Gendered violence, frontline workers, and intersections of space, care and agency in Dharavi, India

Abstract

The resilience and activism of marginalised urban populations have played an important role in imagining urban politics in Indian cities. Similarly, the issue of sexual violence against women in public spaces became a significant part of urban politics in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case. However, subsequent activism and research have paid lesser attention to other pervasive experiences of intimate violence and structural inequalities that confront marginalised urban populations, particularly poor women and children. Drawing on participatory ethnographic research with frontline workers engaged in an NGO’s violence prevention program in Dharavi, Mumbai, this paper re-inscribes ‘gender’ and ‘violence’ as experiential concepts into the urban framework. I use the term ‘intersection’ as a heuristic device to examine how frontline workers come to understand gender as a relationship of inequality that produces conditions of violence. I term this intersection ‘gender/violence’. The second intersection, ‘frontline’, further underscores how negotiations of the public–private divide in urban spaces, women’s caring labour in supporting survivors of violence and the resultant forms of gendered agency are interconnected. I argue that such a holistic understanding of women’s everyday actions of resisting and negotiating structural and gendered violence contributes to recent urban scholarship on gender and violence and furthers our understandings of agency, solidarity and resilience.