Whose city? Intersections of gender, class, and (il)legitimate belonging in Delhi's Jhuggi Jhopris
"In the constantly transforming space of India's capital, belonging and rights to the city are continually contested at intersections of class and gender. Following India's economic 'liberalization' in the early 1990s, there has been a growing push among the country's business and elite classes to transform big cities such as Delhi and Mumbai into 'global cities,' complete with high-rise buildings, multiplexes, and massive highways. This trend has reinvigorated already embedded popular discourses and government policies that characterize the makeshift and unauthorized housing structures of the urban poor as problems to be solved, primarily through their demolition and the removal of their residents to peripheries of the city. This is in stark contrast to many lavish elite neighborhoods, also built illegally and utilizing public resources, which do not face similar concerns of demolition and removal. Instead, spatial precariousness remains largely a dilemma of the poor. Simultaneously, scholars have noted that the 'outside' or 'public' of Indian cities remain spaces to be consumed and enjoyed by distinctly masculine bodies (Hansen 2001; Lukose 2009). In contrast, women in urban public spaces must often move in primarily circumscribed ways. What's more, Delhi has had a growing reputation as a city that is particularly unsafe for women and is popularly referred to as India's 'rape capital.' Indeed, following a widely publicized gang rape in 2012, there has been an increasing emphasis placed on women's safety, and more generally on 'women's empowerment,' by city residents, social activists, and politicians alike. Yet, public discourses of women's empowerment tend to rely heavily on narratives and experiences of middleclass women, failing to address the experiences and ongoing struggles of poor women living in slums. Meanwhile, slum resident women must constantly negotiate their rights to both public and private spaces of the city as they balance movement between the instability of their 'illegal' homes and the 'masculine' public spaces. This dissertation aims to examine the intersectional marginalization (Crenshaw 1991) of poor women in Delhi as they navigate an urban space that is hostile to both female and impoverished persons but seldom provides modes of organized resistance that holistically or effectively incorporate both of these identities."--Pages ii-iii.
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- In Collections
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Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Copyright Status
- In Copyright
- Material Type
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Theses
- Authors
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Glegziabher, Meskerem Zikru
- Thesis Advisors
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Drexler, Elizabeth F.
- Committee Members
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Ferguson, Anne
Hourani, Najib
Zitzewitz, Karin
- Date
- 2016
- Subjects
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Social conditions
Slums
Public spaces
Poor women
Marginality, Social
Intersectionality (Sociology)
Scheduled tribes in India--Social conditions
India--Delhi
- Program of Study
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Anthropology - Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree Level
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Doctoral
- Language
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English
- Pages
- xvi, 249 pages
- ISBN
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9781369425239
1369425236
- Permalink
- https://doi.org/doi:10.25335/p7h9-7d17