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- Convenors:
-
Nazia Hussein
(London School of Economics)
Sarah Potthoff (Ruhr University Bochum)
- Location:
- Room 211
- Start time:
- 29 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This panel examines contemporary neo-liberal South Asia to explore change and continuity in understanding the idea of the 'new woman' in relation to state, class, culture, religion, family and media.
Long Abstract:
There is evolving talk in diverse parts of South Asia about 'new womanhood' that resulted from neo-liberalized social policies, market extension and changing understanding of women's roles in societies. The idea of the new woman is by no means a new phenomenon -- discussions of the 'New Woman' can be traced to 19th and 20th century South Asia when she was an indispensable part of the social and community reformist discourses. Indeed, present-day discussions of the 'new woman' make direct or indirect references to this earlier historical legacy, as she represents a challenge to the ways ideal womanhood is bounded within the divisions, variable across time and space, of the public and private. She also represents moments of actual or potential change in how womanhood is not only configured in symbolic ways as prescient of change, but how it is enacted as an everyday practice. Many hail new womanhood, as evidence for spreading and strengthening modernity, while others, judge it as a site of challenging state, class, caste, cultural and religious understanding of ideal or respectable womanhood. This panel explores how one might make sense of the discursive ambiguity that shape the concept of new womanhood in relation to change and continuity and calls for pluralistic understanding of 'new womenhoods' in contemporary South Asia. We welcome papers studying South Asian women's identities in relation to state, class, culture, religion, education, paid employment, family, literature and the media.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Saikat Maitra (University of Goettingen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper ethnographically explores how the exposure to the life-styles of global consumerism are scripting a new worker-subjectivity amongst underclass female service workers in Kolkata. india.
Paper long abstract:
My paper explores the fashioning of a new labour-subjectivity amongst underclass female workers associated with the emerging service industries in Kolkata, India. Through ethnography on entry-level female workers, I suggest, how the female workforce is utilized in creating the appropriate 'atmospheres' of shopping malls or upscale cafés as symbolic of the city's current regeneration. Work in these spheres necessitates the complete reconfiguration of the workers' subjectivities. Their bodily comportments, voice inflections, affective potentials and speech patterns are trained to communicate the embodied thrills of cosmopolitan life-styles to customers, while downplaying the workers' own marginality.
Embodied cosmopolitanism in work environments, however, does not translate into actual possession of the capitalist 'good life' for the women employees. A void persists between the dream worlds of commodities that saturate their everyday lives and the realities of low wages, sexual exploitation and lack of state protection. The lives of young workers thus alternate between the extremes of desire and frustration, exuberance and precariousness. I argue in this paper that the exposure of this underclass female workforce to the habitus of consumer citizenship in metropolitan India today is giving rise to new idioms of gendered aspirations and practices of inhabiting the city that forces us to re-conceptualize the nineteenth century 'Women's Question', with its binaries of inner/outer, for the contemporary period. Not only do these 'New Women' stand in contravention to the class and gender hegemonies of an older female bourgeoisie or Bhadramahilas in Kolkata but also signify unforeseen forms of agency and exploitation.
Mary Abraham (Jawaharlal Nehru university, New Delhi, India)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the formation of 'new womanhood’ in the lives of five Indian Muslim women on becoming heads of their families and while traversing through patriarchal boundaries of the public (informal sector) and the private (families), in the face of neo-Liberal policies of the state
Paper long abstract:
Deregulation of markets resulting from neo-liberal policies of industrializing countries leads to disproportionate labour rights of the workers vis-à-vis their industrialised country counterparts. They work with no contract, lack proper organization, have long, unregulated work hours and negligible wages leading to 'feminization' of the informal workforce. While the inclusion of women into the labor force has led to a reclaiming of the hitherto male dominated public sphere and dilution of the divide between the public and private, patriarchal authorities at work and in their families continue to dictate the terms of their agency in terms of work undertaken, wages paid and amount/hours of work undertaken.
