Asia brown bag lecture: Atreyee Sen

NIAS and ADI invite you to a brown bag lecture by Atreyee Sen from the Department of Anthropology. 

'My wife carries a knife!’: Right-wing female militancy and castration/ wounding/masculine anxieties in a Mumbai slum

This paper will discuss some sexual, affective and bodily anxieties exhibited by poor men, as a response to a rhetoric of female militarization that emerged in a Hindu nationalist slum in Mumbai, the commercial capital of western India.

Between 2012-2014, several Indian political parties across ideological and regional divides, mobilized women leaders and cadres into public demonstrations in the metropolises. Women’s angry protests were an expression of collective outrage against a series of brutal gang rapes in Delhi and Mumbai, which later came to be known internationally as the ‘India Rape Crisis’. The Shiv Sena, a prominent Hindu nationalist political party with a primary membership in the slums of Mumbai, began to ceremoniously distribute specially designed, Chinese retractable blades to lower middle class and slum women. The party instigated poor women workers to carry knives on them, and use these blades as ‘self-defense’ against sexual predators who use the public transport system and the streets of Mumbai as their urban hunting ground. Even though the Shiv Sena leaders suggested that the knife carriers refrain from using weapons in cases of domestic violence, I argue that the celebration of women as urban warriors, the symbolic salutation of knives and chilli powder as weapons, and the resourcefulness of the kitchen as an armoury, this (a) created apprehensions about male wounding and castration during inter-personal conflict; and (b) enhanced everyday tensions about the emasculation of poor men (brought about by shifting gender identities in domestic spaces, income generation, labour markets, sexual practices, marital and communal violence, etc) in contemporary Indian slums.  The paper makes a contribution towards the anthropology of urban conflict by highlighting the ways in which passing political gimmicks and spectacles of political haggling in the city can engender male fragility and female aggression, and eventually impact quotidian gender relations in peripheral urban settlements.

Time: 10 February 2016, 12:00-13:00
Place: NIAS, CSS, room 18.1.08

Feel free to bring your own lunch. There will be coffee/tea.