Selfing the City: Women Migrants and Their Lives in Calcutta

FORTHCOMING

Selfing the City: Women Migrants and Their Lives in Calcutta

Ipshita Chanda

The author talks of the pull the city exerts on young women. A youthful migrant herself, she has recorded and analysed the results of a survey of the ways in which single women who come to Calcutta from smaller cities and villages experience the metropolis. She delves into their negotiations with the urban, urbanization and their relation with the women’s movement and feminism. The city, the spatial and cultural location of these negotiations, is itself a character in this survey, ‘almost as much a respondent as the women’.

How do discourses and activities related to feminism and the women’s movement impact upon the actual lives of women as they conceptualize relationships and conduct their lives in and across spaces designated as ‘private’ and ‘public’? This question forms the core of the book and provides its theoretical frame.

An unusual thoughtful book on the way India and women of all classes are changing and finding the city conducive, or not, to change and negotiation.

Ipshita Chanda is professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. Amongst her writings is Packaging Freedom: Feminism and Popular Culture (Stree, 2003); and she has co-edited with Jayeeta Bagchi, Women Writing Gender (Stree: forthcoming).

Stree

ISBN 978-81-960760-4-5 pp 300 approx

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