SOUTH ASIA SESSION 70

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Inspired by multifarious global conjunctures and in renewed politicized ways, gender essentialism persists in public discourse, academic practice, and developmental policy-making in India. Here, conflicting compulsions of “traditional” moralities, expanding middle-class lifestyles, cultural preservation, and global homogenization have made women, once again, the upholders of--often evanescent--national cultural “values”. Against this backdrop, this panel embraces the critical legacy of decolonizing representations of gender through finely-grained ethnographies of the present. These concerns will be addressed: North Indian women activists whose “irreverent” languages, postures, and unusual life choices posited dilemmas for the ethnographer’s analytical categories; middle-class women in Karnataka who have negotiated gender and class expectations to pioneer new social and economic spaces in “a man’s world”; village women in eastern India whose leadership in anti-mining movements belie media censorship and stereotyping as ignorant, illiterate, and downtrodden; and women sex-workers in Tamil Nadu caught between profession, choice, and pleasure on the one hand, and trafficking, co-option, and shame on the other. Embarking on a “model-subverting” intellectual journey, these ethnographies challenge such constructions as “normative” through a notion of “deviant”, the “chaste” through the “unchaste”, the “perennial passive” through the “agentive”, and the “modern” through the “traditional”. Contextually, the ethnographies are informed by such overarching questions as: What is the relationship between depictions of women and the shifting local and global socio-economic, cultural, and political circumstances in which they were able to carve out working, acting, linguistic spaces for themselves? What insights can be gleaned with regard to gender transformations?

Encountering Subversion? Ethnographic Sex, “Third-World” (Indian) Women, and the Genesis of Representation
Manuela Ciotti, Centro Incontri Umani
This paper analyzes ethnographic encounters with women activists in Lucknow, north India, and the “irreverent” languages and postures that marked a number of them. The paper shows the ways in which women activists’ use of sexual innuendos “discursively harassed” the anthropologist’s interpretive categories and through their “excess of agency” established a joking intimacy with her. These encounters, together with the activists’ life stories, not only challenged the anthropologist’s expectations, but also the “non-agency” found in conventional passive and victimizing portraits of “third-world” Indian women. The paper argues that the subversion contained in women’s life stories, as an outcome of the transformative experience of doing politics, might well have been inadvertently encouraged and rendered manifest in these encounters by the anthropologist herself. Her agency and subjectivity may have been viewed by these assertive informants as open to the plurality of forms that agency can take as well as a vulnerable terrain to “tease”. It is suggested that the anthropologist’s subject position opens up new possibilities of self-representation on the part of the informants. Subsequently, the paper asks whether subversion be considered as a lingering possibility in all ethnographic encounters, even when, unlike the case of political activists, informants belong to the realm of the “ordinary”. What emerges powerfully from considering the complex relations between the anthropologist’s and her informants’ subject positions is the realization that the possibilities of (self-)representation are not solely confined to the writing-up process but are catalyzed through field practices in the very moment of the ethnographic encounter.

Subversions of the Gentlewoman: Representational Maneuvers, Middle-Class Sensibilities, and the Pursuit of Agency in South India
Patricia Taber, University of California, Santa Barbara
Focusing on middle-class women in the city of Mysore, South India, who have ventured into the “man’s world” of entrepreneurship, this paper describes “subversion” of representation on two levels. One repudiates the portrayals of Indian middle-class women by others. While social science and popular discourses have acknowledged the concerted efficacy of groups of women, the agency of ordinary, individual middle-class women has received scant consideration. From 19th-century constructions of the genteel bhadramahila, to the nationalist movement’s “new woman”, to neo-orientalist depictions emphasizing domesticity and dependence, Indian middle-class women have been viewed as either beneficiaries or victims of modernity, but seldom as agents in its configuration. Critiques of their alleged conservatism, complacency, and roles in social reproduction have elided women’s deeper yearnings to come into their own as full and equal citizens, their agency as individuals in social transformation, and their growing participation in the global cultural economy as producers as well as consumers. The second “subversion” involves self-representation by women themselves. While middle-class girls today are increasingly encouraged to pursue post-secondary education and even careers, adult married women often encounter resistance to vocational ambitions from conservative family members and local society. Spurred by economic circumstances and personal aspirations, some have resolved this dilemma by starting small, often home-based, enterprises. Life-story narratives reveal how strategic deployment of both “traditional”/local discourses such as duty to family and “modern”/global discourses of equal rights enable women to pioneer new social spaces, reconfiguring what, for the middle classes, has been a predominantly male public domain.

Resisting Dispossession: Women and Men against Mining and Metal Factories in Central/Eastern India
Samarendra Das, Independent Scholar
Throughout Orissa and neighboring states of India, proposed mining projects threaten to displace hundreds more villages and add to the 60 million "oustees" already displaced by industrialization. Women are often at the forefront of movements against these mass displacements and are primary victims as well. In addition to being fired upon by the police, there has been a proliferation of rapes, suicides, and prostitution in areas undergoing enforced industrialization. Displacement also marginalizes women who, as traditional cultivators, maintain a high degree of self-respect as growers and traders of food. In addition, tribal and Dalit cultures are famous for the egalitarian spirit and high degree of freedom women enjoy. This contrasts sharply with their relatively disadvantaged position in mainstream society, which is exacerbated by displacement; women lose their independent, land-based role and become the object of male sexual aggression. About 50% of those facing dispossession are Adivasis (tribal people), and around 25% are Dalits--groups who already suffer tremendous stereotyping and censorship from mainstream forces invading their land and communities. While village women in India are often represented in the media as "ignorant", "illiterate", and "downtrodden", this paper argues that NGO-sponsored representations are often complicit in negative portrayals that depict them as in need of, or benefiting unreservedly from, "self-help groups", which are promoted by the mining companies themselves as a way of justifying and "greenwashing" their actions. Further, the paper shows how village women are highly conscious and articulate, yet their actual voices are widely suppressed.