Disparate power equations are embedded in the various ways daily life is organized within social and geographical spaces and tacitly influences individuals’ use of space. This is particularly true for cities, where space is unequivocally premised through a male-centric approach, whereby the public spaces which harbor the legitimate basis of social power are kept out of bounds for women. City spaces are being increasingly masculinized and seem to restrict women’s use of public spaces in rearticulated socially coded ways, largely within the domain of domesticity. Physical intimidation is the most widely used means of keeping women out of masculine public spaces. However, the very identity of “women” per-haps plays the most important role in precluding their access to such spaces. In this context, this article attempts to understand the extent to which crime affects women’s negotiation of public spaces in Kolkata, a relatively safer city in the Indian social space, and explores how the intersectionality of heterogeneous socioeconomic characteristics affect women’s access to public space and its re-articulation. I argue that women’s restricted access to public space is a manifestation of socially produced fear that is constituted by the way space is perceived and imagined.
Ardener, Shirley. (1981). Women and space: Ground rules and social maps. London: Croomhelm.
2.
Bannerji, Himani. (2001). Inventing subjects: Studies in hegemony, patriarchy and colonialism. New Delhi: Tulika Books.
3.
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4.
Cassirer, Ernst. (1944). The concept of group and the theory of perception. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5(1), 1–36.
5.
Channa, Subhadra Mitra. (1997). Gender and social space in a Haryana village. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 4(1), 21–34.
6.
Chatterjee, Partha. (1994). The nation and its fragments: Colonial and post colonial histories. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
7.
Clemente, Frank, & Kleiman, Michael. (1976). Fear of crime among the aged. Gerontologist, 16(3), 207–10.
8.
Dilworth, Richardson, & Trevenen, Kathryn. (2004). When cities get married: Constructing urban space through gender, sexuality and municipal consolidation. Urban Affairs Review, 40(2), 183–209.
9.
Ferraro, Kenneth F., & LaGrange, Randy. (1992). The measurement of fear of crime. Sociogical Enquiry, 57(1), 70–101.
10.
Foucault, Michel. (1978). History of sexuality, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage.
11.
Goheen, Peter G. (1998). Public space and the geography of the modern city. Progress in Human Geography, 22(4), 479–490.
12.
Habermas, Jürgen. (1989). The transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
13.
Hagerstrand, Torsten. (1970). What about people in regional science?Papers of the Regional Science Association, 24(1), 6–21.
14.
Hanmer, J., & Saunders, S. (1984). Well founded fear. London: Hutchinson.
15.
Harvey, David. (1973). Social justice and the city. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
16.
Harvey, David. (1989). The urban experience. Oxford: Blackwell.
17.
Harvey, David. (1990). Between space and time: Reflections on the geographical imagination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 80(3), 418–434.
18.
Hindelang, Michael J., Gottfredson, Michael R., & Garofalo, James. (1978). Victims of personal crime: An empirical foundation for a theory of personal victimization. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
19.
Koskela, Hille, & Pain, Rachel. (2000). Revisiting fear and place: Women’s fear of attack and the built environment. Geoforum, 31(2), 269–280.
20.
Koskela, Hille. (1997). “Bold walks and breakings”: Women’s spatial confidence versus fear of violence. Gender, Place and Culture, 4(3), 301–320.
21.
Koskela, Hille. (1999). Gendered exclusions: Women’s fear of violence and changing relations to space. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 81(2), 111–124.
22.
Koskela, Hille. (2005). Urban space in plural: Elastic, tamed, suppressed. In Lise Nelson & Joni Seager (Eds), A companion to feminist geography (pp. 257–270). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
23.
Lefebvre, Henri. (1974). The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
24.
Longhurst, Robyn. (1995). The body and geography. Gender, Place and Culture, 2(1), 97–106.
25.
Mahadevan, Kanchana. (2008). The “virtuous women”: Law, language and activism. Economic and Political Weekly, XLIII(7), 44–51.
26.
Massey, Doreen. (1994). Space, place and gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.
27.
McDowell, Linda. (1993). Feminist empiricism and the geography of social rela-tions. Progress in Human Geography, 17(2), 157–179.
Mehta, A., & Bondi L. (1999). Embodied discourse on gender and fear of violence. Gender, Place and Culture, 6(1), 67–84.
30.
Niranjana, Semanthini. (2001). Gender and space: Femininity, sexualization and the female body. New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
31.
Pain, Rachel. (1991). Space, sexual violence and social control: Integrating geographical and feminist analyses of women’s fear of crime. Progress in Human Geography, 15(4), 415–431.
32.
Pain, Rachel. (1997). Social geographies of women’s fear of crime. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 22(2), 231–244.
33.
Pain, Rachel. (2001). Gender, race, age and fear in the city. Urban Studies, 38(5–6), 899–913.
34.
Paul, Tanusree. (2011). Public spaces and everyday lives. In Saraswati Raju & Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt (Eds), Doing gender, doing geography: Emerging research in India (pp. 248–267). New Delhi: Routledge.
35.
Phadke, Shilpa. (2005). You can be lonely in a crowd: The production of safety in Mumbai. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 21(1), 41–62.
36.
Phadke, Shilpa. (2007). Dangerous liaisons—Women and men: Risk and reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(15), 1510–1518.
37.
Ranade, Shilpa. (2007). The way she moves: Mapping the everyday production of gendered-space. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(15), 1519–1526.
38.
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist. (1974). Women, culture and society: A theoretical overview. In Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo & Louis Lamphere (Eds), Women, culture and society (pp. 17–42). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
39.
Rose, Gillian. (1993). Feminism and geography: The limits of geographical knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press.
40.
Silvey, Rachel. (2005). Borders, embodiment, and mobility: Feminist migration studies in geography. In Lise Nelson & Joni Seager (Eds), A companion to feminist geography (pp. 138–149). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
41.
Smith, S. J. (1987). Fear of crime: Beyond a geography of deviance. Progress in Human Geography, 11(1), 1–23.
42.
Soja, Edward. (1996). Third space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Stanko, Elizabeth A. (1995). Women, crime, and fear. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 539(May), 46–58.
45.
Stoneall, Linda. (1981). Cognitive mapping gender differences in the perception of community. Sociological Inquiry, 51(2), 121–128.
46.
Tenhunen, Sirpa. (2006). Transforming boundaries: Women’s work and domesticity. In Lina Fruzzetti & Sirpa Tenhunen (Eds), Culture, Power and Agency (pp. 110–134). Kolkata: STREE.
47.
Tiengtrakul, Chanasai. (2006). Home banarasi women and perceptions of the domestic domain. In Lina Fruzzetti & Sirpa Tenhunen (Eds), Culture, Power and Agency (21–51). Kolkata: STREE.
48.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.
49.
Valentine, Gill. (1989). The geography of women’s fear. Area, 21(4), 385–390.
50.
Valentine, Gill. (1992). Images of danger: Women’s sources of information about the spatial distribution of male violence. Area, 24(1), 22–29.
51.
Warr, Mark. (1985). Fear of rape among urban women. Social Problems, 32(3), 238–250.
52.
Wesley, Jennifer K., & Gaarder, Emily. (2004). The gendered “nature” of the urban outdoors: Women negotiating fear of violence. Gender and Society, 18(5), 645–663.
53.
Wilson, Elizabeth. (1991). The sphinx in the city: Urban life, the control of disorder, and women. Berkeley: University of California Press.
