[Séminaire général du CEE] Attachment and Estrangement: Women’s Embodied Placemaking in Urban Banaras

Banaras, contemporarily known as Varanasi, has a strong identity within the South Asian landscape for its religious, mystical, and ancient characteristics. Recently, it has been further politicized by the right-wing Hindu political party, Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), and the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who is using the city as his electoral constituency. Modi’s agenda of development premised on the smart city rhetoric underpinned by divisive politics has marginalized women as belongers to the city and reproduced them as mere carriers of religion, traditions, feminine norms, and duties.    

The talk presents women’s everyday worlds by examining women’s embodied and lived experiences through their relationships with urban spaces in the unique city of Banaras. Through ethnographic anecdotes, I discuss women’s attachment and estrangement with city spaces through the phenomenon of embodied placemaking. I use Dalmandi, an everyday bazaar, as a case study as it represents the transition of an urban space from a redlight district to a market by situationally excluding women as its legitimate residents. Tracing the history and contemporary image of Dalmandi, I examine how women have reconfigured their relationship with this particular space and the city in general.

The study demonstrates intersectional embodied placemaking by women while repurposing debates on the fallacies of public/private, un/safe, and dis/reputable, among other patriarchally imposed binaries. The talk takes the audience to streets, temples, and bazaars in this extraordinarily timeless, sacred, and antique city to demonstrate how estrangement and attachment materialize for women in urban spaces. 

Speaker:

Shivani Gupta, National University of Singapore & Visiting Faculty, Sciences Po, CEE

Shivani Gupta is an anthropologist interested in examining how everyday gendered experiences in urban settings are articulated and negotiated by gender minorities through precepts of violence, surveillance, mobilities, fear, morality, and honor rooted in social structures. They use ethnographic, feminist, and phenomenological approaches to investigate social issues related to gender, sexuality, violence, urbanism, spatiality, subversions, everyday life, and pedagogy.

She received a PhD from the Department of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, following an MA from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai, India) and a BA (Honours) in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University (India).

Before joining NUS College as a lecturer, they were a postdoctoral fellow at the Communications and New Media department at NUS, working on a project that investigated campus sexual violence (including technology-facilitated violence) in Singapore.

At NUSC, Shivani Gupta runs one of the impact experience programmes called "Gender Matters Everyday." In this programme, they supervise students in service and experiential learning projects focused on issues of gender and sexuality in Singapore.

To find out more: read our interview with Shivani Gupta

Chair: 

Bruno Cousin, Sciences Po, CEE

Discussant:

Federico Varese, Sciences Po, CEE