Disowning Dependence

Single Women's Collective Struggle for Independence and Land Rights in Northwestern India

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3946794
AutoresKim Berry (autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen98
Número1
Páginas136-152
Fecha de publicación2011-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/fr.2011.7
OpenAlexW1984218769
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas14

In April 2008 over 2,600 single women marched for three days to Shimla, the state capital of the northwestern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, to demand rights to land, health care and ration cards for single women. The march was organized by a new social movement called Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, comprising divorced, abandoned, never-married women, widows and wives fleeing domestic violence who are demanding rights from the state in their own names (rather than as wives, daughters or mothers); in so doing they are directly challenging the construct of the 'dependent woman' naturalized in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial discourses. The most radical of the demands of this new social movement is the struggle for land rights and the creation of new women-centred family formations. Through an analysis of their collective demands, I argue that the normative, dependent woman is mutually constituted not only at the intersections of gender, kinship and heterosexuality, but also spatially, through denial of rights to land. As single women disown their dependence upon husbands/fathers/brothers and demand land rights, they simultaneously re-imagine gendered selves by envisioning new marital families and re-working the division of labour

Colonialism · Denial · Feminism · Geography · Kinship · Land tenure · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law · Psychology · South Asian Studies and Conflicts