Politics of presence: women’s safety and respectability at night in Mumbai, India

Parikh, Aparna

doi:10.1080/0966369x.2017.1400951

Cited by 31 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Like Maria, Tahera tried to maintain the notion of “good women.” To be a “good” and “respectable” (Parikh, 2018; Sultana, 2009) woman is important to gain respect in Bangladesh as it supports traditional norms that perceive good women are good wives and look after their homes (White, 2017). This notion of “good woman” is directly related to women's safety as men will treat women as prostitutes if they lack respect for them, and the common perception is that good women do not roam around public space alone or without purpose.…”

Section: Space For Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Almost from the beginning of urbanization, the presence of women in cities and particularly on city streets has been questioned, and women have faced stigma and violence for their very presence in public space (Parikh, 2018; Samuel & Rozario, 2010; Wilson, 1991). Labor markets are gender‐segregated everywhere and although women's participation in the labor market is greater than at any other time in history (Alda‐Vidal, Rusca, Zwarteveen, Schwartz, & Pouw, 2017; Brottem & Ba, 2019; S. H. Chant & Pedwell, 2008; Robson, 2000; UNDP, 2020), the informal economy in the Global South is more segregated than the simple division of the wage employment versus self‐employment dichotomy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The politics of gendered space: Social norms and purdah affecting female informal work in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Lata

Walters

Roitman

2020

Gender Work & Organization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Labor markets are still heavily gendered everywhere, even when women's participation in the labor market is greater now than at any other time in history. Existing research shows poor women's participation in the informal economy is higher than men's in many parts of the Global South. However, this is not the case in Bangladesh. Poor Muslim women's participation, particularly where they require access to public space, is lower than men due to persistent patriarchal norms, reflected in social and religious expectations of women. Drawing on interview data with female street vendors from a slum in Dhaka, this article explores the dynamics of social and religious norms that constrain poor Muslim women's access to public space to earn income. This article contributes to the literature on gender, religion, and work by highlighting that the parochial realm offers a safer space for operating businesses without breaking social norms and by arguing that poor Muslim women experience social and religious barriers rather than legal ones. Non‐legal barriers are more amenable to change as a result, which is important for empowering women.

show abstract

Section: Space For Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The politics of gendered space: Social norms and purdah affecting female informal work in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Lata

Walters

Roitman

2020

Gender Work & Organization

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Teashops are those neither public, nor private zones, so prominent in the literature on modernity and public life, which form a key aspect of men's everyday geographies in India. Several literatures suggest the extent to which public spaces in India are gendered through violence, abuse, discrimination, castigation, stigmatisation, and exclusion (Abraham 2010;Bhattacharya 2015;Chakraborty 2009;Parikh 2018;Phadke 2013). From our conversations with Anushka and significant others in our fieldwork we learnt that, outsiders, after morning/evening walks and other sports/recreational activities on the campus, mostly use the hut-type teashop that she referred to.…”

Section: Encountering the Male Gaze In A Public Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing Indian girls’ embodied orientations towards public life

Aruldoss

Nolas

2019

Gender, Place & Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Contemporary figurations of the 'the Indian Woman' over recent years have been heavily influenced by national and international media coverage focused on high profile, gruesome and brutal cases of rape and sexual assault of women in public. The suffering involved in such cases notwithstanding, we argue that investment in such representations runs the risk of limiting our understanding of the varied experiences of female bodies in public life. Most significantly, the bodies of younger girls and how they relate to public life is mostly assumed rather than studied. Drawing on a sub-sample of ethnographies of younger children aged 6-8 living in the city of Hyderabad, India and employing the phenomenological concept of 'orientation', the article explores young girls' everyday embodied orientation towards public life, with an intersectional framework. The paper considers three case studies from different spatial/cultural contexts and the empirical material is organised around the themes of the male gaze in a public space, orienting bodies in a schooled space, and the lived body in a domestic space.

show abstract

“…Even as young women in India migrate in growing numbers to cities for education and employment, they find their lives subject to proliferating networks of surveillance. These forms of control are increasingly normalised and justified within a discourse of “risk” that, as feminist scholarship has shown, conflates the danger of sexual assault with anxieties about young women’s exercise of sexual agency outside caste and communal lines (Parikh ; Shandilya ). Care of the self—as an ethical practice in subject‐making (Mahmood )—is materialised here in the cultivation of attachment directed away from objects of risk (Patel ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Killing Us Slowly: Pre‐Empting Suicide at a Women’s Hostel in Chennai

Krishnan

2019

Antipode

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper draws on ethnographic research in Chennai to unpack the preemptive logic that shapes anti-suicide interventions at hostels-dormitories-for collegegoing women in this city. Its central contention is that a concern for the production of a presumed future becomes, in hostels, a governmental technology that is used to limit young women's lifeworlds in the present. These regimes of intervention reinforce the unliveability of attachments, intimacies and affects that popular discourse and scaled-up demographic narrative associate with the potential for suicide. Building from this, the paper also shows that such regimes engender feelings of suffocation and attrition among the young women who live in hostels. "Being slowly killed", as they call it, draws attention to suicide not as a spectacular event but as a site where the terms of everyday life are remade.

show abstract

Politics of presence: women’s safety and respectability at night in Mumbai, India

Cited by 31 publications

References 20 publications

The politics of gendered space: Social norms and purdah affecting female informal work in Dhaka, Bangladesh

The politics of gendered space: Social norms and purdah affecting female informal work in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Tracing Indian girls’ embodied orientations towards public life

Killing Us Slowly: Pre‐Empting Suicide at a Women’s Hostel in Chennai

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About