Perspectives on Feminist Political Economy and Gendered Labour in India (II)

 

 

This talk focused on marriage migration undertaken by rural bachelors in North India who seek brides from outside their customary marriage pools such as from development peripheries of India. Drawing on feminist political economy and Dalit feminism, Dr. Kukreja connected the macro-political violent process of neoliberalism to the micro-personal level of marriage and intimate gender relations to demonstrate that predatory capitalism dispossess many poor women from India’s marginalized Dalit and Muslim communities of marriage choices in their local communities. It was argued that this gendered matrimonial dispossession exposes migrant brides to new forms of gendered and caste violence in conjugal communities that act as disciplining tools to efficiently extract labour from them.

 

The talk drew on Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal India (Cornell University Press 2022).

 

 

Reena Kukreja, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies with cross appointment to Gender Studies Department and affiliation with the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University, Canada. Her research interests and filmmaking practice is focussed on migration and development, political economy, marriage migration, South Asian masculinities, and caste. Her current work examines the intersections of masculinity, sexuality, securitization of borders and political economy on the lives of undocumented South Asian men in Greece and other South European countries.

 

(Discussant) Sanjukta Mukherjee is an Associate Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul University. Dr. Mukherjee's research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of feminist political economy, critical development studies and urban geographies with a focus on neoliberal globalization, transnational service work and social transformations centered on the politics of gender, class, caste, race and age in South Asia and its diaspora. She is co-author of Low Wage in High Tech: An Ethnography of Service Workers in Global India (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her research has been published in journals like Gender, Place and Culture, The Professional Geographer, International Migration Review and several anthologies and edited volumes.