Lecturer: Proshant Chakraborty

Welcome to our lecture on “Gender, structure, and agency.”

Today's PowerPoint slides: gender-structure-agency (pc).pptx

In this session, we will (re)examine and (re)contextualize the ways that gendered relations are shaped by historical and material circumstances, particularly in the organization of public and private spaces. We will begin by looking at a classic text by Peggy Reeves Sanday on female status and the public domain.

The rest of the lecture will focus on one case/context - gender-based violence - drawn from my research with frontline workers and prevention of domestic violence. In particular, we will look at how community norms shape and restrict the mobility of women and girls (gender), which thus produce conditions of violence (structure), as well as ways to negotiate such violences (agency).

Readings:

Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 1974. Female Status in the Public Domain. In Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louis Lamphere, pp. 189–206. Stanford University Press. (Link to PDF).

Chakraborty, Proshant. 2021. “Gendered Violence, Frontline Workers, and Intersections of Space, Care and Agency in Dharavi, India.” Gender, Place and Culture 28 (5): 649–79. https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.ub.gu.se//doi/full/10.1080/0966369X.2020.1739004.

Further readings:

Le Guin, Ursula K. 1986. The Carried Bag Theory of Fiction. The Anarchist Library.