Clubbing in the afternoon: Worlding the city as a college-girl in Chennai

Abstract

Clubbing in the Afternoon: Worlding the City as a College-Girl in Chennai Highlights• With rising cultural nationalisms, young women in urban India find themselves under increasing surveillance. • This restricts their access to cultural forms that constitute 'youth culture' in Indian cities.• Ethnography in Chennai shows that a burgeoning culture of Afternoon Clubs allows young women to subvert this temporal discipline. • In analysing this, the paper brings insights from non-representational theory to bear on subculture scholarship. • It shows that Afternoon Clubs reorient young women's urban experience away from vulnerability.

Geographical education I: fields, interactions and relationships

“…Movement, mainly in terms of student mobilities and transnational spaces of education (Kleibert, 2022), illustrates the emphasis on education as a dynamic process that changes people and places (Caciagli, 2019). In Krishnan’s (2019) ethnographic work with young women in Chennai, being a college-girl has multiple implications for how urban life is experienced, particularly through formal education’s distinctive times and spaces, and its production of colonial and gendered middle-class subjectivities. At a different scale, research on school choice strategies and the socio-spatial arrangements of access and segregation highlights the ways in which these arrangements reproduce classed and racialised inequalities (Boterman, 2021): education as an active, dynamic process with potential for emancipatory transformation, and yet the same forces are also used to police and maintain deeply unjust and unequal hierarchies and distributions of multiple forms of capital ‘where racism and unequal power relations persist, revealing an extraordinary web of encounters, negotiations and inter-dependencies that extend across multiple spaces’ (Wilson, 2014: 112).…”