and the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy in Tagore's Chitrangada. Discover the depth of Chitra's character transformation.

Discover how Indian Feminist Foreign Policy challenges traditional security models by incorporating gender and feminist insights.

One of Irawati Karve's famous works is Yuganta, which analyses the Mahabharata. However, Yuganta is rife with contradictions.

Delve into For the Love of Stories, where personal anecdotes meet cultural reflections in a unique narrative style.

Explore the themes in Your Perfect Dream Girl and discover insights on influencers, AI, and desire in contemporary culture.

Learn how schools enforce masculinity and its impact on boys. Discover the effects of rigid gender norms in educational environments.

Simone de Beauvoir stated in The Second Sex that the gender binary is 'perhaps superficial; perhaps destined to disappear'. Decades later, Judith Butler reinforced this view, which was powerfully carried into the Indian context by Nivedita Menon, who argued that dismantling the rigid enforcement of the male–female divide would allow the gender binary to dissolve into a fluid spectrum of human existence. By connecting these ideas across time and geography, we can identify a shared philosophical vision of liberation from structural conditioning. However, we have failed to adequately address a fundamental question: What is gender?

Rather than positioning cis women and transfeminine people as competitors for recognition, Onyo Opala makes us realise how both become subjects of patriarchal regulation.

For a woman like me, who has not yet been able to gather the courage to embark on a solo trip (let alone explore whether it is even a realistic possibility), despite having lived alone in Australia for a couple of years, the opportunity to travel for work has become the next best alternative.

This Kylie-Meta partnership represents the most preposterous version of this playbook yet: that women aren’t just a market segment being sold pink hardware, they are also being sold a feminised relationship with the AI itself, one designed to disarm exactly the privacy and consent concerns that women, as the primary targets of covert filming and harassment, have the most reason to raise.

In Madhya Pradesh’s Chhattarpur, women lie on a symbolic funeral pyre, and a few meters away, villagers stand waist-deep in the Barana river protesting against the Ken-Betwa river linking project.

What happened in Tiruvallur was not a freak accident but a manifestation of a labour system built, quite deliberately, on gendered precarity. This necessitates an exploration into how gender, caste, migration status, and regulatory neglect were not incidental to the women’s deaths; they were structural preconditions for them. 

For working-class women and men in India's retail economy, rest remains what it has always been: something stolen in between, on stairs not meant for them.

In Rajasthan's 625-year-old community-conserved sacred forest, solar and wind projects are shrinking grazing land and affecting the lives of the Rabari community.

When popular culture attempts to portray a woman dismantling an authoritarian state, it hits a creative ceiling. It cannot imagine her hating the regime on principle, for her radicalisation is rarely ideological; it is tied intimately to her reproductive biology.

Bhopal was never only a tragedy of one night. The gas leak lasted a few hours, but its violence remains. It survives through chronic illness, contaminated water, damaged bodies, neurological disorders and in an unending bureaucracy that still asks survivors to prove the legitimacy of their suffering.

The SIR process by the Election Commission of India is not a neutral clean-up of electoral rolls but a process that punishes queer and trans people who are disowned by families or forced to rebuild their lives and documents after transition.

Rising temperatures affect everyone, but the inability to cool their bodies due to lack of electricity or inadequate water supply impacts informal migrant women workers more, exacerbated by poor housing, the double exposure to heat at home, and low incomes.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that sex workers are entitled to dignity and equal protection under the law. However, it requires the Parliament to address a draft bill that has been pending for a decade.

Judicial reasoning shapes far more than the outcomes of individual cases. It influences how police investigate sexual violence, how prosecutors present their cases, and whether survivors trust the justice system enough to seek justice. Court judgements also shape public understanding of sexual violence by signalling what the law recognises as harm.

There was a lot of anticipation around Alpha ever since it was announced: a big-budget spy thriller headlined by two women, aiming to redefine the femme fatale in Bollywood. However, the release ultimately exposed the industry’s limited understanding of 'female-led films' and how to successfully create one.  

The case presents itself as an opportunity to ask a deeper question: why do certain moments of exceptional violence against women become immediately legible as tragedies to the country, while countless other incidents remain socially invisible?

A more responsible way to contextualise the Ketan-Siya case is to view it as a reflection of India’s patriarchal, caste-based, and class-conscious society, where women struggle to exercise their agency because families and institutions don't offer a safe psychological and sociological space for them to say ‘no’.

The renaming of PCOS to PMOS represents a significant advancement in medical science. However, the impact of this renaming is, at present, largely confined to clinical and academic spheres.

