A Gendered Focus

On the Pandemic, Lockdown & Beyond

Zubaan has helped provide relief to marginalised women and communities through its partner organisations in Assam, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Manipur, Rajasthan and West Bengal. As of June 2020, more than 1100 women and their families have received rations, sanitation kits, reproductive health kits, medicines, etc. based on requirements identified by partner organisations.

Overview

Zubaan has helped provide relief to marginalised women and communities through its partner organisations in Assam, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Manipur, Rajasthan and West Bengal. As of June 2020, more than 1100 women and their families have received rations, sanitation kits, reproductive health kits, medicines, etc. based on requirements identified by partner organisations (listed at the end of this page). While immediate relief for pressing and often unmet needs is our first priority, especially for single women, women with disabilities, and those from marginalised communities, we are also working on building awareness of, and producing focused resources on, the impact of the lockdown on women, queer, trans and other marginalised identities. This page will be updated regularly with new activities, resources and partnerships.

Reports

Covid-19 Impact on Women in Assam

20 June 2020

View Report

Impact

67.5K+

People documented

10+

Years of existence

39K+

Strong community

50+

Some counter

View Impact Report

VISUAL RESOURCES

Through Her Lens is a visual research programme in collaboration with Zubaan Publishers Pvt Ltd., supported by Sasakawa Peace Foundation, under the Fragrance of Peace Project. It aims to expand women’s photographic practices in the eight Northeast Indian states and Darjeeling Hills.

THL: Reframing the Domestic aims to visually manifest the experiences of women, queer and other marginalized identities within the domestic space, in Northeast India and Darjeeling Hills, during the current COVID-19 crisis and the contestations, negotiations, etc. that emerge from them. To read more and view the full exhibition, please click here.

Through Her Lens: Conversations on Reframing the Domestic is a webinar series curated to engage with the issues of present challenges — the lockdown, the collapse of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ space, the merging of paid, unpaid work, etc. and photographers navigating their own domestic space and documenting intimate relations. This makes it a deeply personal work for anyone and the act of photography acquires new meaning. The distance between the documentarian and the subject, between the storyteller and the story, has evidently collapsed.

To further delve into dialogue and experiences with feminists and queer researchers, activists and photographers in Northeast India, Zubaan Publishers in collaboration with Sikkim based curators, Mridu Rai and Anushya Pradhan, hopes to further engage with the question of the impact of a global pandemic and lockdown on communities in the Northeast.

Webinars

A Crisis of Care is a series of conversations on the issues posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown in India, featuring feminist activists, researchers and writers. This series addresses the themes of caste, class, racism, Islamophobia, ecology, LGBTQ+ rights, disability, etc. focusing on each theme through a gendered lens.

We frame this set of conversations as being rooted in the feminist principles of collectiveness, compassion and care that should be driving responses (ours as well as the state’s) to the public health emergency and the parallel humanitarian crises it has led to.