“The Personal is Political”: Examining Gendered Political Consciousness Among Undergraduate Female Students at ANS College, Nabinagar

Abstract

This paper revisits the feminist claim that the personal is political by examining how young women in a semi-rural Indian college absorb and reproduce gendered roles through everyday culture. Based on qualitative engagement with 100 undergraduate students at A.N.S. College, Nabinagar, the study explores how songs, serials, jokes, and proverbs shape emotional choices and moral expectations ;   not as individual preferences, but as outcomes of cultural hegemony.

Using Harold Lasswell’s framework, “who gets what, when, and how”; and drawing from theorists like Foucault, Bourdieu, Chakravarti, and Menon, the research reads the personal as a site of symbolic power and quiet political allocation.

The study does not aim to expose resistance or false consciousness, but to listen for how power becomes intimate, familiar, and emotionally sustained. It offers a pedagogical perspective on how classrooms can become spaces to notice and name the Political within the Personal and to create awareness among teachers and students.