Shannon Philip
(University of Cambridge)
Garima Jaju
(University of Cambridge)
Manali Desai
(University of Cambridge)
Chair:
Nandini Gooptu
(University of Oxford)
Discussant:
Nandini Gooptu
(University of Oxford)
Format:
Panel
Streams:
Gender & generation
Technology & innovation
Sessions:
Thursday 7 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Gendered Violence and Urban Transformations in the Global South I.
Panel P16a at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
In this panel, we invite ethnographically or qualitatively informed papers that look at women’s everyday negotiations of interpersonal violence, in the larger context of the changing urban landscapes of the Global South.
Long Abstract:
Gender based violence – its actual occurrence, its looming possibility or its structuring force – acts upon already existing gendered social worlds and women’s positioning within them. It is important to move away from focusing on singular ‘acts’ of violence, and instead look at the whole of gendered social worlds that women occupy in which violence is managed within negotiated social relations, aspirations and social performances. It is these social worlds that create the conditions for violence, that absorb the shock of violence and get reinterpreted and renegotiated in the wake of violence. Focusing on social worlds, we look at conjugal relations, kin relations, friendships as well as the relational creation of personhood. These relations are significantly shaped by the urban context, which provides a distinctly urban moral, ethical as well as cultural and socio-economic framework within which they operate. Questioning the roles of gender and its inequalities and violences marks important possibilities for sustainable and just futures for urban contexts around the world.
In this panel, we invite ethnographically or qualitatively informed papers that look at women’s everyday negotiations of interpersonal violence, in the larger context of the changing urban landscapes of the Global South. We are keen to explore the relationships between masculinities and femininities and their many changing cultures and embodiments in various social contexts. We are particularly keen to engage with scholars working on urban contexts in South Asia and Southern Africa that speak to the themes of the panel. This panel will also bring together insights from The GendV Project led by Prof Manali Desai at the University of Cambridge which looks at gendered violence and urban transformations in India and South Africa.
Methodology - This is a paper based panel. Papers can be supported with PowerPoint presentations that use photo, audio or video material. All panellists will work with the panel conveners to think creatively about engaging audience participation for an inclusive and interactive session.
Existing arguments often highlight how structures of urbanisation might trigger intimate partner violence for women in the society. In South Africa, Sandton is one of those urban spaces of interest - revealing progressive opportunities, but also susceptibility.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the evident affluent lifestyles that are underpinned by gendered power relations, limited discourses and discussions exist on the experiences and impacts of violence on women within the suburb of Sandton in Johannesburg. Moving towards the need for heterogeneous narratives of women affected by violence, we draw on the lived experiences of women who reside in the affluent neighbourhoods of Sandton, while using the emotionality and feminist frameworks. Narratives from both survivors and key stakeholders on issues of intimate partner violence were corroborated. The results highlight the influence of survivors' early socialisation, and the dynamics of the socio-cultural space, particularly the environment they were exposed to. The foundational tutelage inevitably impacts their responses to their experiences as they navigate life. Moreover, the consistent grappling with intimate partner violence, while putting on a brave façade to the world emerges as a coping mechanism that deserves further interrogation. The fear of isolation and loneliness, financial dependency and societal/religious pressures were also evident in most narratives. Although the narratives of women's experiences of violence are rooted in socio-cultural contexts and practices, and patriarchal and gender dynamics, intimate partner violence within urban spaces continues to be aggravated by some often overlooked and indirect agents of structural violence that are associated with urban spaces in South Africa. Redirecting the lens towards providing the needed social support and effective empowerment of all relevant agents within South African society will ultimately impact the lives of both the specific survivors and future generations in South Africa, irrespective of socially constructed identities.
My paper tries to understand the complex experience of daughterhood in middle and upper class India. I present an account of the conflicting emotions of gratitude and resentment daughters go through, and the everyday violence of having their experiences of discrimination minimized.
Paper long abstract:
Son preference and daughter discrimination is often misunderstood as a problem of economic valuation and resource constraints as well as lack of awareness among the poor in India, despite evidence suggesting that a large proportion of sex-selection in the country takes place in well-educated and more affluent families (Sekher and Hatti 2005).
This paper uses in-depth interviews conducted among highly educated, professionally qualified daughters in Delhi, NCR to make the argument that the very lack of explicit and significant material deprivation for daughters among middle and upper class households, and the language of love and "equality" used to justify it, results in a power dynamic within the family which obscures the persistence of gendered constraints that continue to shape daughters' lives, while simultaneously taking away their right to protest or complain against them.
Being fully aware of their status as daughters and opportunities that have been granted to them despite it, girls in such households struggle with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and moral responsibility to be "good daughters" on the one hand, and the guilt of a deep seated, unarticulated resentment on the other, against the patent but unacknowledged ways in which their gender is used to restrict them by their families.
I argue that daughters' inability to articulate, or even at times see such limitations as problematic, operates as an insidious form of violence and unfreedom, which minimizes and delegitimizes daughters' experiences of discrimination, and forces them to live a curtailed life, often without recognizing it as such.
