06 | Beyond Domesticity. Shifting Sites of Women's Labour in Modern India
Combining historical and anthropological methodologies, the panel explores transformations of women’s labor in modern India (19th-21st centuries). It looks at paid and unpaid labor, explores sites of women’s labor, and the ways in which women negotiate employment, care-work, and family life.
Convenors:
· Nikolay Kamenov Graduate Institute Geneva (Geneva, Switzerland)
· Supurna Banerjee Institute for Development Studies Kolkata (Kolkata, India)
Timeslots:
· 07/27 | 11:00-12:30 UTC+2/CEST
· 07/28 | 09:00-10:30 UTC+2/CEST
Long Abstract
From the 1970s, feminist scholars emphasized the relevance of housewives’ ‘invisible’ domestic labor for social reproduction. More recent studies showed that households are also sites of paid domestic labor, and recipients remunerated services by outsiders. Already in the 19th century, teaching, nursing, and medicine emerged as fields of women’s professionalism. Women constituted an important part of the emerging industrial labor force. The panel builds on three research fields to explore the changes and complexities of women’s labor in India: first, labor history, and the emerging historiography of domestic servants; second, feminist studies of gender and domesticity; and third, studies of labor migration in the context of economic change. We aim to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange between historical, anthropological, and sociological approaches, and to bridge the gap between gender studies and labor studies.
The panel links social and economic change, industrial transformation, and the emergence of new household forms. It looks at the ways in which women negotiate paid and unpaid labor, affect and intimacy, and move between different sites of labor. Through the lens of social reproduction, it seeks to promote a complex understanding of women’s labor beyond domesticity and draw attention to the multiple ways in which labor was and is organized and (not) remunerated in modern India. Covering different temporalities and regions, the panel promotes a broad view on women’s labor, which includes, but is not limited to: • Paid and unpaid domestic labor • Household-external wage labor • Professional care work • Self-employed labor • Volunteer labor
Presentations
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07/27 | 09:00-09:20 UTC+2/CEST
Intimacy and Militancy: Women Workers in India’s First Steel Plant, Ca. 1908-1958 (Mircea Raianu) -
07/27 | 09:20-09:40 UTC+2/CEST
Labour, Property, and Gender in the Context of the Cooperative Movement in Western India, 1900 to 1950 (Nikolay Kamenov) -
07/27 | 09:40-10:00 UTC+2/CEST
Spiritual Motherhood: ‘Social Work’ and ‘Social Service’ in the Early Twentieth Century Bombay Presidency (Jana Tschurenev) -
07/27 | 10:00-10:20 UTC+2/CEST
Gender-Specific Barriers to Social Protection for Home-Based Women Beedi Workers in India (Priya Singh) -
07/27 | 11:00-11:20 UTC+2/CEST
Expanding the Scope of Women's Work: Narratives of Economic Precarity and Medical Practice in Muhammadi Begham's Urdu Novels (Mohammed Afzal) -
07/27 | 11:20-11:40 UTC+2/CEST
Subverting the ‘Domestic’: A Gendered Analysis of Socio-Cultural Labor of Female Stage Actresses in Colonial Calcutta, 1870-1920 (Twisha Singh) -
07/27 | 11:40-12:00 UTC+2/CEST
Domestic Goddesses and Double Shifts: Bengali Married Women’s negotiation of Professional and Domestic Labour (Sanhita Chatterjee) -
07/27 | 12:00-12:20 UTC+2/CEST
Bleeding Kin: Menstrual Care Work and Women’s Relationships (Sherin Sabu) -
07/28 | 09:00-09:20 UTC+2/CEST
Ayahs and Mehterannies: The Making of Female Domestic Labour in Colonial India (Nitin Varma) -
07/28 | 09:20-09:40 UTC+2/CEST
Between Market and “Home-Cooked” Food: Understanding Contours of Domesticity (Aanchal Dhull) -
07/28 | 09:40-10:00 UTC+2/CEST
Daughters of Domestic Workers: Young Women and Socio-Economic Change in Contemporary India (Asiya Islam)