Scooty girls are safe girls: risk, respectability and brand assemblages in urban India

Abstract

Advancing an emergent scholarship on brands as having spatial and scalar effects, this paper examines the brand as an assemblage. In doing so, it focuses on youth engagement with the brandedness of motorbikes in the South Indian city of Chennai to examine in particular how brand assemblages shape gendered engagements with risk in Indian cities. Scooters and Motorbikes are important markers of 'youth' and middle classness in urban South Asia, representing freedom, mobility and fun. The Scooter has further been celebrated for putting women -literally and otherwise -in the driver's seat: creating the possibility for transgression and rebellion. This article complicates this narrative, by positioning scooters and motorbikes instead as sites upon which 'respectable' femininities are calibrated and articulated through young women's engagement with brands. In doing so, it unpacks the ways in which brand assemblages enliven the agency of commodities and participate in the disciplinary processes that shape gendered urban geographies of risk and respectability.

Risk

“…For her, violence in public is not a real deterrent but the knowledge of this violence to her family could be. This paradox of risk and fear concurs with Krishnan's (2020) argument of risk as a transaction between publicness and secrecy, which denotes women not as passive inhabitants of the city but as agentive risk‐taking actors through strategic complicity to patriarchal orders. The strategic complicities are veiled by inverting the morality rhetoric espoused by patriarchy.…”

Carceral domesticities and the geopolitics of Love Jihad

“…Parents and families, educational authorities, and even judicial processes frequently seek to ‘protect’ young women from their own desires – imagined to be wrongly oriented (Ahmed, 2006) – by immobilising them within the home, or in the home-like spaces of hostels, where it is imagined that they will change their minds and reorient themselves towards liveable futures that are commensurate with national and neoliberal projects (Krishnan, 2019; V. Patel, 2017). For young women who belong to communities that are seeking to establish themselves as respectable, these pressures are often heightened (Krishnan, 2022; Twamley and Sidharth, 2019).…”

“…Patel, 2017). For young women who belong to communities that are seeking to establish themselves as respectable, these pressures are often heightened (Krishnan, 2022;Twamley and Sidharth, 2019).…”