Sumi Madhok

Agency, injury, and transgressive politics in neoliberal times

Through an analysis of agency and risk, this article argues that an outcome-driven agenda of neoliberal developmentalism treats women’s agency as an instrument of social change without giving sufficient attention to existing power relations in which agential capacities are formulated and exercised, and in which risk is negotiated and managed. Analyzing the Women’s Development Programme in Rajasthan, India, we argue that an individualized development logic continues to disregard the injuries to those it mobilizes; we suggest that this trend needs to be challenged in order to support sustainable participation.

Autonomy, gendered subordination and transcultural dialogue

This paper is a theoretical and empirical investigation into whether persons in subordinate social contexts possess agency and if they do, how do we recognise and recover their agency given the oppressive conditions of their lives. It aims to achieve this through forging closer links between the philosophical arguments and the ethnographic evidence of womens agency. Through such an exercise, this paper hopes to bridge the existing gap between feminist theoretical interventions and feminist politics as well as to increase ‘sociological awareness’ within feminist philosophical arguments. In order to think about womens agency in oppressive social contexts, the paper evaluates the suitability of existing theoretical frameworks for examining, describing and capturing the autonomy of persons and concludes that a new and a more complex thinking is required to facilitate thinking about human agency within oppressive transcultural contexts. The social context of subordination, the exhibition of agency within and oppressive context and the application of the new theoretical framework is illustrated in an extensive empirical study of the contact with modernity and its accompanying ideas of autonomy and individual rights of rural women belonging to two districts in Rajasthan, North western India.

Action, Agency, Coercion: Reformatting Agency for Oppressive Contexts

I begin with a question and three clarifications. How to think of agency in oppressive contexts? By oppressive contexts, I mean the following: the absence of background conditions of negative freedom and contexts where the negative consequence of socially transgressive behaviour is uncommonly high. In aligning agency and oppression, I concernmyself with the processes of subjectivation – of the discourse and practices through which individuals are turned into subjects, of how ‘agency is implicated in subordination’;1 with the banality of oppressive practices, including violence, intimidation, and injury, which render these subjectivating processes fragile, precarious, and conflictual; and finally, with how persons might undertake agentival activity in a manifestly oppressive context. Consequently, this chapter is concerned with two interrelated threads of discussion: the first sets out certain modifications in our conceptual thinking on agency and argues that this is essential if we are to seriously think about agentival practices under conditions of severe oppression, and the second focuses on a specific empirical context in order to provide illustrations in support of the suggested modifications. This empirical context – that of developmentalism in North West India – is explicitly engaged in producing a particular ‘development subject’ and in facilitating the emergence of certain forms of subjectivities amenable to ‘development’.

Vernacular rights cultures and the 'Right to Have Rights'

We use a case study of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and the Via Campesina network of which they are part to develop the concept of ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Vernacular rights cultures calls attention to the way in which demands for the right to have rights call on particular cultures, histories and political contexts in a manner that can transform the rights inscribed in constitutions and political imaginaries. What Ranciere (1999) and Balibar (2002) call the democratisation of democracy, we therefore argue, does not just involve a logic of equality and inclusion through which dispossessed groups demand already existing rights. Rather, it also occurs as mobilisations alter the means through which rights are delivered and transform the content and meaning of the rights demanded.

On reproductive justice: ‘domestic violence’, rights and the law in India

In this paper we draw attention to the difficulty of accessing reproductive rights in the absence of effective state and legal guarantees for gender equity and citizenship, and argue that if reproductive rights are to be meaningful interventions on the ground, they must be reframed in terms of reproductive justice. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Rajasthan, Northwest India, we track two dynamic legal aid interventions on reproductive health rights in India, concerned with domestic violence and maternal mortality respectively, that have sought to fill this existing gap between ineffective state policies and the rhetoric on reproductive rights. Through an analysis of these interventions, we propose that requirements of reproductive justice cannot be met through discrete or private, albeit creative legal initiatives, pursued by individuals or civil society organisations but must involve comprehensive policies as well as strategies and alliances between state, non-state, transnational organisations and progressive political groups.

Coloniality, political subjectivation and the gendered politics of protest in a ‘state of exception’

abstractIn this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception.

On vernacular rights cultures and the political imaginaries of haq

Abstract: In this article, I track the deployment of rights in the vernacular across different subaltern citizen mobilizations in Southern Asia. In order to conceptually capture the ethical dynamism, ideational energy and intellectual innovativeness of this language of rights, I argue that we need yet more complex and different kinds of thinking. I propose the framework of vernacular rights cultures to theorise and empirically document rights politics in ‘most of the world’. Studying vernacular rights cultures, I argue in this article, involves documenting and analyzing the literal and conceptual languages of rights/human rights and the political imaginaries these embody while also paying attention to the justificatory premises that animate and activate the stakes and struggles of rights mobilizations.