Gendered Narratives of Mobility

Bibliographic Data

ID23036588
AuthorsB Grossman-Thompson (0000-0001-9383-2399, California State University, Long Beach, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume2
Issue4
Pages323-341
Publication date2016-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociology of Development (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2374-538X • E-ISSN: 2374-538X
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/sod.2016.2.4.323
OpenAlexW2557774205
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited37

In the last 30 years women have been making significant inroads into Nepal's public sphere, troubling long-held normative assumptions about women's place in modern Nepal. In this article I examine the discursive strategies that working-class Nepali women employ to justify and legitimate their presence in Nepal's urban public spaces and simultaneously claim an identity as a modern Nepali woman. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of one group of publicly visible women, female trekking guides, I provide a close analysis of how spatial language is leveraged by both state actors and informants to articulate multiple, sometimes conflicting, messages about Nepali women's “place” in contemporary society. In particular, I focus on the use of spatial metaphors, showing how informants use terms such as inside, outside, forward, and backward to locate themselves within narratives of modernity, development, and national progress. I conclude by showing that unlike women in other examples from the global South, who have framed their emergent presence in the public sphere as an extension of a traditionally feminine and domestic role, informants in the present case study appropriate a masculine language of overt publicness and mobility to justify their visibility. In so doing, informants author themselves as agents of modernity rather than objects of the state's development efforts.

Aesthetics · Ethnography · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Modernity · Narrative · Nepali · Normative · Political science · Public sphere · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Migration and Exile Studies · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

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