ABSTRACT

This volume explores the links between gender, space and agency in India. It offers fresh perspectives and frameworks within which these links can be analyzed across diverse geographical contexts in India. 

The chapters in this volume are based on field studies which showcase how agency is gendered. The volume examines how gender and agency are fashioned by a multitude of everyday contexts, socio-economic processes, policy interventions and geographic phenomenon and manifest in diffusion of education, decentralization of politics, rising social inequalities, poverty, green revolution, mechanization of agriculture and even drought.  

This book will be of interest to researchers, teachers and practitioners of human geography, social and cultural geography, and those interested in geographies of gender. It will also be helpful for policy makers interested in the issues of gender and development in India.

chapter 1|14 pages

Gender, space and agency in India

Exploring regional genderscapes

chapter 2|19 pages

Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic violence

Scripting gender among Assamese middle-class women in higher education

chapter 3|14 pages

The power of social spaces in enabling girls’ education in India

Perspectives from Indian origin students in the US

chapter 6|15 pages

Mahila Panchayats of Delhi

Scripting agency within low-income urban neighbourhoods

chapter 7|14 pages

“It is better to die than to live like this”

Widowhood, economic denial and violence in rural Punjab

chapter 8|14 pages

“This is our area and that is theirs”

Scripting the spatiality of migrant masculinity in Goa, India

chapter 9|13 pages

Watercentric roles and women’s spaces

Narratives from drought-prone villages of Gujarat

chapter 10|12 pages

Numbers, bodies, love and babies

Gender and territory in Ladakh

chapter 11|15 pages

Reinterpreting resistance and agency

Excavating feminist counterspaces within indigenous feminisms