Organizer: Susan Seizer, University of Chicago
Chair: Mary Hancock, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Nilanjana Chatterjee, CUNY, Queen's College
This panel seeks to move beyond an acknowledgment of the ways that the familiar "home and the world" paradigm for gender relations in Indian nationalist discourse has shaped spheres of morality as separate for women and men, and to look closely at movements and social practices of South Asian women that trouble and transgress this neat binarism. We are interested in women's strategic redeployments of the dominant idea of the good woman as "homely." The papers focus on women's mobility within and through such dominant cultural discourses. Our premise is that the cultural scripting of "home" is being regularly manipulated, extended, and renegotiated by women in actual social practice, and that women use such scripts of cultural identity in multiple ways for multiple ends. The home practices of women have already been identified and defined as a fulcrum for cultural discourse in South Asia, and the analysis of women's own deployment of these ideas in their social and spatial practices promises to enliven and complicate our understanding of public culture and its domestic practices.
Homely Acts: Women's Participation in the Public Sphere of Late Colonial India
Kamala Visweswaran, University of Texas, Austin
This paper challenges the idea that the equation of women with the domestic sphere translated directly into apolitical forms of action in late colonial India. Using interview and archival materials from Tamil Nadu, I argue instead, that it was precisely the reordering of the domestic realm that contributed in large part to the emergence of the public sphere under British colonialism. Taking Gandhi's (1920) formulation of satyagraha as the "extension of the rule of domestic life into the political" as my starting point, I explore the contradictory axes of women's agency in the inscription of the domestic into the political realm. For when Gandhi characterizes the political as domestic, he is also arguing that what women now do is political. This formulation allows us to see how women can now participate in the public sphere without raising hostility, because in some sense, they take the 'home' with them. Thus Gandhian notions of agency both allowed women to leave the home, and set into play a strategy of containment to continually identify women with the home.
Gendering the Modern: Women and Home Science in South India
Mary Hancock, University of California, Santa Barbara
This paper considers the public culture of urban domesticity in India, focusing on cultural practices by which domesticity has been produced in Madras since the turn of this century. Though elite nationalists envisioned the domestic realm as the interior of a modern public world, it was elite women who enacted domesticity through their relations with men (as wives, mothers, sisters) and with other women (including servants and poor women). The domestic was thereby marked as a site for reinventing elite womanhood and Hindu "tradition" as public virtues. In this light, I consider the formation of home science, a field of women's education modeled on Western "home economics." As a self-conscious invention of modernity, it brought the macrostructures of economic development home by transforming domestic spaces into loci of bourgeois class formation (through consumption) in accordance with values of rationality, science and efficiency. At the same time, however, it created bounded spaces of female action, sociality and imagination in which differential and contestatory modernities were fashioned, often through ritually mediated consumption.
Motherhood as a Space of Protest: Women's Political Participation in Sri Lanka
Malathi de Alwis, University of Chicago
This paper seeks to explore how the Mothers' Front, a grassroots women's organization protesting the 'disappearance' of their male relatives, mobilized the privatized and feminized category of 'motherhood' to inaugurate a public protest campaign against the state. While the state's reprisals and counter-rhetoric occupy the same discursive terrain as that of the Mothers' Front's rhetoric, I argue that the Front's innovative use of feminized strategies of protest such as tears and curses in the context of religious rituals of resistance, should be understood in terms of their contingency rather than being framed by a feminist discourse that requires us to choose between maternalized and radicalized politics.
Road Work: Off-Stage Scripts for Acting the Ideal Tamil Woman
Susan Seizer, University of Chicago
In this paper, I focus on the problematic mobility of women who do not properly internalize gender constraints. I write here about stage actresses, by definition women who regularly make public spectacles of themselves and are the quintessential "bad women" in a culture where womanly virtue sticks close to the home. I argue that in Tamilnadu, south India, actresses' attempts to attain the status of "good woman" take a very different form from that employed by middle-class women, who have been enjoined by Indian nationalist discourse to internalize their domestic virtue and to carry "the home" out into "the world" with them. For actresses who have never had either such a proper home or such a proper home identity, internalizing domesticity is not a viable option. Instead, in a practice that aims at countering their stigmatizing visibility in the public sphere, actresses attempt to recreate externally and materially (foreclosing the need to rely on public recognition of internal and spiritual intentions) private spaces that will provide them with havens of domestic respite during their travels on public roads. After introducing these theoretical concerns, the body of my paper consists of five stages in my experience of traveling with certain actresses down certain roads. In moving with Special Drama actresses through the streets of Tamilnadu, I experienced how actresses create structures of enclosure even in the most public of places, and how ever-present is the inside-outside dichotomy of good and bad that accompanies their journey.