Scooty girls are safe girls

Risk, respectability and brand assemblages in urban India

Bibliographic Data

ID3977392
AuthorsShanker Krishnan (0000-0002-3351-0715, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume23
Issue3
Pages424-442
Publication date2022-03-24
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14649365.2020.1744705
OpenAlexW3012494109
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited63

Advancing an emergent scholarship on brands as having spatial and scalar effects, this paper examines the brand as an assemblage. In doing so, it focuses on youth engagement with the brandedness of motorbikes in the South Indian city of Chennai to examine in particular how brand assemblages shape gendered engagements with risk in Indian cities. Scooters and Motorbikes are important markers of ‘youth’ and middle classness in urban South Asia, representing freedom, mobility and fun. The Scooter has further been celebrated for putting women – literally and otherwise – in the driver’s seat: creating the possibility for transgression and rebellion. This article complicates this narrative, by positioning scooters and motorbikes instead as sites upon which ‘respectable’ femininities are calibrated and articulated through young women’s engagement with brands. In doing so, it unpacks the ways in which brand assemblages enliven the agency of commodities and participate in the disciplinary processes that shape gendered urban geographies of risk and respectability

Agency (philosophy · Art · Formality · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Sex work and related issues

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