Being single, being ‘wrong’: pain and the remaking of gendered subjectivity in Delhi

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the role of social pain in the unmaking and remaking of urban subjectivities in a context of cultural change. I argue that doubt and uncertainty generated by shifting cultural boundaries underpins a drive to reassert extant social order, including gendered expectations, generating pain in the unmaking of subjectivities for those who are different or ‘other’. In the case of this study, the different are single, middle-aged, women in Delhi, standing outside normative familial structures and forced to answer the question ‘what’s wrong with you?’. However, everyday practices of repair and ‘swallowing’ pain could also work to remake a sense of self. Demonstrating invention as well as the politics of pain in their reclamations of space, these ‘wrong’ women reconfigured subjectivity as a form of cosmopolitanism often defined in opposition to ‘parochial’ others, particularly male migrant workers and cultural nationalists, who are made to lie beyond imagined urbane boundaries. The mirroring of exclusions highlights Elaine Scarry’s work on the incommunicability of pain that results, under conditions of neo-liberal and patriarchal social relations, in both women and working-class men being excluded from city spaces.

Keywords:

• Delhi
• encounter
• gender
• identity
• single
• urban studies

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the women in this study, for their time and insight, and to colleagues Kinneret Lahad, Kalpana Wilson, and the anonymous reviewers, for invaluable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No financial interest or benefit has been gained from the application of this research. There are no conflicts of interest. Ethical approval was received in February 2014, via the Open University Ethics Committee, HREC/2014/1621/Butcher/1. Informed consent was given by all participants in the study, and copies of signed forms kept on file by the principal investigator.

Additional information

Funding

The study was made possible by the AHRC/HERA ‘Cultural Encounters’ Joint Research Programme, grant number 12-HERA-JRP-CE-FP-586 SINGLE (2013–2016, www.hera-single.de).

Notes on contributors

Melissa Butcher

Melissa Butcher is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at Birkbeck, University of London. She uses ethnographic, visual and participatory methodologies to examine questions of identity and belonging within contexts of cultural change and contested urban space. She has been Principle and Co-Investigator on several UKRI, European and ARC funded projects in the USA, London, Delhi, Singapore and Sydney, including: ‘The Trouble with Freedom’ (2022-https://thetroublewithfreedom.wordpress.com/); ‘Learning from Small Cities: Governing Imagined Futures and the Dynamics of Change in India’s Smart Urban Age’ (2018–2021, www.smartsmallcity.com), ‘SINGLE: Entanglements of Urban Space, Cultural Encounters and Gendered Identities in Delhi and Shanghai’ (2013–2016, www.hera-single.de), and ‘Creating Hackney as Home’ (2013–2015, www.hackneyashome.co.uk). Melissa presents and writes regularly on issues relating to cultural diversity, mobility, gentrification, urban and youth cultures, social cohesion, globalisation, and global human resources management.