Taking Action: The Desiring Subjects of Neoliberal Feminism in India

This paper reflects on an emergent brand of feminist activism in India that responds to everyday sexual violence against women in public. I focus specifically on the efforts of middle class women who organize through online media to conduct interventions in urban Indian public spaces. I review these recent feminist interventions and locate them within a historical review of the women’s movement in India to suggest that contemporary feminist organizing embodies and reflects India’s turn to neoliberalism in the 1990s. While neoliberal reforms have been analyzed within the terms of political economy, this paper extends existing research to consider how neoliberal subjectivities shape a new feminism. The contemporary feminist interventions under review draw from individual testimonials to form the basis for activism, affirm the agency of participants to transform their urban environments, and foreground desire and consumption as central gendered rights. In sum, this feminism shifts its attention from legal redress and state intervention to cultivate entrepreneurial activists who adopt responsibility for their experiences of urban space as agentive actors

Book review: Accidental feminism: gender parity and selective mobility among India’s professional elite by Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen

In Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite, Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen explores the fact that elite law firms in India display unexpected levels of gender parity, showing this to be the result of an ‘accidental feminism’ that has produced seemingly egalitarian outcomes without systematically dismantling oppressive structures. Revealing the infrastructural scaffolding and affective registers through which the accidental works its power, this book is an important contribution to expanding legal and organisational sociology beyond Euro-American contexts in deepening readers’ understanding of professional women’s entry into the workforce in India, writes Hemangini Gupta. Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite. Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen. Princeton University Press. 2021

Postcolonial Assembly Protocols for Unnamed Automation Projects [Special Section]

This creative contribution offers a sardonic manual to navigate the exuberant world of the startup economy in Bangalore, India, once known as a backend site of technological labor. As Bangalore fashions itself to become a “new” StartUp City, this manual continually tacks between the material sites and discourses of these seemingly new practices to bring into focus the persistent and revised forms of inequality that undergird them. Adopting the form of annotated keywords allows the manual to recast the circulating buzzwords of startup capitalism within their larger social and cultural histories. Each index entry expands a site of ethnographic investigation and cultural critique to allow the reader to explore the manual across registers: as a sardonic text, as a movement between words and their histories, and as an introduction to academic work that contextualizes technological experimentation

In Bengaluru’s Gated Communities, New Forms of Civil Engagement are Emerging

By foregrounding the flows of water and waste through the analytics of seepage, smell, and sightings (of flies and buzzards), an ethnography of the gated community suggests an entangled and evolving relationship with its poorer neighbours

The Corporeal Costs of Doing What You Love

When I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the high-technology world of startup capitalism in Bangalore, India, the air was full of possibility. This is India’s “Start Up City,” a vision for the future that is promised by state governments, driven by entrepreneurs and funders, and crafted by local media. In full page advertisements and dedicated supplements, media discourses about a new generation of workers who “do what they love” proliferate. These mediatized expressions of work and affect as interconnected align with global media proclamations about the rise of passionate entrepreneurs (Walter Isaacson 2011Isaacson, Walter. 2011. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster. [Google Scholar]). Yet these mediatized affective realms obscure the material conditions under which such “loving innovations” are produced transnationally. Far from the homes of Silicon Valley multimillionaires are the proliferating spaces (manufacturing factories, startups, offshore offices) and actors (jobbers, workers, entrepreneurs) in the Global South who transform Do What You Love discourses into concrete products and services