This chapter examines caste and gender as enduring and constitutive structures of injustice that exceed the analytic limits of liberal political theory. Engaging B. R. Ambedkar’s critique of graded inequality, Dalit feminist interventions, and Black feminist analyses of social reproduction, it shows how liberal frameworks of rights, equality, and recognition obscure forms of domination that operate through hierarchy, embodied labour, and inherited social status. Rather than functioning as discrete axes of oppression, caste and patriarchy are shown to produce political subjectivity itself—shaping who can appear as a rights-bearing subject and whose labour, vulnerability, and dispossession remain politically illegible. By foregrounding reproduction, endogamy, and social control, it is argued that injustice in caste- and gender-structured societies cannot be understood as exclusion from an otherwise neutral order. The chapter proposes a shift in political theory from the liberal promise of inclusion to a grammar of exclusion that centres structural domination, historical reproduction, and embodied inequality as foundational, rather than residual, to modern political life.

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Caste, Gender, and the Grammar of Exclusion

  • Asis Mistry

摘要

This chapter examines caste and gender as enduring and constitutive structures of injustice that exceed the analytic limits of liberal political theory. Engaging B. R. Ambedkar’s critique of graded inequality, Dalit feminist interventions, and Black feminist analyses of social reproduction, it shows how liberal frameworks of rights, equality, and recognition obscure forms of domination that operate through hierarchy, embodied labour, and inherited social status. Rather than functioning as discrete axes of oppression, caste and patriarchy are shown to produce political subjectivity itself—shaping who can appear as a rights-bearing subject and whose labour, vulnerability, and dispossession remain politically illegible. By foregrounding reproduction, endogamy, and social control, it is argued that injustice in caste- and gender-structured societies cannot be understood as exclusion from an otherwise neutral order. The chapter proposes a shift in political theory from the liberal promise of inclusion to a grammar of exclusion that centres structural domination, historical reproduction, and embodied inequality as foundational, rather than residual, to modern political life.