Abstract
The socio-economic, political, historical and culturally inflected meanings of various forms of labour have wide repercussions for the status of women engaged in both paid and unpaid forms of work. This volume provides an inter-disciplinary and intersectional analysis to explore the multiple crises surrounding women’s labour in a ‘bewildering variety of incommensurable labouring contexts’ (p. xxxv). Its methodological rigour lies in its capacity to question generic frames that analyse the relationship between women, work and employment; and draw upon both quantitative data and extensive qualitative fieldwork through multi-sited ethnography to provide a more reflexive account of the dynamics of the labouring lives of women. Svati Shah’s suggestion to go beyond mere interlocution reminds us of an exceptional work by the renowned social anthropologist, Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009), which advocated for multi-sensuality of ethnographic experience and practice.
The nineteen chapters in this volume explicate the gap between discursive orientation or public perception and empirical reality, lapses in statistical documentation including definitional issues and modes of classification, that nonetheless unproductively compartmentalised writings on women’s labour. Mary E. John carefully invokes Kalyan Sanyal to analyse how capitalist and non-capitalist forms of production co-constitute each other. Thus, instead of a holistic understanding, this volume provides sociological and analytical lens to gauge the dynamic impact of historical trajectory, hegemonic ideologies, regional diversity, patriarchal household, hetero-patriarchy, political economy, neo-liberal policies, capitalist patriarchy, State intervention, education and poverty on the meanings attached to various forms of labour. It also encapsulates the differential experiences of labouring women, that is in turn structured at the intersection of multiple identities like gender, class, disability, caste hierarchies, power relationships and sexuality.
Social and cultural valuation of forms of work operate in tandem with structural inequalities in a deeply segmented society to situate the socio-political dehumanisation and economic marginalisation of differently situated women. Such dehumanisation is exacerbated by the dubious role of the State and civil society compounded by the under-representation of women in organisations that were intended to assert their agency against institutional mechanisms regulating labour practises. The ambivalence of the State is further explicated through its nexus with capitalist structures and other vested interests, who, in its propagation of the dominant script of development, have ruptured social relations not only among/within communities, but also between communities and the natural environment. In an intensely saturated, segmented, competitive, and individualised labour market, women’s agency straddles between dominant scripts of legality and illegality while navigating survival strategies.
The essays advocate the significance of ‘partial theory’, where contradictory as well as complementary theoretical frames could together situate the contextual valuation of women’s both paid and unpaid labour; and to reconceptualise the relation between production and reproduction. Differing labouring activities not only unsettle dualisms, but also challenge the discourses that gives rise to dualisms. Moreover, terminological shifts foreground discussion on how ‘femininity’ gets re-defined and assumes differential value in market transactions, through labour migration, domestic work, sex work, care work or surrogacy, positing it against social and global inequalities. Interestingly, the question is less about feminisation of labour force or the increasing invisibility of women. Instead, it is more about the inherent contradictory patterns which define particularities of women’s experiences that requires debunking the ‘victimhood’ status or ‘passivity’ of women. Consequently, these ‘differences’ can be both empowering as well as marginalising.
The authors have significantly concentrated on how ‘bodies’ get defined by the kind of work one engages in. For instance, Geeta Thatra’s essay provides a lucid illustration of how specific forms of labour have implications for the insidious process of ‘othering’, spatial reconfiguration, social exclusion and differential perception of ‘music’ or performing arts. This stems from the ambivalence associated with the Brahmanical, hegemonic, social and discursive construction of ‘respectability’, thus, creating a sexual hierarchy among women’s bodies, and situating these bodies as sites of both possibility and vulnerability. Renu Addlakha situates a different kind of hierarchy between abled-bodies and disabled bodies, wherein disabled bodies straddle between forms of exclusion and inclusion, due to social discrimination and bias in job requirements. Furthermore, stigma induced by the idea of ‘indignity’ of labour not only affects sociality, health, spatial and moral abjection, but also culminates in layered violence against labouring women or queer community. Embodied collective resistance abounds, but it always comes at a price. Moreover, the collective is also dissected by intersectional identities. The language of resistance also varies from overt confrontation to developing coping mechanisms in order to provide counter-narratives to dominant gendered discourses.
Though this edited volume is quite expansive and is a timely intervention to ignite our critical minds, it would have been more nuanced if it could advocate ways to conceptualise the relationship between women’s unpaid domestic labour and the economy, acknowledging that this unpaid labour subsidises the government and private sector employment by shouldering disproportionately greater share of unpaid domestic services. Nonetheless, this volume is a must read across disciplines since it captures the ‘lived experiences’ of women who lie at an intersection of cross-cutting identities and structural frameworks. It instils a kind of responsibility and prompts readers to question vulgarised social constructions that under-recognise or unrecognise certain forms of labour. It succinctly encapsulates not only how identities affect labouring lives of women, but also how identities are formed through differential valuation placed on paid and unpaid forms of work. It advocates the need to dissociate labour from community-based identities to counter stereotypes. It suggests the need to replace a priori assumption with critical interrogation of existing discursive and non-discursive practices to analyse their diverse impact on labour market outcomes for differentially situated women, and the precarity that structures their lives. Finally, it posits that change is multi-directional. Hence, instead of a linear analysis on whether certain identities are waxing or waning, efforts should be geared towards exploring the myriad articulations and enforcement of these identities in women’s worlds of labour.