This paper looks into the lives of five Muslim Female Headed Households belonging to slums of Delhi, India, and employed in informal works such as sewing, peeling plastic coated metal wires, working as para-medicals. They face the brunt of double social exclusion, on grounds of belonging to economically weaker sections of society and the poorest religious minority (Muslims) of the country; and on being a woman and working in a patriarchal, male-dominated work force.
It explores the formation of 'new womanhood' on becoming 'female heads' of their family and in negotiating patriarchal authority while traversing the boundaries of the public and private realm through their work in a mixed environment. It also analyses barriers to entry in work-force, difficulties faced in being a female head and working/adjusting to meet the needs of the family, and pressures of remarriage imposed by relatives.
Sarah Potthoff (Ruhr University Bochum)
Paper short abstract:
This paper emphasizes the necessity to look beyond a positive law and the articulation of women's rights within it. The paper takes instead the perspective of legal pluralism that turns out to be crucial to understand women's agency within family disputes in India.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the limits of state power and the role of non-state actors in negotiations of women's rights within family disputes in rural South India. Taking a perspective of legal pluralism, this paper emphasizes the need to look beyond a positive law and how women's rights are articulated within it, and shows how this is crucial for understanding women's agency within family disputes. For a long time in debates about gender justice and law in India, women's movements blamed either the so-called traditional values and patriarchy embodied in Religious Personal Laws or the state's inability to implement its laws on discrimination against women. These positions are based strongly on a liberal faith in state institutions and the rule of law and, at the same time, reveal feminists' and women activists' ambivalent relationship to the state. This paper instead focuses on the entanglement of everyday life and the practice of law in order to illustrate women's active part in configuring the social transformation of unequal gender and power relations in marriage and the family. Based on interviews and participant observations made during a seven months fieldwork in Karnataka, this paper argues that women's agency in family disputes is governed by state and non-state actors and is negotiated in various legal settings, under diverse types of norms and morals aside from the state. Accordingly, this paper highlights the necessity to take into account legal forums and actors beyond the state, which allows women's gendered and plural legal realities to be addressed.
Nandita Ghosh (Fairleigh Dickinson University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on a 30-year national discourse of rationality and progress despite challenges during a globalized era, a discourse that falters when encountering non-submissive female bodies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines late-20th- early-21st-century literary and news stories that narrate the "new woman" as a signifier that destabilizes established meanings within the nation. Middle-class females modify or subvert their assigned roles by freely embracing a particular lifestyle. Gulnari (Partap Sharma's Days of the Turban, pub. 1986) breaks codes of respectability when she joins the Akali movement as a revolutionary and interacts with men of different castes and faiths. Akhila (Anita Nair's Ladies Coupѐ, pub. 2001), a 45-year-old income-tax clerk, buys a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. She breaks conservative Tamilian Brahmanical norms governing her behavior when she decides to explore if a woman can live feasibly without marriage. In news stories of the Park Street rape case (2012), Suzette Jordan, a single working mother, challenged a number of norms when she was gang raped: her right to be out late, to accept drinks at a bar, and get a ride home without being raped. These women's choices serve as flashpoints within a nation, problematizing its self-definition as modern. This paper wishes to look at border as method. Borders demarcate spaces, people, and activities. These women trespass on disallowed terrain and experience violence. This paper reflects on a 30-year national discourse of modernity during neo-liberal challenges during a globalized era, a discourse that falters when encountering non-submissive female bodies. It scrutinizes the faultlines of these emerging contradictions to theorize other relations between gender and nationalism in an age of global capital.
Soma Sengupta (Department of Commerce, Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi) Anjan Sen (University of Delhi)
Paper short abstract:
The empowered women with higher education and better employment in urban India, is affecting their buying roles. The paper analyses the influence of ‘new women’ in the purchase decision-making process for different category of products in Delhi. The study has strategic implication for the marketers.
Paper long abstract:
Financial independence, self-identity, job satisfaction and professional achievement, which were previously considered as the sole prerogative of men, are now desired also by the women in urban India. With the emergence of new family categories, like single-women headed households; and notions of feminism and women liberation touching them; it has led to a major shift in the role-structure of women in family, leading to emergence of the 'new women'. This is reflected in the market place in the form of a change in the purchase behaviour pattern associated with a variety of goods and services.
