Tracing Indian girls’ embodied orientations towards public life

Abstract

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.

Learning to Listen: Exploring the Idioms of Childhood

“…Nevertheless, the empowering family setting does not entirely protect her from problematic encounters with public life, such as the ubiquitous ‘male gaze’ which she experiences while walking past the teashops on campus (cf. Aruldoss et al, submitted).…”

The pace of secular changes of body measurements of children and adolescents from Kolkata (India) in the context of socioeconomic inequalities between the sexes

“…Thus, it can be concluded the observed, significant differences noted in the pace of secular trends were more likely due to the social, and even more so, domestic discrepancies. In this context, it seems important to stress, that, despite all of the positive changes, described above, a considerable social division of sexes is present even in the affluent Indian households (Aruldoss & Nolas, 2019). Additionally, it should also be mentioned, that secular trends regarding anthropometric characteristics, such as body height, can mirror changes of environmental factors, that traditional, monetary indicators, cannot fully cover (Castellucci et al, 2019;Koepke et al, 2018).…”

Thinking with feeling: Children’s emotional orientations to public life

“…Public life in India is organised, controlled, mediated, scrutinised and/or legitimised by the social categories of gender, caste, class, religion, ethnicity and their intersectionalities; and gendered violence, both mundane and extraordinary, is often used as a moral force to maintain such differences and to assert authority over marginalised groups in India’s fragmented cultural and ethnic landscape (see Hansen, 2018). Children are no exception to this violence, as we too began to discover (Aruldoss and Nolas, 2019), and neither is their affective labour that is involved in resisting and navigating such violence.…”

“…Similarly, Sircar and Dutta’s (2011) study on children of sex workers from Kolkata sheds light on the discourses around suffering and compassion and, how children collectively navigate the culture of fear and stigma attached with their lives while fighting for the dignity of their mothers. In contrast, Chakrabarty’s (2009) study of Muslim girls in a Kolkata slum illustrates how girls navigate and subvert the construction of ideal (Indian) girlhood at home, in the slum and other public spaces (see also Aruldoss and Nolas, 2019). Similarly, Dyson’s (2014) research with working children, both boys and girls, involved in livestock activities like herding and collecting leaves in the Himalayan region, chronicles their everyday working lives in the forest, which are in turn shaped by gender, caste, nature and culture.…”