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Our paper lays out an experiential account of walking the city, an otherwise mundane everyday act, as a performative action. The specific act of walking that this paper examines is part of a series of performance actions titled 'Women Walk at Midnight' (Delhi, 2016- present) where women collectively walk the streets of the city at night. Breaking from the conventional article format, our paper draws on reflexive feminist research and performance analysis to narrate the performative dimensions of walking that foreground how women collectively negotiate fear and vulnerability in/of the city. We draw on our own memories and experiences of walking - embodied, sensorial, even intuitive - not only as participants of the Midnight Walk but as women who often negotiate varied agressions of the city streets. The paper weaves an intricate pattern of relations between space, time and movement of female bodies in the city of New Delhi from a gendered perspective. We posit that transformations of urban atmosphere through the course of the day shape our experiences of the city, reproducing it as a gendered site. Relation of bodies to space, we argue, shifts in response to time. We are interested not only in the singular and deliberate actions carried out by individual walkers, but unpack the shared notions of risk, adventure and pleasure, experienced fleetingly and afforded only through the collective. These performative actions of female bodies at night not only challenge the rehearsed understandings of urban citizenship but also stage its emancipatory possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a city where violence against women is an everyday reality and a highly contested subject, gendered claims to the city are also fraught with possibilities and problems. This paper evaluates some of these issues through speech act and resilience of young, unmarried, middle-class women in Delhi, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores how these women navigate public spaces, respond to violence and fear, and claim their rights to the city. I argue that these women's speech act and resilience are forms of everyday resistance to the violent gender order in the city. The paper also demonstrates that violence, fear, speech act and resilience are interlaced into women's everyday lives. In turn, I argue, the divide between gendered violence and women's agency is not discreet spaces but are relationally produced in a city where pluralities, contradictions, and contestations are embodied realities for women. Speech act and resilience thus provide spaces for meaningful discussions on how women (re)articulate their place in the city amidst gendered violence and fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to examine the role of social pain in the unmaking and remaking of urban subjectivities in a context of cultural change. I argue that doubt and uncertainty generated by shifting cultural boundaries underpins a drive to reassert extant social order, including gendered expectations, generating pain in the unmaking of subjectivities for those who are different or 'other'. In the case of this study, the different are single, middle-aged, women in Delhi, standing outside normative familial structures and forced to answer the question 'what's wrong with you?'. However, everyday practices of repair and 'swallowing' pain could also work to remake a sense of self. Demonstrating invention as well as the politics of pain in their reclamations of space, these 'wrong' women reconfigured subjectivity as a form of cosmopolitanism often defined in opposition to 'parochial' others, particularly male migrant workers and cultural nationalists, who are made to lie beyond imagined urbane boundaries. The mirroring of exclusions highlights Elaine Scarry's work on the incommunicability of pain that results, under conditions of neo-liberal and patriarchal social relations, in both women and working-class men being excluded from city spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resilience and activism of marginalised urban populations have played an important role in imagining urban politics in Indian cities. Similarly, the issue of sexual violence against women in public spaces became a significant part of urban politics in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case. However, subsequent activism and research have paid lesser attention to other pervasive experiences of intimate violence and structural inequalities that confront marginalised urban populations, particularly poor women and children. Drawing on participatory ethnographic research with frontline workers engaged in an NGO's violence prevention program in Dharavi, Mumbai, this paper re-inscribes 'gender' and 'violence' as experiential concepts into the urban framework. I use the term 'intersection' as a heuristic device to examine how frontline workers come to understand gender as a relationship of inequality that produces conditions of violence. I term this intersection 'gender/violence'. The second intersection, 'frontline', further underscores how negotiations of the public–private divide in urban spaces, women's caring labour in supporting survivors of violence and the resultant forms of gendered agency are interconnected. I argue that such a holistic understanding of women's everyday actions of resisting and negotiating structural and gendered violence contributes to recent urban scholarship on gender and violence and furthers our understandings of agency, solidarity and resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gang-rape case of Delhi in December 2012, usually referred to as Nirbhaya to the very recent Hathras case of September 2020, led to mass protests and demonstrations. However, reading it through the feminist intersectional lens clearly indicates the difference in public response, political stance, and legal progression. There was a protracted struggle, indeed, but sexual violence in Delhi subsequently led to the change in legal reforms, aligning itself towards rendering justice to the victim, but in the case of Hathras, it's treading upon blurred pathways of judicial proceedings. This article evaluates the altered textures of protest and the trajectory of feminist intervention when it intersects with the spectrum of caste, class, space, and gender. Therefore, even beyond the social and economic position, the location plays a crucial role in deciphering the discourse of rape or sexual violence. Through the intersectional reading of these two case studies, this article evaluates the discourse of sexual violence in both urban and rural India and the politics of justice meted out to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I offer the concept of 'refugeespace' as a way of understanding Afghan refugee women's homemaking practices in Delhi, India. Such practices unfold in various spaces–the domestic space/apartment, the refugee neighborhood, and the larger megacity–Delhi. I map 'refugeescape' through the social networks that Afghan refugee women create with one another, livelihood and leisure activities, and everyday socio-economic negotiations that knit the spaces of the domestic home, neighborhood, and city together. Tracing the spaces that constitute Afghan refugee women's lives in Delhi in relation to each other, the constraints they impose, and the possibilities they offer point to how these spaces are a critical aspect of refugee women's strategies of surviving and thriving as refugees in Delhi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2012 gangrape of a young woman in Delhi, known as the Nirbhaya case, became an international media event that cast public spaces in India as unsafe, and situated sexual violence as a problem characterized by class difference and lack of development. This dominant media discourse reiterated long-standing neocolonial, classist and casteist tropes that signified a failure of transnational solidarity. At this time, Talk to Me, a public art intervention by the Bangalore-based feminist artist collective, Blank Noise, went viral on social media. The project took place near the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology on a lane along which many women experience molestation and harassment. Students from Srishti engaged strangers – typically migrant and displaced men from the lower classes – in a conversation over tea and a snack. In this article, I analyse Talk to Me as an intervention that offered a counternarrative and countervisual to the dominant, fear-based characterization of public spaces in India. Talk to Me encouraged participants, through a process of dialogue and conversation, to identify and overcome their internalized biases about the lower-class, migrant men who are often constructed as sexual threats to upper-class women. These conversations, I argue, were designed to break down ingrained biases and internalized prejudice, and to attempt to create compassion and solidarity across the barriers of class, education, language, and gender. The intervention offers a model of building solidarity that is not passive or automatic, but rather requires the difficult and often uncomfortable labour of self-reflection and introspection. [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]