Paper short abstract:

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.