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- Convenors:
-
Henrike Donner
(Goldsmiths)
Mirna Guha (Anglia Ruskin University)
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- Stream:
- Identities and Subjectivities
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 1.03
- Sessions:
- Thursday 5 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Women's access to housing has been underexplored in literature on urban restructuring and in anthropological research on gender and property. This panel intends to bring together research on the way gendered rights in shelter are affected by neoliberal restructuring.
Long Abstract:
Whilst gendered rights in property, housing and residence have long been a subject of anthropological research, few scholars have looked at the way urban restructuring, privatisation of housing, and the financialisation of social relationships that afford or deny women access to their own home produce new discourses on gender, family, extended kinship networks and relationships with the state.
The panel invites papers that explore gendered access to shelter in various contexts, with a special focus on global cities and the remaking of family and kinship under neoliberal regimes and processes of disinvestment in the welfare state.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 5 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how women in a slum neighbourhood are experiencing displacement/relocation one after the other, and struggling to find their home and livelihoods. It explores the complex processes of urban restructuring at the margin of a metropolitan city in terms of gender.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the dynamics of urban restructuring at the frontier of Kolkata, an Indian metropolitan City, through the lens of gender. It seeks to understand with ethnographic data (collected from field work in 2018) the way in which gender is shaping, on the one hand, the urban policies meant for restructuring the city at the expense of slum dwellers, and on the other, the slum dwellers’ resistance and negotiation in finding their home. Drawing on the ethnographic life-stories of maidservants who were earlier displaced by the cyclone disaster (2009) from the Sundarbans, and now located though being dislocated and relocated time and again in slum neighbourhoods beside E. M. Bypass, it explains why they rarely succeed to escape from vulnerabilities at home and work, despite being able to obtain some illegal, semi-legal and legal right to live and work in Kolkata. The paper describes in its first part the politics through which the women including their kin and family members have become displaced due to urban restructuring only to be relocated again in the same place or some other places. The second part of the paper shows the way these maidservants/kajer meye deal with the domesticity strategically both at home and workplace, and make a living, and thereby shaping the pattern of state/gender politics at the margin of Kolkata.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on how women in slums of Kolkata make gendered negotiations for survival within families and communities. I locate the study in the interface between slums and middle class neighbourhoods.
Paper long abstract:
The paper uses the notion of 'feminisation of responsibility and/or obligation' to understand how poor women living in slums of Kolkata negotiate gendered relationships in family and community to become better 'managers' of violence and poverty. I study interactions between slum dwellers and residents in middle class neighbourhood in the larger context of middle class politics of 'distinction' and 'forgetting' of the poor. How does this add to the discourse of the 'spatial purification' of cities?
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine how women in urban slums in Kolkata define home. What does home mean to them? How do they describe a sense of belonging? The paper will delve into the social and cultural factors that make a home for women and examine the relationship of such factors with legal rights.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will examine how women in selected urban slums in Kolkata define home. What does home mean to them? Is there a distinction between home and house? How do they describe and determine a sense of belonging? The paper will delve into the social and cultural factors that make a home for women and examine the relationship of such factors with legal rights. There are many laws in India that grant legal rights to women and promote gender equality. Are women in the slums aware of these laws? How do they define their relationship with their homes vis a vis the law? Do women rely on laws for rights or customs and relationships? These questions will be examined through the stories and experiences of women by conducting focus group discussions and personal interviews. The writer expects that the narratives about women and their ideas of home will traverse geographical spaces and will not be limited to the walls of the home. There will be incursions within the community and links will also be built between the political, economic and cultural factors that either marginalise or empower working class women in poor neighbourhoods in the city of Kolkata, that is grappling with twenty first century forces of globalisation.