Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bedi, Tarini

Titel

Shiv Sena women and the gendered politics of performance in Maharashtra, India

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation engages with the political, historical, and cultural ramifications of women's political performance and the formation of gendered political subjects. It explores anthropological concerns with performance and the subject through the study of female party-workers in Shiv Sena, a militant political party in Western India. Using performance and narrative approaches the study makes two arguments. First, it finds that in Shiv Sena gendered political subjects are produced out of militant political performances that are part of the democratic politics of modern India. It suggests that performances that draw on non-liberal agendas cannot be seen either as pathologies of the democratic state, nor as the symbolic utilization of women in the public sphere as gendered symbols of nation or religion. The research reveals instead that particular kinds of gendered performative practices are important to the personal, political aspirations of women in political parties, and to the dynamics of local politics in India's urbanizing regions. They are also critical to gendered community and relationships of brokerage and patronage in urban and urbanizing areas. Secondly, it argues that Shiv Sena women's performance is located in regional, religious, urban, and media narratives that are individually and collectively called upon. The research shows how particular kinds of political personas emerge out of a variety of narrative contexts that are quite separate from what are generally assumed to be gendered fields of action. It finds that political subjects produced out of the intersection of performance and narrativity influence both the gendered relationships of the household and the larger practice of politics and planning in a globalizing India. The findings reveal less about the ideological structures that assumedly guide non-liberal politics and more about the motivations, pragmatics, and local forms of power that they confer on adherents. The study therefore sheds light on what happens to party-workers when they join parties like Shiv Sena, their class-cultural and gendered logics, the ways in which they frame and reframe the larger discourse of democratic politics in their normalization of violence and exclusion, and the social and psychological affirmation that they provide. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by addressing your request to ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O. Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346. Telephone 1-800-521-3042; email: disspub@umi.com