As Indian women's rights organizations address violence against women, they rely heavily on mediation practices such as family counseling. At one counseling center in Jaipur, Rajasthan, family counselors operated in an environment saturated with transnational discourse about human rights and gendered violence. Yet counselors addressed household harm through arguments about kin‐based care and interdependence, referred to as seva. Through their discussions of seva, counselors challenge scholarly assumptions about an insurmountable opposition between the demands of kinship and women's rights as autonomous subjects. Instead of presenting independence as a solution to disordered homes, they reordered household dependencies, subtly reworking ideologies of patriarchal kinship. Via ethnographic attention to the complex connections between kinship, care, and interdependence in counseling, I demonstrate the central role of kinship in localizing transnational arguments about rights. [kinship, care, dependence, gender, domestic violence, India]
Over the past three decades, transnational women's rights discourse has promoted the category gender as a universal tool to evaluate questions of inequality. Building on fieldwork in Jaipur, India, this article argues that the discursive economy of women's rights renders gender global by framing kinship as a local, harmful element of women's social worlds. Mid-level staff at women's rights organizations, called "family counselors," demonstrate the complexities of kinship in women's rights institutions. Counselors work with the constraints and possibilities of
Following transnational legal standards, India's antidomestic violence legislation is designed to sensitize the state to gendered violence by appointing nongovernmental organizations to help plaintiffs document abuse. Drawing on fieldwork at a family counseling center in Rajasthan, I show that staff balanced their roles as family counselors and “service providers” to plaintiffs as sensitization discourse revalued the complex documentary practices required by both activities. In this context, bureaucratic elements of counselors’ practices were highlighted, and the role of documents in supporting expert interactions with clients was erased, consolidating expertise along existing hierarchies of class and status that organized activists and staff at the center. By consolidating expertise, “gender‐sensitive” state policies may erase precisely the vernacular modes of responding to gendered inequality that they are meant to incorporate.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.