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- Convenor:
-
Radhika Govinda
(University of Edinburgh)
- Discussants:
-
Patricia Jeffery
(University of Edinburgh)
Henrike Donner (Goldsmiths)
- Location:
- 21F70
- Start time:
- 24 July, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel reflects on gender and cities in South Asia, with a view to examining how women experience cities differently from men, how cities (in)visibilise certain genders and gendered practices, and how marginalisation and resistance are far from gender neutral in city spaces.
Long Abstract:
Scholarly reflection on cities and gender, as co-constitutive subjects, has been long overdue. While efforts at systematically examining how women experience cities differently from men, how cities (in)visibilise certain genders and gendered practices, how gender norms influence male and female bodies' negotiation of physical/ social/ political spaces or how marginalisation and resistance are far from gender neutral in different cities in the world are beginning to appear, not many adequately capture South Asian realities. Given that South Asia is in the midst of a rapid transition from a predominantly rural to an urban society, examination of such questions is crucial to imagining a more inclusive and sustainable future for the region.
This panel invites papers that offer ways of seeing gender in the city by exploring themes such as gender and urban governance, laboring women, migration and citizenship, alternative sexual identities and the law, gendered politics of peri-urban spaces, women's mobility and safety, preservation of class privilege, environment and monuments, and women's activism, masculinities, and gender-based violence in especially, though not exclusively, metropolitan cities in the region. Papers that go beyond picture postcard images, news headlines and rhetoric of worldclassness as also conventional binaries of urban/ rural, public/ private in understanding gender and city spaces are welcome.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the impact of violence on young men living in Lyari, one of Karachi’s oldest and most conflict-ridden areas. It explores how this violence, which involves rival gangs, political parties, and state actors, impacts on young men’s experiences of fear and insecurity.
Paper long abstract:
With one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world, Karachi has been described as the world's most violent mega-city. By and large it is young men who both perpetuate and are victims of this violence. However, very little research has been conducted on how young men articulate and experience this violence and how it effects their everyday lives. This paper explores the impact of this violence on young men living in the area of Lyari. As one of the oldest and most diverse settlements in the city, Lyari is also one of its most volatile and has been the site of an on-going conflict between rival gangs, political parties and state security forces over the past decade. Many of the residents of this area express a sense of isolation and marginalisation from the rest of the city, which they trace back to the time before Partition, but which is described as having increased over the past ten years. Not only have Lyari's residents faced heightened insecurity as a result of violence within their locality, but they also face discrimination in terms of education and employment outside of Lyari, which has contributed to a growing sense of frustration amongst the area's young men in particular. These narratives of fear and insecurity will be placed within the wider socio-political context of Karachi, where the fear of violence increasingly permeates all areas of the city.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects of the narratives of Sikh taxi drivers to explore how their driving lives offer a liminal perspective on contemporary transformations in urban spaces and masculinities in Delhi, India.
Paper long abstract:
Male taxi drivers are synonymous with metropolises. Their driving lives offer a liminal perspective on contemporary transformations in urban spaces and masculinities. The drivers are themselves low-income, rural migrants, living in abysmal conditions, but whose booths are often located on the edges of gated communities, and who transport in their taxis a variety of middle class male and female passengers through 'good' and 'bad' areas of the city. Based on an ongoing gendered ethnography of Sikh taxi drivers in Delhi, this paper reflects on their narratives - so far largely hidden from both public and scholarly view - to understand how male low-income migrant workers imagine, negotiate and claim changing spaces and identities in a metropolis, which has acquired the dubious distinction of being called the 'rape capital' of India, even as urban development plans are afoot to turn it into a 'world class city'.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the role of boarding houses (BH) in urban migrations. BH are key providers of accommodation for single female migrants. Yet these spaces have not received sustained attention. Two problematics, public/private and movement/stasis will be utilised to analyse BH residents.
Paper long abstract:
Single women are relocating to cities in increasing numbers seeking employment and higher education. Although literature on the gendered dimensions of urban subjectivity and experience is growing, the search for suitable accommodation is a significant dimension of internal migration that is often neglected. Boarding houses, known colloquially as 'Paying Guest Accommodations', are key providers of accommodation for single female migrants. Residence is secured using networks, advertisements and recommendations. While the sector is subject to increasing regulation by municipal authorities, regulatory compliance continues to be low. To date, these spaces have not received sustained ethnographic attention.
Drawing on ten months of fieldwork, this paper examines the lives of young Indian women living in one such boarding house in the city of Bangalore, known internationally for its booming IT industries. The paper will posit boarding houses as spaces which confound the distinctions between the public and private sphere and are therefore emergent as key sites to interpret the shifting positions that women occupy as they move between natal families, boarding houses, workplaces, public transport and spaces for recreation and consumption. In contrast to migration studies which foreground movement and mobility, this paper draws on phenomenological approaches to analyse experiences of stasis and partially realised goals drawing attention to the mediated freedoms of gendered subjects in urban contexts.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationship of negotiation between the city and a female, migrant sex worker as the traditional red-light area becomes diluted into an expansive and unfamiliar urban city space.
Paper long abstract:
Women, within the gendered organization of sex work, are situated as passive subjects under a dominant sexuality. The act of selling sexual services relies upon patriarchal, socially constructed notions of gender, sexuality and heteronormativity where only the female body can be prostituted to a male one.
