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This paper examines the intimate labour of corporate cleaners in India. Their intimate labour involves removing the bodily waste of others, as well as working on their own bodies to meet employer demands. These workers are situated within India's lavish corporate offices which serve as prominent symbols of development. Yet toilet cleaning continues to be embedded within histories of gender, caste, and class hierarchies in India. Based on original field research in Pune, India, we explore the experiences of the workers who perform corporate cleaning jobs that allow round the clock operation of multinational technology industries. We argue that while corporate cleaning is sanitized, professionalized, and mirrors the neoliberal visions of a global India, it is complicit in a denial and entrenchment of caste and gender hierarchies. Our analysis contributes to debates around gendering of intimate labour by exploring its salience as well as invisibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines discourses about sexual risk and respectability in the South Indian city of Chennai, through an ethnographic study of young women's participation in practices of public sex. Focusing on middle-class women located at the heart of neoliberal and national fantasies of the 'good life', it makes two arguments. First: the paper unpacks the ways in which urban publics have been stigmatised as 'unsafe' for respectable women. It demonstrates that in practices of publicly-located sex, young women subvert this. They instead see private and commercial spaces – which have been celebrated as the locus of their liberation – as places of surveillance and discipline. Second: the paper interrogates how spatial governmentalities produce regimes of legitimacy that accrue to particular sexual acts. It argues that what 'counts' as sex is also determined geographically: by where the sex act occurs and what geographies of discipline and imaginaries of risk and respectability it evokes in its location. Both arguments draw attention to the ways in which contemporary discourses about the 'risk' of urban publics evoke the logics of development within which the construct of respectable femininity is located. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dams are the biggest 'development' displacement agent. In this paper, we explore the gendered processes and structures of dam-induced displacement and resettlement on Indigenous communities and how displaced men conceptualise masculinities and gender relations within those communities. Drawing upon results of previous research undertaken in India and Malaysia, these two disparate cases allow us to examine how displacement affected men and changed their lives, and subsequently how they (re)constructed and (re)negotiated masculinities and gender-social relations in post-resettlement lives. We highlight two critical issues, namely, household and community land/resources, and compensation and rehabilitation processes to illustrate how gender roles, and in particular masculinities and men's roles, were transformed in dam displacement in both the countries, and analyse the consequences for women, family life and gender relations. We argue that the outcomes of gender and social asymmetries have largely depended on the realities of power, allowing men to reconstruct their masculinities to retain stereotyped notions of male superiority and female subordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the food security implications of the out-migration of men for rural households headed by women. Recent transformations in the socio-economic landscape of the Global South involve an increasing number of rural households shifting towards urban-nonfarm, migration-based livelihoods. In many rural societies, social and cultural norms restricting women's mobility means migration is usually undertaken by men, leading to a phenomenon of left-behind women. The absence of men requires women to assume the role of household heads. This often triggers fundamental changes in intrahousehold gender power relations. However, little is known about the effects of these changes on household food security outcomes. Drawing on primary field research in western Bihar in India, this article attempts to highlight interconnections between migration, women left behind and household food security and, in doing so, makes two key contributions. First, with a focus on gender social roles, the paper shows that the two oft-cited impacts of migration of men—'improved autonomy' and 'increased responsibility' for left-behind women—provide conceptual pathways to understand migration-gender-food security linkages. Second, it provides evidence on how changes in women's roles under conditions of such migration intersect with household food security. The findings indicate a gender-based disadvantage in food security outcomes faced by household headed by women, offsetting even the potentially positive influence of improved female autonomy. The paper argues for the need to address socio-economic mechanisms underpinning gender-based vulnerabilities to food security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rohingya experiences of displacement and refuge are heavily gendered. Sexual and gender-based violence have been used as weapons against Rohingya women, men, girls and boys in Myanmar for decades. Trafficking and exploitation are rife on the flight out of the country, and host states such as India present their own gendered challenges to family survival and individual coping. In this paper, we examine how some of those violent and disruptive experiences have affected gender roles for individuals and families as they have fled Myanmar (often more than once) and sought refuge in India via Bangladesh. We present new insight into the dynamic subjectivity of Rohingya women as we show how, contrary to dominant depictions of passive victimhood, many have lead family migration across borders, taken up NGO/community leadership roles, or made the best 'home' possible within the limitations of the host context. This is because personal and family agency is sensitive to transitional opportunities and threats—i.e., gender norms of home and host contexts, interactions with host communities, and trust relations with NGOs, to name a few. Crucially, these social practices and experiences are not static or linear; they span generations and sprawling geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine representations of nation and gender in newspaper coverage of the murder of a prominent Indian journalist, Gauri Lankesh, in September 2017. Using a transnational feminist and postcolonial lens, I analyze different portrayals of her murder by juxtaposing newspaper articles by major U.S and Indian English-language newspapers. My analysis reveals that both media articles circulate representations reminiscent of transnational discourses that rationalize political projects in the name of saving women or, in this case, saving journalists. My analysis shows, on the one hand, U.S. depictions present a linear progress narrative portraying India's democracy as failing and inefficient. In addition, these accounts employ rescue narratives of Indian democracy and journalists. On the other hand, my analysis also reveals that liberal Indian media depict Lankesh as a martyr killed in the struggle against Hindutva nationalism. I examine how a vernacular press journalist like Gauri Lankesh could become a martyr