Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bedi, Tarini

Titel

Motherhood, and its “lack:” Personal loss, and political community among Shiv Sena women in Mumbai

Ist Teil von

• Women's studies international forum, 2012-11, Vol.35 (6), p.478-486

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Religious-nationalist parties in contemporary India actively mobilize women in their political projects. Party leaders utilize a variety of motherhood tropes in their mobilization of women for nationalist ends. The assumption is that such politics is appealing to women because it reinforces a maternal valor at the same time that it upholds the patriarchal status quo within the party. This paper complicates the relationships between motherhood and political community. Through ethnographic research with women of the political party Shiv Sena (Shivaji's Army) it argues that motherhood and politics are interlinked in ways that are at odds with dominant party rhetoric. It finds that for working-class women who live on the urban margins of the city of Mumbai, and who are marginalized from the centers of politics, grief over loss of a child mobilizes women to seek particular kinds of political community. Therefore, it is the “lack” of motherhood that becomes the source of affirmation and political action. It uses the life-history and narrative approach to analyze the ways in which the “lack” of motherhood gets constructed, narrated and experienced. It explores ways in which political parties that promise cultural community become sites through which this “lack” of motherhood gets negotiated. Finally, it urges feminist scholarship on gender and politics to take intimate emotions seriously in an analysis of political agency and political community.