Paper short abstract:

Wealthy and powerful gated communities, an integral feature of neoliberal urban expansion, enact various forms of dispossession on their poorer neighbours. This paper highlights the visual and symbolic violence that women domestic workers experience in one such context in Kolkata.

Paper long abstract:

Growth and development on the fringes of cities in India has generated experiences of extreme dispossession and violence for poorer residents of these areas. The mushrooming of wealthy gated communities has led to the securitization of space (Banerjee-Guha, 2009) and the partitioning of cities into archipelagos and enclosures (Stavrides 2013). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork over several months, this paper, as part of an ongoing doctoral study, demonstrates the forms of marginalization and violence that women paid domestic workers, residing in a ‘slum’, experience, in one such location of Kolkata, that has witnessed rapid neoliberal urban expansion.

Women paid domestic workers working in a wealthy and powerful gated community in this area (anonymized for respondents’ safety) live in ‘slums’ adjacent to the community. The visual and symbolic violence of these high-rise towers is multi-faceted in these women’s narratives. It serves as a constant reminder of the exploitative work relationships and of the stark wealth inequalities these women are subject to. Given many of these women have also experienced sexual and gender-based violence during work, the constant visual presence of the apartments also acts to perpetuate the trauma of those experiences; further, substantial political clout of the residents of the community deprives these women of justice in many cases of conflict. Invoking Hayden’s deconstruction of the skyscraper as a phallic fantasy (1977), then, this paper argues that the high-rise residential towers of the community enact visual and symbolic violence on the bodies of these women.