for English-speaking intellectual liberals and the English-language media. While both media present different narratives of the murder and its aftermath, they both downplay its gendered implications. Using the case of Lankesh, I raise questions about the effect of such coverage on women journalists today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, incidents of rape, sexual discrimination, honour killing, acid attacks and sex-related murders in Indian cities have come under much media and public scrutiny, significantly impacting conceptions of gender, risk and women's safety in urban spaces. The city itself has become a dominant trope for underscoring the anxieties, discourses and exegeses of sexual violence, as exemplified in the oft-cited designation of Delhi as the 'rape capital of India'. This introduction to the themed section critically engages with 'the urban' in its attempts to understand sexual violence in India, and focuses on the multiple public (workplace, leisure, street lives) and private (domestic, intimate) arenas of urban life where sexual violence is encountered, and the resources they provide to counter it. The co-editors engage with the interdisciplinary research papers by contributing authors that show how sexual violence is '(en)countered' in women's right-wing politics, processes of cultural production, community health activism, experiences of aggressive relationships, and men's growing anxieties about women's self-determination in Indian cities. With a specific ethnographic emphasis on women's experiences, rhetoric, representation and resistance to harassment, the theme section analyses sexual violence through the lens of urban, social and spatial transformations in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two perspectives on women's relationships to forests are usually invoked in much of the mainstream policies and research on gender and forest management in India. First, forest-dwelling women, particularly tribal women, are perceived as sharing some inherent and symbiotic relationships to forests and are, custodians of forests. These women are also seen as having significant stakes in state-led forest management projects to meet their subsistence and cultural needs in forests. Second, there is also a perception in India that forest-dwelling communities have strong desires to commercialise forests, and women work with men to garner economic benefits by unsustainably extracting forest resources. Both perspectives are often used to understand how and why tribal women use forest resources and may participate in state-led forest management projects. However, such perspectives give scarce attention to how forest management projects and other lived realities in forests have gendered consequences for women's lives and livelihoods, the everyday emotional and physical experiences of which reinforce gender inequalities, shape gender subjectivities, and is useful to understand how and why different women may use forest resources and relate to conservation projects in certain complex ways. Through an ethnographic study of a small group of tribal women who illegally planted rubber trees in the Bagafa reserved forest of Tripura, this article examines how women's subjectivities are produced, performed and contested at intersections of livelihood struggles in forests, aspirations for development, and forest management project-encounters, that come to shape both, their use of forest resources and approaches towards conservation projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer education has become a popular strategy for promoting gender equality in recent years in response to calls for more participatory forms of development and thanks to the growing popularity of 'social norms change' within the development industry. However, there is some evidence that the main benefits of peer education programs are accrued by the peer educators themselves, with little change evident among the target group. This essay draws on research with peer educators working in the 'gender and development' sector in Delhi to make two arguments. First, peer educators expressed a sense of enhanced agency and aspirations as a result of the participation in these development initiatives. However, consistent with critiques of other forms of 'information-centred development', the primary outcomes of these programs were tied to the material conditions of employment for peer educators rather than entitlements for intended beneficiaries or indeed the knowledge that peer educators had received and were disbursing. Second, in addition to the the absence of structural change and collective political action, the limited outcomes of peer education programs for intended beneficiaries might also reflect the binary created within information-centred approaches to development between the changed and the unchanged. This binary resonates with the dislocations described by scholars of development categories and postcolonial feminist scholars, suggesting that the intended beneficiaries of these programs might feel alienated by their purported peers when development is conceptualized in terms of norms to be changed through information programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist scholarship has drawn attention to the multiple places of labour and the intersection of social relations that shape women's geographies of work. Acknowledging feminist research on gender dynamics of globalization of production and household relations in 'making available' women's labour to the global capital, this article foregrounds explanations offered by the women, through their life stories, of their decisions to enter social relations of waged work. These young women worked in an electronics special economic zone in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where I argue that for women 'becoming' workers is not merely about entering into waged work or a scripted notion of class identity, but a complex process through which women's labour gets incorporated into the relations of (re)production and their ability to negotiate these relations to gain control over their bodies and labour. Their consciousness of 'becoming' workers is deeply embedded in their awareness and experiences of the gendered relations of labour at homes and their desire to change their life circumstances. Focusing on work-life experiences beyond employment relations, this article highlights the everyday 'micro-scale' struggles of women as they negotiate household relations of labour where escape and responsibility form part of their survival strategies and politics of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the legal ban on untouchability over four decades ago, caste discrimination and atrocities perpetrated against 'untouchable' women (or Dalits) continue to be a part of the social landscape in India. Based on a decade-long partnership between a Canadian NGO, a partner Dalit/Adivasi local organization and 75 partner villages in South Orissa, this article provides a localized snapshot of the contemporary nature of caste atrocities committed against Dalit women in the Mohana administrative block. It briefly elaborates on Dalit explanations for such assaults and suggests that when it comes to addressing gendered-caste victimization, there are limits to open democratic advocacy which need to be acknowledged by activists and critical scholarship engaged with the cultural politics of 'voice'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]