Meet Shivani Gupta, visiting from NUS (Singapore), working on everyday gendered experiences in cities

I studied Political Science (honours) for my undergraduate, at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, and was deeply influenced by ideas of the early feminists from the 1920s to  contemporary feminists. I come from India, where you encounter everyday structural  inequalities. I got an opportunity to analyse them through the analytical lenses provided by social sciences in general and political science in particular, and I saw the value and importance of investigating society to comprehend its structures and processes, which motivated me to pursue academia. For my masters I joined Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Bombay, a university that is grounded in social work. Here we were actually implementing the theories we learnt, for example by working on the theme of poverty by addressing the issues in urban slums. We were able to see the gaps between theory and praxis and formulate solutions through a collective and grounded approach. In my Master’s thesis, I examined the role of gender and sexuality in learning and performance of classical Kathak dance, where most women are performers whereas most men are the teachers and authors of the dance. The study exposed the historiography and androcentrism within the classical dance and its embeddedness in patriarchal values. After taking a break from academia to work with several non profit organisations, I decided to pursue my PhD in South Asian studies at National University of Singapore (NUS) where I studied women’s everyday life in Banaras. I continued at NUS as a Postdoctoral researcher to investigate sexual violence on university and college campuses. Presently, I am a Lecturer at NUS College, an honours college at NUS: I teach courses on gender, sexuality as well as introduction to social sciences, including a service-impact learning programme that addresses issues of gender and sexual inequalities in Singapore. 

I was born and raised in Banaras, considered as the most sacred city for Hindus (just like the Vatican, Mecca or Jerusalem for other religions). When I started reading about the city, a lot of the scholarship was about the city’s sacrality, antiquity and mystique as narrated and designed by cis-abled privileged men. There was nothing about women’s lives and how they contributed to the city and its existence. Contrastingly,  the regnant scholarship consistently does not acknowledge women’s contributions in making and developing the city. During my PhD, I spent 2.5 years in the field doing ethnography, I interviewed more than 50 women and I engaged in participant observation to immerse myself in their lives. 

In this work, I show how women subvert patriarchy in their everyday lives. They are neither victims of patriarchy all the time nor are they empowered all the time: it is contingent on embodied, lived, situated and contextual everyday realities, while creating possibilities for themselves. For instance, in order to find moments of pleasure, women at times tell custodians of patriarchy that they’re going to the temple, because most often, no one would stop them from participating in acts of piety. Within these religious obligations, women seek such moments to socialise by having picnics with their friends in the temple compounds. These are the spaces where you can hear women discuss politics, history, religion, contemporary music, films, art and culture, including women’s needs and desires for and from the city, while engaging in gossip and leisure. They become active citizens and residents who have opinions that are not allowed to be articulated in most other spaces and contexts. In essence, my work, influenced by decolonial feminists, studies the pivoting of centre from androcentric and male dominated notions of city to demonstrate how women subvert patriarchal control and subjugation to formulate their own worlds and seek their own spatial embodiments. My work brings to the fore persuasion and persistence with which women refuse to be perpetual victims. 

I interviewed 32 victims / survivors of sexual violence who were students during my postdoctoral fellowship. What struck me is that victims / survivors don’t feel cared for. When they encounter violence and abuse they feel helpless and vulnerable and need immediate care to feel supported which is more often than not absent. This gets further exacerbated when they think about reporting. The absolute lack of care produces further fear of being judged, stigmatised and victimised resulting in low rates of reporting. I also researched on technology-facilitated violence (TFV, which includes for example revenge-porn). The major revelation was that vulnerability has increased due to technology as digital footprints are impossible to erase. Once image-based abuse occurs, the speed at which it travels across cyberspace is under no one’s control and therefore constantly generates exceptional levels of fear. Additionally, the pitching of technology-facilitated violence against offline violence creates an attitude of dismissal, which prevents proper redressal of the issues and legislating on TFV in a productive manner. 

First, I must say that I have been deeply influenced by bell hooks. The ideas shared by her on feminist, engaged and critical pedagogy, which espouses that education is a commitment towards practice of freedom and liberation for everyone, has inspired and grounded me as an educator. Classroom for me is a space of active engagement for students and teachers, where we need to take into account students’ lived and embodied experiences. Indeed, they don’t come to class as neutral and objective beings but they carry with and within themselves a lot of what they have learned, what they know, and what has happened to them (and so does the teacher). Therefore, when you have them channel their embodied and lived experiences, you get an opportunity to show how things work in society: for example how hierarchies, inequalities are created, how they intersect, as well as how privileges get manifested. A crucial point for such classrooms to work  is to create a shared and safe space, where everyone’s voice can be heard, and no one is silenced, through discourse generation.

This is a course I have been wanting to teach for a long time. The reason is that, too often, people think of women in the Global South as victims who need aid and ‘saving’ from the Global North and can’t be empowered unless international organisations get involved. I want to get students familiarised with how colonised societies, especially women in them, are producing knowledge about themselves. I am using transnational and decolonial feminism frameworks to show that women in the Global South / Global Majority have done a lot for their own empowerment. We explore this by engaging in multiple discourses on how they have created solidarities to fight oppression, and contributed to the idea of rights and justice in the world. In this course, we travel to locations and regions of India, Afghanistan, Iran, parts of Africa and parts of Latin America, and we end by examining the value of digital feminisms in contemporary societies.

I just got a NUS / Sciences Po grant to compare Asian migrant women in Singapore and Paris, with Hélène Le Bail (CERI), so we will start working on this project during my stay here. 

I  want to continue studying sexual violence in universities and look deeper into the idea of intersectional care and justice for victims / survivors. I hope to be able to get some views and discussions about what has been done here at Sciences Po in terms of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) practices, what has worked (or not), and how students and faculty have responded to particular initiatives. 

And I am also working on my first book on women’s everyday lives in Banaras from a decolonial perspective.