Obliqueness as a feminist mode of analysing waterscapes: Learning to think with overflows

Abstract

In this paper, we propose obliqueness as a feminist mode to analyse waterscapes, intersecting feminist political ecology with post-human feminist scholarship. Obliqueness means cultivating attentiveness to those things and events that at first sight appear inconsequential because they do not fit with official plans or predominant (power) structures. Through a methodological focus on the continuous making-of such structures – on acts of tinkering with institutions, ideas and technologies – obliqueness notices not just how structures are reproduced, but also helps draw attention to inconsistencies, divergences and transgressions – what we call overflows. Hence, our oblique analysis of a waterscape of a village in Maharashtra, India revealed overflows to two kinds of structuring: one stemming from the infrastructural lay-out of an irrigation system, and one stemming from intersecting hierarchical relations of caste and gender. These overflows point to possibilities for being and relating beyond those that can be contained in already identified social or planned material structures. In this way, an oblique analysis expands the theoretical and political space to co-enact more equitable human-water relations in Maharashtra, and elsewhere.