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.