Sreedatri Dhar, Week 6

Why Loiter? Radical Possibilities for gendered dissent – Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan 

The author in the above article tries to emphasize on the notion of women’s access at public places and street as form of loitering. The research mentioned in this article is carried out in Mumbai known for being a women friendly city. The research is drawn much from the Gender and Space Project done in collaboration by the authors named PUKAR i.e. Partners in Urban Knowledge Action & Research. It also talks about the disputes regarding the gender and class binary by explaining the access of a certain gender or class of people who are above in social or political hierarchy are able to get access to right to public spaces which limits women’s access to the same. One of the many arguments focuses on the intersection of gender and class by categorising lower class men as Mumbai’s Tapori posing a threat to women’s safety on the road. Just by certain people’s appearance by way of clothing and body language have been categorised into a group which is threatening to the middle class women, thus making it hard for them to access public places as it is a common notion that men can walk freely at any time during the day where as women are preferred not to. Hence respectable people are rarely seen in public places and due to this there is a hegemonic differentiation created by the society as bad and good women.