Varalika Deswal, Week 6

Why Loiter? Radical Possibilities for Gendered Dissent 

  -Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade, and Sameena Khan

The author starts the discussion by talking about why it is found offensive if women seek pleasure in loitering in the city. She says that most believe that women who already have enough privilege are somehow asking for too much by simply wishing to go out and loiter in city spaces. The act of loitering itself is considered a very unproductive activity which raises the very question of why women would desire to engage in it. Women’s unconditional right to public spaces still remains a fantasy as even though their presence is visible in public their access remains conditional in nature. The act of loitering has a way to undermine the hierarchy present in public spaces as it makes way for women to come out and claim their rights over public spaces.

There is also another dilemma that comes up when discussing women’s presence in public spaces, and that is of their safety and the threats that are present outside for them. Most of the time, lower class men are shown to be a threat to women’s presence in public but at the same time, an unconditional right to public spaces can not come at the expense of excluding one other particular group from it.

The struggle against violence is described as an end in itself which divides us rather than unite us which can be achieved by pursuing the quest for pleasure which does not see aggressors or victims but talks in terms of rights.

Women’s presence in the outside world is always purposeful and rarely ever idle. She can’t be seen in public just observing the world, she has a reason to be outside the world and the reason is never that she simply just wished to do so. It all boils down to the narrative of a good private woman and a bad public woman, created by society, which makes women carry the burden of anxiety whenever they wish to access public spaces- almost as if what they wish to engage in is not something completely harmless but wrong.