Raka Ray

Untidy gender : domestic service in Turkey

Acknowledgments 1. The View from Downstairs 2. Husbands, Households, and Other Determinants of Womens Work 3. Neither Maids Nor Cleaners 4. Intimate Weapons of the Weak 5. The Domestic Work of Maids, Mothers, and Men 6. Earning Power and Womens Prerogative 7. Conclusion Appendix: Sampling Procedures Notes References Index

Women's Movements and Political Fields: A Comparison of Two Indian Cities

This paper reconceptualizes the political environment within which a social movement organization operates by offering the concept of political fields, arguing that the actions, rhetoric, and effectiveness of organizations are best understood within the context of the fields within which they are situated. By examining the issue of violence against women in two different fields within the same country, India, it suggests that the structure of the field and an organizations position within it 1) shape the discourse and practice of SMOs; 2) mediate the effects of organization type (politically affiliated or autonomous); and 3) determine whether or not organizations within the same movement (and field) converge or differentiate. The data for this paper comes from fieldwork conducted between 1990 and 1994, as well as newspaper accounts, and movement archives.

Grappling with Modernity India’s Respectable Classes and the Culture of Domestic Servitude

This article explores the culture of servitude of Kolkata’s (formerly Calcutta) respectable classes against the backdrop of their project of modernity. In societies with long and unbroken histories of domestic servitude such as India, the institution is central to understanding self and society. The relations of paid domestic work are intimately tied to the self-conscious evolution of a modern Indian elite. We highlight three premises with origins in pre-independence Kolkata which continue to shape its culture of servitude today: first, servants are essential to a well-run and well-kept household; second, servants are ‘part of the family’ and bound to it by ties of affection, loyalty, and dependence; and third, servants comprise a category with distinctive lifestyles, desires and habits. Yet at the close of the 20th century, this culture of servitude is no longer hegemonic. The first premise sits uncomfortably with contemporary notions of privacy and ideologies of the nuclear family, especially in the more confined space of the apartment. The second is complicated by the entrance of capitalist and corporate discourses about employers and employees. The third is challenged daily in a political culture where democratizing discourses circulate in both state and civil society.

Male Servants and the Failure of Patriarchy in Kolkata (Calcutta)

This article considers questions of patriarchy, masculinity, and male servants in Kolkata’s culture of servitude. Through narratives of men servants and women servants, the ‘‘failure of patriarchy’’ is analyzed, set against hegemonic patriarchal ideologies and hierarchies. Contextualization for these narratives was provided by extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Kolkata, including a survey of 500 middle-class households. When women servants narrate their lives, it is inevitably the failure of patriarchs—fathers, husbands, and brothers—to perform their prescribed familial and social functions and duties that has led to their unfortunate circumstances. Thus, women servants end up taking on ‘‘patriarchal’’ responsibilities of supporting their households. Simultaneously, men servants express with resignation their own as well as their fathers’, and often their sons’, inability to properly make a living. Indeed, male servants think of themselves as failed patriarchs, dependent on stigmatized work to make a living, and feel doubly diminished. Finally, we examine how some male servants have reconfigured the patriarchy of servants through a reevaluation of the terms of work, status, and dependency.

Connell and Postcolonial Sociology

Abstract This essay argues that Southern Theory kick-started a conversation long overdue in sociology about the colonial bounds of the sociological canon and its implications. It makes the case that Southern Theory can be used as a jump-off point to reflect on what the contours of a postcolonial sociology might look like since it argues that postcolonial difference can be used to extend theory, point to earlier theoretical misrecognitions, and to illuminate hitherto unseen logics of social organization by shifting the center.

“The middle class”: Sociological category or proper noun?

Questions about the role and composition of the middle class have been examined and debated in the academy and in the political sphere for more than 100 years. In analyses of the Indian middle class specifically, two questions, both addressed by Diane Davis, seem to excite the most attention. The first has to do with the definition of a middle class, a term that has its origins in a very different social formation as well as its potentially mediating function in democracy. The second and more recent question has to do with what is variously called the “new” or “emerging” middle classes – in short, the middle classes of a liberalizing India.

Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community

can society. On the other hand, she raises the intriguing issue of how adoptees themselves are now changing the processes of adoption— by refusing to let the world know ‘‘how they turned out’’ while struggling with multiple issues. In particular, however, she chafes over the celebrity and ‘‘overly privileged people’’ who believe their adoption of children is more noble than others. The facilitators do little to help prospective parents understand the issues their adoptees will experience in American society and the multiple ways in which their son or daughter will be marginalized. Brian is concerned about the rescuer mentality of adoption. This emphasis misses the focus of many families that want to adopt because they cannot have their own birth children or want to expand families. It also misses the effects of the decrease in average childbearing that result from later ages of marriage, the increase in career women and older age, and so on. She does mention the rise of women becoming more career-oriented and deferral of child-bearing, the availability of abortion, acceptance of single parenting, later births leading to a deficit of same-race white babies available for adoption, leading to the ‘‘baby urgency’’ that couples feel as they age without being able to have birth children. Brian is particularly good at exposing the racial hierarchy in the adoption services and adoptive families. She also portrays the historical racism in adoption, the ‘‘mythical, morally pure white mother.’’ At the same time Native American families were viewed as inferior because the extended family provided care, and black women were prevented from using the adoption system to hide outof-wedlock pregnancies which were then condemned. Clearly, women and men of privilege are able to adopt more readily and the ‘‘professional gatekeepers’’ or adoption facilitators become the key knowledge providers about international adoption which includes false notions about both the United States as epitomizing racial tolerance and the stories of successful and easy adoption. While Brian underemphasizes the demographic factors that push U.S. families to adopt, she is particularly good at describing the efforts made in Korea to keep children there. Her argument is that the adoption of Korean babies allows the facilitators and adopters to be race evasive. Sexism also pervades the adoption of females out of Korea and China. They are part of what Brian refers to as the ‘‘racialized hierarchy endemic to American society.’’ The racism prevalent in the adoption system is symbolized by the ‘‘acceptable’’ model minorities. (Sixty-three percent of all Asian children in the 2000 United States census were female women, reflecting the disproportionate number of Korean and Chinese females who have been adopted by Americans.) The racial hierarchy easily rationalizes the adoption of Korean children as ‘‘honorary whites,’’ and as more likely to be gifted in music or math. In sum, Brian’s book provides an excellent critique of the hidden racism in American adoptions.

Feminism and the History of the Indian Nation

Perhaps the single most important history of the womens movement in India, Radha Kumars The History of Doing is comprehensive, descriptive, and analytical. Kumar takes the reader from the first attempts to include women in the nationalist agitation against colonialism to 1990 when, after decades of struggle, the feminist movement stands embattled as right wing politics begin to claim center stage, using many of the tools developed by the feminist movement. The History of Doing works successfully at two levels. First, it illuminates the depth and variation in womens resistance in India since the

Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women's Activism in India.@@@Toward Empowerment: Women and Movement Politics in India.

Drawing on case studies of the Communist Party of India in West Bengal and Shramik Sangathana in Maharashtra, this work examines Indian womens political activism. Investigating institutional changes at the state level and protest at the village level, Amrita Basu traces the paths of two kinds of political activism among these women. With insights gleaned from extensive interviews with activists, government officials, and ordinary men and women, she finds that militancy has been fueled by pronounced sexual class cleavages combined with potentially rancorous ethnic division.