Syeda Jenifa ZAHAN, Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Polytechnic of Turin, Italy
This presentation focuses on young, single, middle-class women’s everyday geographies of violence in Delhi, India. I focus on the ways in which violence and associated perceptions of safety and fear operate through multiple spaces, relationships and socio-institutional spaces. Using feminist geographical perspectives on violence against women, this paper focuses on three forms of violence – direct interpersonal violence, discursive violence and institutional violence – that shape middle-class women’s experiences in the city. Examining these multiplicities, yet highly relational, experiences of violence, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of violence, fear and safety as everyday, normalised, and rationalised component of middle-class women’s urban lives that find meanings through public and private socio-spatial discourses of gender and space. In turn, I argue that conceptual binaries such as public/private, violence/safety, fear/security, everyday/exceptional are insufficient to understand how women experience violence. Consequently, I propose a conceptual framework of “relational plurality” which argues for a relational understanding of the complexity of women’s lived experiences of violence as consisting of multiple urban forms, practices and processes that spread over time and space.
Mots clés : Violence against women|city|India|relationality|fear
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