Democratic Centralism and the Ideal Revolutionary: Women's Belonging and Self-making in the Gendered Institutional Culture of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)

The paper identifies political parties as systems of signification and lifeworlds constituted by gendered relations of power and offers a Feminist Institutionalist study of the formal rules and informal processes through which hegemonic gender regimes are reproduced and contested in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) as well as of the institutional belonging and political self-making of women party members with an in-depth focus on the state of West Bengal. It has adopted the interpretivist method of Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis and the 'logics approach' (Glynos and Howarth, 2007) to study party publications and semi-structured interviews conducted among women party members. It engages with the constitutive impact of ‘gender regimes’ (Connell, 1987) upon the self-makings and institutional belonging of women party members and is characterised by attention to the contextual particularities of the macro-social gender norms governing political culture in West Bengal. In particular, the paper explores the idealised revolutionary communist subjectivity that represents the institutional standard of appropriateness of gendered behaviour in the CPI(M). The paper reflects a broader theoretical concern with the co-constitutive relationship between institutions and political subjectivities (Mackay, Kenny and Chappell, 2010; Krook and MacKay, 2011).