Mapping the frayed intimate worlds of women, in 'pre', 'present' and 'post' marital heterosexual relationships in Gurgaon, India, the paper shows the experience of managing private violence as centrally the work of managing gendered kinworlds, and attendant forms of social becoming.
Paper long abstract:
Intimate partner violence - its actual occurrence, its looming possibility or its structural presence - acts upon already existing gendered social worlds and women's gendered positioning within marriages and adjacent-kin relations. Far from dramatically disrupting these social worlds, the incidence of domestic violence (or its feared possibility) operates within the existing entanglements of conjugal relations, which are filled with the experience and expectations of love, reciprocity, duty, as also the reality of indifference, hatred, or deeply fraught and conflictual interpersonal dynamics. Private interpersonal violence is perceived as so deeply embedded in the sobering complexity of social relations and people's individual situations, idiosyncrasies, and predicaments, that the issue of violence becomes difficult to isolate and is interpreted less as straight up violence and more often as failed social relations and frayed social worlds. Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in the city of Gurgaon, India, this paper proceeds through ethnographic exploration of the love, affliction, and violence experienced by three women - an upwardly mobile young professional, a rural housewife and a bottom-end service worker - in their heterosexual relationships with their boyfriend, husband, and estranged husband, respectively. All three relationships are defined in reference to an 'ideal marriage', and its promise of good domesticity. Marriage features as anticipation in the first case, a daily negotiated reality in the second and as the site of ruin and collapse in the third. The paper shows the experience of violence as the experience of managing marriage, kinship, and gendered worlds of intimacies.
Based on three ethnographic pieces of research conducted over the last fifteen years among young men in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this paper explores how the construction of masculinities influenced the sexual practices of young men in Dhaka and resulted in violence against women and girls.
Paper long abstract:
The theorization of Connell (on masculinity) and Bourdieu (on practice) has been used in the paper to understand the link among constructions of masculinities, young heterosexual men’s sexual practices, and enactment of violence against women and girls in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It helps portray a comprehensive picture revealing the intersection of these without being lost to a structure–agency dichotomy. To understand the effects of structure on agency, Dhaka as a city is considered an active agent (not merely a landscape) based on the perceived and the conceived all-encompassing notion of freedom in the eyes of the young people – a Rongin Sohor (colorful city). In this sense, the city is not only dividing instead also uniting as young men from all classes envision Dhaka as a dreamland for their freedom, prosperity. In an agrarian society based on a kin system, the young who dream of their own lives can only get this chance in a gigantic city where the kin system is weaker and fails to ensure surveillance over the young blood. The paper argues that due to the embodiment of masculinities, young men are developing different ‘dispositions’ that result in ‘habitus’ regarding sexual practices (which is only possible in a gigantic city like Dhaka) and thereby ensures ‘symbolic violence’ against women and girls. The ‘habitus’ and ‘symbolic violence’ are used to understand young men’s sexual practices as a response to women’s increasing empowerment that threatens long-established male supremacy and therefore is read as a bid to reinforce patriarchy enacting VAW.
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Garima Jaju (University of Cambridge)
Manali Desai (University of Cambridge)
Short Abstract:
In this panel, we invite ethnographically or qualitatively informed papers that look at women’s everyday negotiations of interpersonal violence, in the larger context of the changing urban landscapes of the Global South.
Long Abstract:
Gender based violence – its actual occurrence, its looming possibility or its structuring force – acts upon already existing gendered social worlds and women’s positioning within them. It is important to move away from focusing on singular ‘acts’ of violence, and instead look at the whole of gendered social worlds that women occupy in which violence is managed within negotiated social relations, aspirations and social performances. It is these social worlds that create the conditions for violence, that absorb the shock of violence and get reinterpreted and renegotiated in the wake of violence. Focusing on social worlds, we look at conjugal relations, kin relations, friendships as well as the relational creation of personhood. These relations are significantly shaped by the urban context, which provides a distinctly urban moral, ethical as well as cultural and socio-economic framework within which they operate. Questioning the roles of gender and its inequalities and violences marks important possibilities for sustainable and just futures for urban contexts around the world.
In this panel, we invite ethnographically or qualitatively informed papers that look at women’s everyday negotiations of interpersonal violence, in the larger context of the changing urban landscapes of the Global South. We are keen to explore the relationships between masculinities and femininities and their many changing cultures and embodiments in various social contexts. We are particularly keen to engage with scholars working on urban contexts in South Asia and Southern Africa that speak to the themes of the panel. This panel will also bring together insights from The GendV Project led by Prof Manali Desai at the University of Cambridge which looks at gendered violence and urban transformations in India and South Africa.
Methodology - This is a paper based panel. Papers can be supported with PowerPoint presentations that use photo, audio or video material. All panellists will work with the panel conveners to think creatively about engaging audience participation for an inclusive and interactive session.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 7 July, 2022, -