Traditionally, men dominated purchase-decisions for products like, automobiles and electronics; while women were associated with the role of home-maker influencing purchase of groceries and kitchen appliances. But, the emergence of 'new women' has seen a change in the buying roles.
The paper analyses the increasing influence of the 'new women' in the purchase decision-making process for different category of products in Delhi. It also explores the impact of socio-economic factors on their buying roles. The study revealed that the 'new women' has altogether broken the stereotypical roles, with a role interchange. While men also buy groceries; women too, take important decisions regarding buying cars and electronic gadgets; and even do not hesitate in buying embarrassing products, like, sanitary napkins, condoms, birth control pills, and pregnancy-test kits. The women with more education and better jobs have more influence in purchase decision-making. The study has strategic implications for marketers in terms of product-positioning, advertising and promotional strategies.
Deepali Yadav (Banaras Hindu University)
Paper short abstract:
The understanding of ad-makers about feminism in India is threat to entire issue of women’s empowerment who unconsciously generate paradox of modern, liberated woman through visual and verbal politics that propagates mediated and sterilized understanding of feminism.
Paper long abstract:
Women play an important role in Indian advertisement market when it comes to selling ideas ranging from a washing powder to women's empowerment. These advertisements are usually televised in the midst of daily soaps mainly watched by women in India. As a result these women not only tend to gather meaning of their life and surroundings through such soaps but also from such commercials which occur repeatedly on TV screen. In such a situation, it is quite responsible business to publish ads with social issues quite seriously as they tend to becomes realities in popular imagination. In my paper, I want to look at recent ads of Airtel "Boss" and Vogue "My Choice" which in their attempt to celebrate "New/Modern/Liberated Woman" of today offer pseudo feminism. At the time of their launch these ads caused a great stir and debates among Indian feminists for the danger of constructed feminism overtake the actual feminism. I will explain how such commercials though quite unique in their approach of creating awareness about women's freedom paradoxically do injustice and contribute in further repression of same gender. These commercials brag about the advent of "new woman" for their primary aim of selling the product and in doing so they go on to formulate prejudiced beliefs of feminism that is elitist, egoist and self-indulgent rather than equality. The paper will bring both visual and verbal politics of these commercials in showcasing how they are a threat to women's empowerment in the real world.
Reva Yunus (University of Warwick)
Paper short abstract:
This paper unpacks the specific ways in which cultural and economic changes have shaped girls' learning contexts and experiences in urban India. It focuses on differences among girls, as well as biases implicit in classroom texts & practices and retheorises "emancipation" in/through education.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses how urban Indian girl-learners from underprivileged backgrounds negotiate the gendered social order (re)produced through texts, practices and social relations in coeducational classrooms. While economic and cultural neoliberalism forms the larger context for these processes of gendered meaning-making, a more complete understanding of these girls' lives also demands attention to related twin processes of globalisation and informalisation.
Neoliberal educational reforms have led to stratification in school-education and bracketing off of discourses around inequality and quality, encouraging multiple & hierarchical standards of educational quality. Besides, increased individualisation and competition often shape relationships among girls around success at school rather than shared experiences of gender-based discrimination.
Neoliberal reform has also resulted in large-scale migration to urban centres. Breaking away from joint families has brought certain freedoms and increased participation in public sphere; but also created multiple responsibilities for the adolescent girl: learning, working at home and outside. Further, 'new economies of desire' in a globalised world have brought novel avenues of consumption which act as double-edged swords, simultaneously reinforcing, and mounting challenges to, traditional gender roles and relations.
Thus, the "ideal" girl defined by teachers, communities and market forces overflows with contradictions: this new girl is a learner, worker and consumer who must be assertive but modest, confident in studies and submissive elsewhere. Since schools offer no resources to make sense of these contradictions girls adopt a combination of strategies - falling in love, cheating on tests, using foul-language or accepting patriarchal norms - to survive, challenge and succeed.