Liminality of women’s leisure in Mumbai, India

Abstract

This paper theorizes the transformative potential of women’s night-time leisure in Mumbai’s urban areas. To this end, I draw on instances from qualitative field-based research focused on Mumbai’s call centers and surrounding areas of informal urban activity. For women working night shifts in this sector, leisure activities occur with the help of informal vendors who run food stalls on streets around call centers. These times and space of leisure, I argue, disrupt capitalist and caste-based patriarchal systems. I analyze such leisure as a “limen” (cf. Lugones, 2003 ), a form of liminality that disrupts systems of production and reproduction that constitute the everyday (cf. Lefebvre, 1991 ). I elaborate on the temporal attributes of the limen to show how it goes against the grain of “efficiency” that otherwise shapes women’s routines. The fluid spatial nature of women’s night-time leisure helps rework dichotomous understandings of the public and private realm, demonstrating possibilities for intimate interactions within the public domain. The limen and intimate interactions therein often occur between food vendors and women working night shifts, revealing an intersubjective dynamic that ephemerally disrupts societal hierarchies. As such, the limen reworks and challenges existing structures, and in doing so, holds significance for envisioning a politics of change.

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