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Abstract
Contemporary figurations of the ‘the Indian Woman’ over recent years have been heavily influenced by national and international media coverage focused on high profile, gruesome and brutal cases of rape and sexual assault of women in public. The suffering involved in such cases notwithstanding, we argue that investment in such representations runs the risk of limiting our understanding of the varied experiences of female bodies in public life. Most significantly, the bodies of younger girls and how they relate to public life is mostly assumed rather than studied. Drawing on a sub-sample of ethnographies of younger children aged 6–8 living in the city of Hyderabad, India and employing the phenomenological concept of ‘orientation’, the article explores young girls’ everyday embodied orientation towards public life, with an intersectional framework. The paper considers three case studies from different spatial/cultural contexts and the empirical material is organised around the themes of the male gaze in a public space, orienting bodies in a schooled space, and the lived body in a domestic space.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge their colleague Madhavi Latha who assisted the first author with the fieldwork in Hyderabad. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and feedback.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Vinnarasan Aruldoss
Vinnarasan Aruldoss is an Assistant Professor at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS-Pilani), Dubai Campus and a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. Previously, he held research fellowships at University of Sussex and Goldsmiths on the ERC funded Connectors Study. His research interests are in childhood, social policy, early years intervention, social theories and sociology of education.
Sevasti-Melissa Nolas
Sevasti-Melissa Nolas is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research areas include: human agency and lived experience, childhood, youth and family lives, civic and political practices across the life course, and publics creating methodologies. She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded Connectors Study and the co-editor of entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.