Reflecting on Resistance

Abstract

This article analyses the power of peripheral urban spaces in the creation and dissemin-ation of a culture of female militancy. I show how poor women in the Bombay slums, by affiliating themselves with the aggressive Shiv Sena movement, came to violently control a range of physical, material and social spaces, in the process moving away from positions of subordination to occupy roles that allowed them to affect the male exercise of authority. I explore the importance of women's oral narratives by analysing the stories of migrant Shiv Sena women and their crippling encounters with a harsh slum life. The slum became a complex space that redefined and reconceptualised social groupings, and migration and relocation of unemployed people created new social and kinship networks. While sustaining a façade of being structurally muted within such an environment of constant transition, my ethnography illustrates how women (over two overlapping generations) tacitly and explicitly resisted naturalising discourses on femininity and ‘the home’. I argue that slum women strategically chose to infuse their physical environments with the threat of conflict, as women's presence in (and patrolling of) these contested urban spaces became a source of real and symbolic power.