Content area
Full Text
BEYOND PUBLIC SPACES AND PRIVATE SPHERES: GENDER, FAMILY, AND WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN INDIA
LEELA FERNANDES
Discourses on the family, appropriate roles of women, and the politics of sexuality remain central to the making of labor politics in the industrial arena in contemporary India. A study of everyday politics in the jute mills 1 in Calcutta provides a striking example of the ways in which such gendered ideologies and practices transform working-class politics into a masculine terrain, one which rests on the marginalization of women workers. For instance, the masculinization of space in the jute factory and in the workers' communities 2 results in the construction of single, working-class women as a social and sexual threat to the community; or, for example, family ties represent the primary means of gaining employment through a system of recruitment called the khandani, or family, system in which the son or male relative of a worker inherits his job when the worker retires or dies. 3 What forms of politics produce such hegemonic masculinized spaces at the local level in the jute factories? What mechanisms of exclusion and hierarchy constrain women workers who continue to work or attempt to gain work in such male-dominated industries? I will address these questions through an analysis of the ways in which the daily social practices of workers result in the production of an exclusionary realm of public activity.
The construction of the workers' public sphere in the jute mills represents a culturally specific and gendered political space that exists alongside the bourgeois public sphere and constitutes an arena where "members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs." 4 The jute workers' public activity is shaped by the particular sociospatial continuum between workplace and residence in the jute factories in which there is no geographical separation between the work and home similar to the U.S. company towns and mill villages. 5 Management also qualifies this spatial continuum between work and home by attempting to incorporate the workers' residences within its sphere of authority. Workers therefore engage in a continual battle to transform their communities into what Sara Evans and Harry Boyte have called "free spaces," 6 which can escape from and exist in...