When comedy outrage can drive legal scrutiny, what we get angry about matters. A comparison between India’s Got Latent controversy and the Pranit More disaster reveals uncomfortable truths about our public morality and law machinery.

'Main Vaapas Aaunga invites us to remember the Partition, but it also emphasises how women's experiences often survive only as extensions of the memories of fathers, grandfathers, and lovers. Whose grief is remembered? Whose trauma is narrated?'

'Amma Ariyaan' is a 1986 Malayalam film directed by John Abraham as part of the Odessa Collective. It was the last film he made before his untimely death in 1987. It is widely regarded as his magnum opus, distilling his ideas about left-wing politics, class struggle, collective activism, and institutional resistance into a single work that was made of the people, for the people, and by the people. 

With the overcommercialisation of Pride Month and large corporations stepping in to celebrate Pride on LinkedIn, Pride Month in urban cities may represent a genuine expansion of cultural spaces, but Pride also requires a call for institutional accountability.

'Queer India Now' seamlessly weaves tales of invisibilisation, pathologisation, and violence with stories of quiet resistance, solidarity, and the radical power of community. The book is committed to diversifying popular understandings of queer identity and infusing much-needed intersectionality into conversations on queerness.

Whether it is a 350-crore pan-Indian film or a 370-rupee dinner receipt, the underlying calculus remains identical: the female body is treated as a commodity, pre-purchased for male consumption.

Romila Thapar’s recently released memoir, Just Being, is many things at once. It is a manifesto for historians, a touchstone for academic researchers, a chronicle of familial relationships and emancipatory friendships, a travelogue where every anecdote detonates into a larger question about history, ethics, language, and civic responsibility. Yet beneath these various strands is the portrait of a fiercely autonomous woman, one who insists on the right to live her life, to simply be, on her own terms. Arranged with the tidy chronology that one expects from a historian, the memoir begins with the unlikely circumstances of Thapar’s arrival into the world and moves through an almost novelistic childhood in the North-West Frontier province, Peshawar, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, weaving together family homes, British cantonments, visits to the zenana of Pathan women, and political aftershocks of the partition.

By framing softness, dependence, and being cared for as 'girly' and natural to women, these phrases produce and reinforce gender stereotypes that feminism has fought hard against.

Dalwai’s book aptly recognises that the bogey of love jihad works on two fronts: demonising Muslim men and infantilising Hindu women. The operative principle behind the bogey of love jihad is the construction of the Hindu woman’s body as a site of patriarchal control and the Muslim man’s body as a site of patriarchal terror.

The issue with the three-year practice requirement is not only that it creates an impediment, but also that it entrenches an insular vision of the 'ideal' judicial candidate: a fresh graduate who can devote the immediate years after graduation entirely to their profession and navigate it free from significant external constraints. In India, that vision is deeply gendered.

The court observed that it is ironic to describe a homemaker as dependent on the earning members of a household when, in reality, the household's functioning depends substantially on the homemaker, upon whom the earning members themselves rely, a reality that is rarely acknowledged.

American writer and educator Kate Millett argued in Sexual Politics that patriarchy often manifests itself in banal, everyday ways rather than through spectacular acts of violence. Bear’s character embodies this idea: his violence is neither grotesque nor spectacular; it is subtle, mundane, and all the more unsettling for it.

Vietnamese street food developed partly through mobility. But also because the women who had to work could not sit around to serve a piping hot meal to the men. 

Additionally, the form asks whether the applicant has asserted citizenship under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. However, the question remains: if the purpose of the Annapurna Yojana is to deposit money into poor women's bank accounts, why is this information relevant?

Children deserve to see that they can be fully themselves. Every child deserves to grow up in a world where they can express and live their gender freely, without fear, bullying, or exclusion.

The urban street is not a neutral space that feminism must simply reclaim from patriarchy. It is a space already organised by caste, class, and labour — and feminist claims to it must reckon with that organisation. 

The 72-minute film is a sweet one that doesn’t overstay its welcome but definitely leaves you wanting more time with this mast group of women.

At a time when screen cultures remain increasingly invested in redeemable female characters, Rekha remains gloriously, inconveniently flawed. She is excessive, capricious, and at times selfish; yet the film refuses to treat these qualities as failures requiring correction.

For many women vendors, these streets are not merely places of work; they are spaces where they spend much of their lives. Here, they navigate daily exhaustion and fear, shoulder responsibilities, and hold on to hope, all at once. Their day begins long before sunrise and often continues even after the city falls asleep, then they return home to domestic responsibilities.