Re-inventing ‘public’ and ‘private’ in social experience of movements

Abstract

The article seeks to critically examine the secure/normative family from the standpoint of one or more members entering the arena of social movements because this, in many ways, is seen as putting nation/society before the family. In this context, the article attempts to understand how two activists of a Marxist group called Magowa1 enter different spheres of social/collective action and negotiate duties/obligations of the familial in the process of critiquing the normative, recasting lived practices in the family or creating alternate support structures to the family. I hope to tease out the processes of restructuring or reorganising the private sphere that seem inevitable when one or more members of the family enter the arena of social movements. While drawing from the insights from family studies in India, and social movement studies, the article attempts to explore the lives of two activists from the group to map mainly the ‘failed’ or ‘successful’ journeys of the processes of restructuring the ‘private’. These complex journeys help us to arrive at an understanding that goes beyond framework that either suggests that social movements ‘established alternatives to the family’ or ‘simply reproduced normative families in personal lives’. They help us to look for more complex grey areas, thus widening the scope of both family studies and social movement studies.