Vanshika Kundra- Week 6

The reading ‘Why loiter? Radical possibilities for gendered dissent’ by Shilpa Phadke, talks about women and their right to feel safe in public spaces and how the concept of loiter is only given to the males of the society. In the reading Shilpa Phadke, also talks about that how loitering itself is not considered to be something good as according to its definition it means wandering on streets aimlessly but in this case Shilpa Phadke, demands that the right should be given to both men and women equally.

The reading talks about a number of topics related to our society. Such as the class difference that the Shilpa Phadke,  mentions in the reading and how it is related to an aspect that we notice in our society as well where women considered subaltern travelling in public transport such as rickshaw or roaming around streets are looked upon and are under constant surveillance and harassed by men compared to women who are travelling in their own private cars or loitering outside stores or in the malls.

The main issue that Shilpa Phadke, brings forth is the fact that while women all over the world raise their voices for violence against women, rape, equal rights abuse and harassment but no one speaks about the simple aspect of day to day activities where women are deprived of an activity as simple as loitering to have a sense of belonging in the city. The concept of loitering leads to the question of who is allowed to loiter and who is not? This reading portrays issues that women from different classes and communities encounter on their daily basis.

Why Loiter? Also argues that loitering should be celebrated, not criticized as a norm or as an act that offers possibilities for a more inclusive city where all people have a right to feel free in the city public spaces.

Shilpa Phadke, also mentions in the end how there is gender discrimination and hypocrisy found in our society where men who are seen loitering are labeled as tapooris often seen in Indian movies as heroes but in the case of women loitering around the city without a peculiar desire are noticed and are labeled to women with a bad character or prostitutes.

The reading chapter 10 from the book doing Gender and Doing Geography : Public Spaces And Everyday Lives: Gendered Encounters In The Metro City Of Kolkata by Tanusree Paul talks about how the sphere of space is gendered in complex ways that reflect the social organization of differences between women and men rather than in simple binary terms of inside and outside, private/public, home/market etc.

Tanusree Paul argues that every democratic state ought to have such spaces for the ‘public’ to come together and discuss public issues. According to him public space, therefore, is the forum for ventilating the claims of the people. It is also an effective machinery in maneuvering state policies. Being in public place endows one with visibility and mobilizing bond. Issues pertaining to who uses public places and for what purpose are important research propositions, particularly because these go a long way in shaping government’s policies. Exclusion of women from public places, therefore, has far-reaching consequences. It manifests itself in unequal status, loss of access to empowering information, incompetence in making informed decisions and choices. Expansion of space, therefore, emerges as a key issue in women’s empowerment. For men, public space is the site for exchanging ideas, values, expressing grievances and claims, and a platform for leisure activities whereas for women, public places are often regarded as ‘transit ways to other regions, not loci of interest in themselves; laws against loitering, lolling and vagrancy exist in part to ensure that public places remain way stations, not goals’. A woman can access public places legitimately only when she can manufacture a sense of purpose for being there and she is supposed to use these places as a transit between one private space and another

Women are to inhabit and manage the private sphere and provide an anchor for men’s public sphere of life. Women, in almost all cultures, are to be the ‘repository of domestic and civic purity. Moreover, ‘femininity is not only defined in terms of masculinity, but also in terms of “proper” and “improper” femininity, gendered “goodness”, “otherizing” the woman’s own sexuality from herself through patriarchal. Nevertheless, restriction of women to the inside space is a matter of convenience — not to women themselves, but to men, children and the institution of marriage and family itself.

It is this array of factors, either perpetrated by society or internalized by women, which makes their access to public space extremely limited and conditional. Moreover, women may develop preconceived notions of places of fear where they anticipate trouble which may be a product of their past experiences or of secondary information. The reason for this may be sought in the socially learned knowledge that says the home is the rightful place of the women and their presence in the public, that is, the man’s terrain, is fraught with dangerous consequences. 

Such decisions to abstain from ‘masculine’ city spaces generate a different type of urban space. However, male dominance over public spaces is not merely achieved through their numerical appropriation of space, but largely through assertive and aggressive behavior which intimidates and embarrasses women. Tanusree Paul has documented different places which women fear and tend to avoid deserted, large open spaces; closed spaces with limited exits such as subways, alleyways to name a few places out of the visual range of others. Tanusree Paul has also ascertained typical coping behavior resorted to by women like not walking through streets or not going to pubs and clubs alone at night, not acting or dressing provocatively, taking ‘common-sense’ precautions by not putting oneself in ‘dangerous’ situations, consciously monitoring the environment and self-regulating behavior and so on. Besides the specific characteristics of space, time is also a major inhibiting factor in the usage of public space.

Tanusree Paul noted that time is a ‘social construction’ as well. She observed in her study of Scandinavian countries that it is the social nature of the night which instils fear among women. Within this conceptual framework, this chapter attempts to explore the issue of women’s negotiation of public places and how these ‘places’, through the infusion of gendered meanings, get transformed into gendered ‘spaces’.