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Thursday 13 April 2023 16.30 - 18.30
C-8 ASI02 Urban Gendered Violence in a South Asian City in a Comparative Perspective
B21
Networks: Asia , Women and Gender Chairs: -
Organizer: Nandini Gooptu Discussants: -
Nandini Gooptu : The Hyper-masculine Violent City, Class and Gender
Gurgaon or Gurugram epitomises India’s 21st century spectacular techno-modern urban transformation, growing into a major corporate financial and cyber centre in just a couple of decades on previously rural tracts. Believed by residents to offer the promise of unbridled upward mobility and economic opportunities, the city is also imagined to ... (Show more)
Gurgaon or Gurugram epitomises India’s 21st century spectacular techno-modern urban transformation, growing into a major corporate financial and cyber centre in just a couple of decades on previously rural tracts. Believed by residents to offer the promise of unbridled upward mobility and economic opportunities, the city is also imagined to harbour at its heart a culture of aggressive masculinity, patriarchy and violence towards women, relating to the city’s local history, geography and political economy. The cultural construction of the city as a space of male dominance and violence shapes the gendered experience of the city. It determines women’s quotidian lives and relationships, contributing to self-restrictions on their own conduct in public as well as control over their lives by families and public institutions. However, women also forge new gendered identities, solidarities, networks, enterprises, citizenship practices and strategies to negotiate the city of fear. The circulation of ideas about the modern city as violent and hyper-masculine and the resultant practices affect gender, caste and class relations in the city. (Show less)

Garima Jaju : To-be-Wife, Wife and 'Wife': Negotiating Violence and Social Hopes of Marital becoming in a 'Modernising' City
Far from dramatically disrupting social worlds, the incidence of domestic violence (or its threat) operates within the existing entanglements of marriages and adjacent-kin relations, which are filled with the experience and expectations of love, reciprocity, duty, as also the reality of indifference, hatred, or deeply fraught and conflictual interpersonal dynamics. ... (Show more)
Far from dramatically disrupting social worlds, the incidence of domestic violence (or its threat) operates within the existing entanglements of marriages and adjacent-kin relations, which are filled with the experience and expectations of love, reciprocity, duty, as also the reality of indifference, hatred, or deeply fraught and conflictual interpersonal dynamics. Private interpersonal violence is perceived as so deeply embedded in the sobering complexity of social relations and people’s individual situations, idiosyncrasies, and predicaments, that the issue of violence becomes difficult to isolate and is interpreted less as straight-up violence and more often as failed social relations and frayed social worlds. Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in the fast ‘modernising’ city of Gurgaon, India, this paper proceeds through an ethnographic exploration of the love, affliction, and violence experienced by three women – an upwardly mobile young professional, an urban-rural housewife and a bottom-end professional worker – in their heterosexual relationships with their boyfriend, husband, and estranged husband, respectively. Through its changing forms of living, sociality, leisure, consumption, and work, the city provides the moral and material backdrop for these relationships. All three relationships are defined in reference to an ‘ideal marriage’, and its promise of 'good domesticity' and ‘good womanhood’ appropriate to the changing urban context. Marriage features as anticipation in the first case, a daily negotiated reality in the second and as the site of ruin and collapse in the third. Ethnographically mapping the frayed intimate worlds of three women, in ‘pre’, ‘present’ and ‘post’ marital heterosexual relationships in urban India, the paper shows the experience of managing everyday private violence as centrally the work of managing gendered kinworlds, and the attendant hopes of social becoming. (Show less)

Taanya Kapoor : “Managing” Violence before it takes Place: Everyday Fear, “Justified Anger” and Confined Freedoms in Gurgaon’s Gated Complexes
Gurgaon’s rise in the last two decades as India’s “Millennium City” has been characterised by the ubiquitous presence of high-rise, gated condominiums offering an oasis of “calm and peace” and a heavily guarded, secure environment to the young, urban, white-collar professionals that reside within them. While Gurgaon’s reputation as an ... (Show more)
Gurgaon’s rise in the last two decades as India’s “Millennium City” has been characterised by the ubiquitous presence of high-rise, gated condominiums offering an oasis of “calm and peace” and a heavily guarded, secure environment to the young, urban, white-collar professionals that reside within them. While Gurgaon’s reputation as an unsafe city, especially for women, permeates contemporary imagination, these condos as marketed as the hallmark of a “New Gurgaon” that allows for unlimited freedoms within the confines of their walled complexes, keeping women secure from life even just beyond their own gates. In this paper, I will focus on sharing stories of urban, upper class and working women residing within these complexes and the ways in which they navigate the “everyday fear” that residing in a place like Gurgaon instils in them. I will focus specifically on the looming threat of sexual assault and the cultural construction of a “phantom fear” of violence that “may happen” at any time, and the ways in which such a construct is used to justify control, coercion and restriction of women’s lives, often using the paradigm of love, care and protection. Women’s own acceptance of this paradigm also lends itself to the everyday act of “managing” their actions to avoid confrontation, and tolerating “justified” anger while crossing perceived boundaries of respectable behaviour. This paper will attempt to reconceptualise constraints on women’s everyday living as an unrecognized form of violence that takes place within the home, outlining the effect that this has on women’s self-perception as “modern, empowered” women, and its larger implications for changing gender relations within the family. (Show less)

Shannon Philip : Trapped in a Luxury Prison within a ‘Dangerous City’: Narratives of COVID-19, Gendered Violence, the Home and the City amongst Middle-class South African Women
The ‘home’ has long been a site of feminist engagement and critical scholarship. During the global COVID-19 pandemic and its ‘shadow pandemic’ of gendered violence, the home as a site of enquiry has gained renewed attention. In this paper, I look at how wealthy and middle-class South African women conceptualise ... (Show more)
The ‘home’ has long been a site of feminist engagement and critical scholarship. During the global COVID-19 pandemic and its ‘shadow pandemic’ of gendered violence, the home as a site of enquiry has gained renewed attention. In this paper, I look at how wealthy and middle-class South African women conceptualise their ‘home’ within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, I focus on the narratives of gendered violence experienced and discussed by some women as well as contrasting narratives about the ‘safe home’ and the ‘dangerous city’ that several other women talked about. In this way, a complex picture emerges around the ideas and imaginaries of the ‘home’, its lived realities and the many classed and gendered anxieties that shape it in relation to urban transformations. The data for this paper is derived primarily from semi-structured interviews with 40 women in the wealthy suburb of Sandton in Johannesburg. The paper reveals complex and contradictory understandings of the ’home’ during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its interplay with narratives of gendered violence, a gendered respectability as well as ideas about unsafe urban spaces. In this way the paper attempts to connect the ‘home’ and the ‘outside’, as well as ideas of violence, safety and ‘protection’ along a single analytical continuum. (Show less)



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