There are several factors that push women to move out of a familiar place and migrate to a new city space. The lack of information, in terms of the kinds or opportunities in a new place makes women workers vulnerable to being under paid and exploited. This results in women looking for supplementary economic support leading them to sex work.
The space of the female migrant sex worker is disappearing and blurring into an unfamiliar urban city space. An attitude of indifference on the part of policy makers and urban planners has resulted in an effective and systematic 'othering' of those who inhabit these spaces.
This experience of the migrant, female sex worker is often essentialized and almost routinely forgotten. Therefore, there is a need to trace and explore women's narratives of citizenship as practitioners of an illegal trade within a borrowed third world city space.
The acceptance of 'prostitution' as a normative category for theorizing labour depends on how it can be constructed as sex 'work' within an already existing market space.
This paper explores the relationship of negotiation between the city and a female, migrant sex worker as the traditional red-light area becomes diluted into an expansive urban city space.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will critically examine the journey of a LBT collective in Kolkata and document how and to what extent the city creates the space for politics and conversations of plural sexualities.
Paper long abstract:
From naming themselves as Sappho to voicing solidarities against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, this paper will critically examine a journey where relationships are forged, identities are re-constructed and protests are voiced across issues in the city of Kolkata. This is the journey of a lesbian collective in Kolkata. I begin by locating the group in relation to other already existing women's collectivities in the city, and also within the broader sexuality rights discourse of activism in India. The organisation claims that its initial goal was 'to provide a safe space for women with same sex preference, and that it gradually moved into 'a rights-oriented movement to fight discrimination and hatred against marginalized women with same sex preference', with its struggle being 'not against individual heterosexual people but against heterosexism.' Taking cue from these claims, this paper aims at understanding primarily through Sappho's publications the kind of spaces that the organization has created or helped retrieve for the women. The central question the paper engages with is: How has the organization enabled in making spaces within the personal sphere by forging new relationships, as well as within the political sphere by claiming entitlements and opportunities? More generally, the paper is an exploration of the city of Kolkata (which has had a Communist government for the longest period of time in postcolonial India) and how its public spaces and civil society have re-imagined sexual politics.
Paper short abstract:
The paper argues that looking at urban spaces through the lens of paid domestic workers enables us to see Delhi in its subalternity alongside the characteristics of urban development that attempt making it a "world-city".
Paper long abstract:
The paper is an ethnographically oriented study and draws upon narratives of women domestic workers in the city of Delhi about their notions of mobility and their perceptions of everyday spaces.
The paper argues that looking at urban spaces through the lens of paid domestic workers enables us to see Delhi in its subalternity alongside the characteristics of urban development that attempt making it a "world-city". The paper locates the experiences of women domestic workers in relation to larger processes of urbanization, such as displacement and resettlement, creation of gated communities as elite neighbourhoods and informality of service provision, and tries to offer insights on how the urban - in its evolution and reproduction - is negotiated by these workers on a daily basis. The paper attempts to spatialize domestic workers' experiences, both in an external sense, of the formation and negotiation by working people of city spaces in general, as well as in the 'internal' spaces of their own and their employers' homes and interrogate into the layers of intersection inherent in such production of space.
Paper short abstract:
This study investigates how dowry practices create and sustain a highly gendered space in urban Patna/Bihar. Discriminatory spaces in the brides' parental and marital homes as well as strategies and attitudes to deal with dowry in the city are investigated.
Paper long abstract:
In arranged marriages, bride-givers and bride-takers participate in the transactional space with different intentions during marriage solemnization. Hypergamy along with caste-endogamy restricts the options for brides' fathers in the selection of grooms leading to dowry competitiveness while grooms' families feel justified in demanding dowry as a return for the investment in their son. Raised lifestyles and more disposable income due to modernization in Indian cities have aggravated the phenomenon further. This study investigates how dowry practices create and sustain a highly gendered space in urban Patna/Bihar.
The representational space of the social practice of dowry is analyzed in 16 unstructured in-depth interviews with fathers of brides and women of the Hindu Kushwaha caste in West Patna and old Patna city. To examine how transactional space is created, groom's family factors and bride-giving family factors that encourage dowry practices are identified. Furthermore, the discriminatory spaces in the brides' parental and marital homes as well as strategies and attitudes to deal with dowry in the city are investigated.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores retrospective accounts of young Dalit men and their participation in urban violence. Analysing their accounts, the city and their location within it emerged as a dominant theme in the analysis. This paper unpacks these anxieties and opens up new ways of imagining urban masculinities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper engages with retrospective accounts of young Dalit men and their participation in communal conflict of 2002. My ethnographic landscape is Gomtipur, a mixed suburban neighbourhood that developed in the 1960s and 70's to house the migrant mill workers that moved into the city. The deindustrialisation process in the 80s tied into the rise of Hindu nationalism in the neighbourhood and the escalation of communal conflict in the city. The decades of the 1990s and 2000 saw increasing segregation on religious lines in this neighbourhood. It also saw increasing unemployment with second and third generation young men becoming easy target for Hindu nationalist organisations to work with and use as 'foot soldiers' during periods of violence.
Analysis of these narratives reveals their ambiguous relationship with Hindu Nationalism, their justifications for participation in violence, but also highlights anxieties and insecurities that stem around their location within the city and the impact the globalised city was having on slum lives. In exploring young men, urban vulnerability and participation in violence, this paper raises important questions around men and masculinities, but also ethical dilemmas in the study of violence.