Becoming ‘working’ women: Formations of gender, class and caste in urban India

This article explores the value of Skeggs’ Formations of Class and Gender for the study of changing social relations amidst rapid socio-economic change in post-liberalisation India. The article is based on insights and reflections from long-term ethnographic research with young lower middle class women in Delhi, employed in the emerging services sector. For these young women, ‘working’ is not merely an activity, it is an identity. And employment is not merely a source of income, it is a site for renegotiation of social relations. As they traverse between home, work and leisure, their new subjectivities come under contestation. In conversations, young women readily talk about gender and class, but are relatively silent about caste, even though it plays out in subtle ways in the workplace and more generally in their everyday lives. This context throws up a set of new questions in relation to Formations – can we understand the entanglements of gender, class and caste in the same way that Skeggs proposes the inextricability of gender and class? What, if any, are the differences between respectability, honour and prestige? Does a Bourdieusian framework open up or limit the avenues of analysis for this context? Engaging with these questions, this article demonstrates the wide-ranging appeal of Skeggs’ astute thinking in Formations of Class and Gender and brings it into dialogue with Global South feminist scholarship.