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Paper short abstract

This paper draws on feminist ethnography at a women-only labor chowk in Delhi NCR to examine how migrant working-class women navigate informal work, gendered space, and urban precarity. It conceptualizes the labor chowk as a feminist counter-common shaped by collective waiting, care, and survival.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on feminist ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Peer Baba Labor Chowk*, an exclusive women’s informal labor market located in the urban village of Kapashera, though which women seek work in the nearby factories in Udyog Vihar, Delhi NCR. It explores how migrant working-class women, navigate the intersecting precarities of informal work, gendered space, and urban marginality, while simultaneously asserting forms of collective agency, dignity, and survival.

This paper endeavors to conceptualize Labor Chowk as a liminal space which is neither home nor workplace, neither wholly public nor entirely private. It is in this in-between space that women carve out forms of presence, refusal, and mutual care. The paper builds on this conceptualization to argue that the labor chowk operates as a feminist counter-common: a space sustained not by ownership or legality but through embodied co-presence, shared routines, and relational survival. In this ephemeral common, the act of waiting becomes more than economic necessity; it is transformed into a collective social and affective infrastructure.

This study contributes to the conference theme in four interlinked ways. First, it offers an empirical account of informal labor that attends to the everyday, affective dimensions of work. Second, it speaks to decolonial and intersectional approaches by foregrounding the voices, bodies, and spatial strategies of women who are simultaneously marginalized and agentic. Third, it rethinks “women and work” not as narrow economic participation but as a terrain of spatial politics and collective life.

* labor chowk is an informal street-side hiring space