Indian Journal of Gender Studies

This article is concerned with a long-standing problem concerning the nature and value of women’s labour in modern India. The first part of the article offers a theoretical overview of the issues involved, arguing for an intersectional framework that would reorient a focus on women through questions of gender, class, caste and sexuality. Issues relating to the prominence of the domestic sphere, stigma and public labour, and the abjection of sex work are brought into this frame. The second part of the article uses the method of exploring women’s life narratives or autobiographies to investigate this problem through the places occupied by labour in a life story, drawing on the writings of Rashsundari Debi, Binodini Dasi, Baby Kamble, Baby Haldar and Nalini Jameela. The third part of the article reflects on the insights gleaned, in particular on the kinds of conflicts that structure women’s relationships in the world of labour and on the further questions this raises for feminist analysis.

Women’s role in biological reproduction is recognised in Indian society over and above their contributions to social reproduction. For ages, dais—traditional midwives—have played important roles in birthing care in India, yet they are subjected to social and economic marginalisation. Contemporary interrogations into the lives of these women reveal their precarious condition. Despite continuing to represent a rich heritage of health care, they now mostly serve those who are yet to benefit from planned development. The current status of the dai has roots in the social history of the institution, which is yet to get adequate attention in research. This article attempts to explore how the images of the dais have been socially constructed in the changing socio-economic, cultural and political contexts of 20th century Bengal.

This article tries in a preliminary manner to establish links between sexual labour, the negotiations of everyday life and the reproduction of social relations. The context for this interrogation is the recent ban in 2005 on dancing in beer bars in the Indian city of Mumbai; the attempts by the state to legitimise its action amidst a range of national and international rhetoric on sexual labour, and the voices of women who were disenfranchised due to the state ban. Women’s interrogation of their role in sexual labour and their struggle for dignity and respect in the domain of work is discussed in the light of the negative discourse weighing against them, while also bringing in historical and contemporary accounts of other forms of ‘stigmatised’ labour. The attempt is to understand how notions of dignity and respectability are intertwined with shifts in gender, caste, class locations and the struggles of social movements. Significant in this discussion are various examples of how women choose to ‘move away’ in their constant search for livelihoods and survival. The article is an attempt to illuminate how an expanded notion of social reproduction could recognise labours of different kinds with the voices of those embodying these labours having a say in how justice and entitlements should devolve.

The micro credit-based development programme working through self-help groups (SHGs) is an initiative whose basic premise is that the empowerment of women can be achieved through economically gainful activities. The lack of access to financial resources is considered to be one of the main reasons for the patriarchal subjection and subjugation of women as well as their low status in family and society. However, empowerment thus achieved or claimed to have been achieved through SHG initiatives may do more to enhancing the bargaining power of women within the existing system of male hegemony, thereby not only acknowledging but also strengthening it—the same unequal, hierarchical, masculine, biased system that SHGs are said to free women from. Using ethnographic field data undertaken in the city of Delhi, the present article examines some of the paradoxes in the practices of micro credit.

This article attempts to lay out the broad discursive space connecting the triad of microfinance, poverty and empowerment. Linking the neoliberal construction of individual agency with the construction of the role of ‘third world’ women in development, it critiques microfinance for a false promise of liberation which is predicated upon a reductionist approach to both poverty and patriarchy. The article argues that microfinance can at best become a coping strategy for poor people, with the onus of survival falling disproportionately on women without necessarily benefiting them in terms of rights and entitlements. However, with insights from primary observations, the article shows that it is possible for organisations to use microfinance as a tool to connect women to larger collectives and processes that are empowering. Such organisational initiatives require the right perspectives rather than huge funds. Thus, subversion of the neoliberal agenda can happen when microfinance is shorn of its larger than life image and used as a strategy in specific contexts.

The process of globalisation has unleashed substantial changes in the employment sector. One of the common features of this process has been discussed through the concept of the ‘feminisation of labour’. In India, most scholars have questioned this thesis given the ongoing low work participation rates among women. In this article two sites of labour—one in the traditional sector and the other in the emerging new labour context—are compared to explain the gendered structures of the new labour paradigm. In the handloom sector, male workers are leaving while women continue to work, whereas the special economic zone emerges with young women-centred jobs. The article argues that at the micro level, especially in the context of Kerala’s male labour history, a variation on the feminisation thesis is relevant. The micro spaces of these women workers must be explored in order to understand labour and its nuances in contemporary Kerala, with possible lessons for other spaces as well.

Women are entering the domain of school teaching in significantly high numbers at this critical moment of the fundamental restructuring of education in contemporary India. Wider structural determinants, ideologies and practices that define and regulate women teachers in the paid workforce as well as within the domestic sphere are historically related and an examination of these is critical to understanding social reproduction within the contemporary context. This article discusses the discursive and material contexts engendered by neoliberal policy reform in the education sector which are shaping and reframing the lives of women school teachers. The article argues for the need to develop a feminist understanding of these shifting realities through deeper engagement with the professional and personal lives of women teachers in relation to broader processes of social reproduction.

Vijayalakshmi Balakrishnan, Growing Up and Away—Narratives of Indian Childhoods, Memory, History, Identity. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. 240 pages. ₹ 695.

Devaki Nilayamgode, Antharjanam: Memoirs of a Namboodiri Woman, translated by Indira Menon and Radhika P. Menon. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. 204 pages. $19.95 (Paperback).

Book Review: Peter Robb, Sentiment and Self, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, February 2013, 20(1), 161–164, doi: 10.1177/0971521512466004