Reclaiming Rage: Gendered practices of navigating Delhi
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Melissa Butcher will deliver this month's GEDS Lunchtime Seminar, titled 'Reclaiming Rage: Gendered practices of navigating Delhi'.
In the wake of protests against sexual violence in Delhi (2012), Hindu nationalist discourse (Hindutva) positioned the city as a site of cultural pollution intertwined with globalization, claiming 'western lifestyles' contributed to gendered assault in the city. In juxtaposition, Delhi's neo-liberal landscape positions the female body as a valued commodity, iconic of 'globalised living', embedded in discourses of autonomy and modernity. This paper will argue, however, that Hindutva and neo-liberalism cannot be separated, and are in fact entangled cultural constructs creating forms of violence that problematize women's access to the city, be it for livelihood or leisure, emplacing women within coordinates not of their making. Yet, rather than acquiesce to this urban topology women are engaged in everyday practices to reclaim space from this entanglement of the secular, religio-cultural and built environment. From smoking in public to 'unrespectable' sex, the agonistic relationships generated in public spaces by the presence of the single, middle-aged, middle-class women in this ethnographic study extends Braidotti's notion that subjectivity and the material cannot be separated. In adopting small scale practices of gift and exchange, these women attempted to re-version the possibilities of urban development. The outcome of their daily interactions with, and in, the city has implications for Delhi's development, including the possibility that their autonomy enables pockets of social and political flourishing.
Melissa Butcher
m.butcher@bbk.ac.uk