Gowri Vijayakumar

“I’ll Be Like Water” Gender, Class, and Flexible Aspirations at the Edge of India’s Knowledge Economy

This article examines the ways in which ideologies of aspiration, inclusion, and women’s empowerment associated with India’s globalizing knowledge economy are re-framed by young women workers in a small-town business-process outsourcing (BPO) center two hours outside of Bangalore. Drawing on forty in-depth interviews, I show that, in contrast to their managers’ expectations of individualized work aspirations, women workers draw on both individualistic and domestically embedded articulations of the future in a formulation I call “flexible aspirations.” In articulating flexible aspirations, they draw both on the gendered language of neoliberal self-improvement for the global economy and on the nationalist ideal of rural middle-class feminine domesticity. While insisting that the future is uncertain, young women use flexible aspirations as a symbolic resource to distinguish themselves from both old-fashioned village housewives and promiscuous urban call center girls. I briefly compare these flexible aspirations to young men workers’ strategic articulations of aspiration, which, rather than relinquishing hopes to an unpredictable future, adjust plans to fit known social limitations. This article, drawing on feminist interpretations of Bourdieu, extends the literature on the Indian middle classes by analyzing young women’s aspirations in non-elite social locations. It builds on this feminist scholarship by highlighting ways in which young women use articulations of flexible aspiration as a mode of gendered class distinction.

Unionizing Sex Workers: The Karnataka Experience

Abstract Studies that capture sex workers’ experiences, as activists in collectives and unions, are scarce. In India, the Karnataka Sex Workers’ Union (KSWU) materialized as a direct response to the violation of sex workers’ rights. The goal of this qualitative study was to review KSWU’s journey through the years. Forty-eight respondents participated in eight focus group discussions. Findings revealed the complexity of addressing the disparate needs of the heterogeneous group of sex workers in Karnataka. KSWU’s experiences suggest the potential for hybrid models of organizing that integrate activism with service provision.

Book review: The identity dilemma: Social movements and collective identityMcGarryAidanJasperJames M, The identity dilemma: Social movements and collective identity, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, PA, 2015; 238 pp. ISBN: 9781439912522,

policy in the months of preparations for the event. It might have been worthwhile to also discuss the status relations among the forum’s waste management personnel, in keeping with the themes of other chapters which analyze survey data to understand the patterns and cleavages common to Senegalese participants and perhaps to Global South participants, in general. Myriad other issues might have been taken up in additional ethnographic chapters. The book concludes by saying that ‘explaining the pragmatic paradoxes in which activists are caught can give them an opportunity to appropriate this knowledge and de-dramatize what is so often the basis for conflicts between them’ (p. 219). This is indeed true, but one lacks the sense of how this specific research project is being made, or could be made, accessible to WSF organizers and participants in some useful form. This brings up the methodological question of the researchers’ responsibility to their respondents. It can be instructive to learn whether WSF organizers gave consent to having this team of academics formally study the Dakar forum and its participants or whether consent was only sought from individuals who filled out the questionnaire. Reciprocity is particularly important in social movement research where Northern academics study activist events in the Global South. It would be good to see some discussion, perhaps in the appendix, of which steps are being taken to help activists gain use of the knowledge in this volume. This book is ultimately very beneficial and practical for reflecting on how the division of labor in social movements is shaped by larger material and intellectual conditions. Issues such as the training of activists, the salience of some issues over others to participants, the staging of conferences, and the differential access of organizations to resources and scripts are as much products of the ‘development industry’ as they are of previous WSF experiences, world politics, and the deeply stratified structure of the world-system. In a world where we are often told by dominant institutions (and by some scholars) that global technology and culture are quickly diminishing anachronistic rivalries and provincialisms, this book studies a transitory international activist space in which participants are mutually engaged in constructing a more inclusive and more equal world. It does so not through a bird’s eye view and sweeping generalizations about borderless civil society but precisely by paying attention to place and space through a variety of methodological techniques. This ends up giving readers a better appreciation for the specific kinds of ‘local’ effects that can emerge in any concrete situation of transnational social movement organizing.

29.95 (paperback).

While the legal categorisation of sex work as work has been the subject of on-going debate, there has been little focus on the differential experiences of female, male and transgender sex workers in pursuing sex work to earn their livelihoods. This chapter focuses on the working lives of three groups that rely on sex work as the mainstay for survival: women, men, and transgender women in sex work. We explore the differences and similarities in the pathways to sex work for these three groups, as well their experiences of violence and social stigma and access to social entitlements. Broadening the focus beyond women sex workers, we demonstrate how thinking of sex work as work provides a useful framework for bringing these groups together on a common platform, through a discussion of the Karnataka Sex Workers’ Union.