Single female tenants in South Delhi – gender, class and morality in a globalizing city

‘Sir, it was my right of way!’ Examining cultural change and the contested entitlements of automobility

“…The limitations noted by Lakshmi illustrate a social context within Delhi's landscape of power that has privileged men's mobility and access to public space. This context underpins descriptions of the city as 'difficult' for women (Bernroider 2018;Butcher 2018;Amrute 2015). While several in this study noted positive changes, such as increased mobility, no longer being an oddity to be a woman driving alone in Delhi, and that added security has come with having more women on the road, simultaneously there is the stickiness of extant cultural norms.…”

“…Her death sparked nationwide campaigns to address violence against women. ix There is ongoing campaigning to gain unconditional access to public space for women in India, including new forms of protest driven by a generation of young, urban middle class activists (Bernroider 2018). x See, for example, Safetipin and the Manas Foundation; http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-rickshawdrivers-take-message-of-respect-for-women-to-delhi-s-streets-2034571]…”

“…Unlike the trends noted above, professional women in Delhi may now be commuting longer distances because of the spatial reorganisation of the city: working in new industries, media and business process outsourcing (BPO), for example, in the satellite cities of NOIDA and Gurugram (Gurgaon). iii It can be difficult for women in Delhi to relocate closer to these workplaces if they prefer to stay in the family home until married, in addition to a reluctance on the part of some landlords to rent to single women (Bernroider 2018). This counters, for example, Cristaldi's (2005) findings in the Italian context that it is mostly women without educational qualifications that live with their families and rely on others to drive them.…”

The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating

“…In India, enclaved leisure spaces, such as walking tracks, gardens, and gyms, support long-restricted leisure practices and invite westernized attire as expressions of a freedom from both the ogling public eye and the surveillant gaze of traditional neighborhoods (Bernroider, 2018;Srivastava, 2014). The contrast between the openness of such enclaves and the restricted female agency experienced in the public city, as in the Saudi case, invites enclaved transit to other privatized public spaces, especially the shopping mall, a defining sphere of feminine middle-class urbanity (Tewari and Bhatia, 2019).…”

Clubbing in the afternoon: Worlding the city as a college-girl in Chennai

“…This paper draws on ethnographic research to examine cultures of afternoon partying among young people in Chennai. Youth in India are at the heart of a post-1990 culture of consumption and leisure in urban spaces in which a popular discourse of gendered 'risk' ambiguously indexes both the danger of sexual violence, and social anxieties about young women transgressing caste and class boundaries (Parikh, 2017;Bernroider, 2018;Chakraborty et al, 2017). The college-going women with whom I conducted fieldwork found their access to the city and its potentials heavily regulated: most prominently by curfews in their student residences that prevented them from going out after six pm.…”