Professional Documents
Culture Documents
This module discusses the gendered contestations over the public, both in
theoretical and in historical terms. It primarily focuses upon the distinction of the public
and the private which is mobilised in the ordering of gender. The last part of the module
is a longish activity linked to the emerging work on urban space and gender, where the
questions of the public and the private seem to be played out in complex forms.
We can identify the significant role played by notion of the public along with its
binary opposite private, if we consider this as an everyday issue – one that organises the
everyday. Let us consider this: We live at a time when a number of middle class women
are out of their houses to work or to study or just hanging out. As far as women from
lower classes and lower castes are concerned, they have been occupying the spaces
outsides the domestic for a long time. Even then it is evident that there is a difference in
the way men and women occupy the space of the public. To begin with, this module,
following from the discussions of gender in earlier modules, will suggest that there is
nothing ‘natural’ about this difference. It is not that there is something innate in men
that allow them to occupy the public more comfortably than women. Surely, the
incidents of violence that women face in the public are well documented. But we need to
note that when we are discussing the difference in the way women occupy the public, it
is not just violence that is at issue as we know for a fact that violence on women happens
in the private sphere too. At one level, there is an experiential tangibility to this
difference and on the other it remains something elusive as far as language is concerned.
It is also important to note that the experiences of both men and women in the public are
not uniform among them, nor is it historically constant. The module is an attempt to
think of the ways in which one can understand this difference. It is possible that we may
arrive at tentative reasons for the absence of a language to talk about this difference in
the course of this discussion.
When we talk about the contests over the public, the first question to ask is of the
notion of the public itself. How do we understand this concept? In attempting to
understand the concept of the public, we need to keep in mind an important issue. This
is the fact that the idea of a public, often but not exclusively in opposition to the private
is used by us in everyday speech.
Activity 1:
a. The students should use their various language competencies to list out the word(s) used
in their own languages (i.e. other than English) to denote the idea of the public.
b. The students could think of objects, ideas, institutions that they think form the public in
our contexts. What are the spaces of the private, then?
It can be argued that the notion of the public is used mainly in two different ways.
1. When we discusses institutions as public spaces.
2. When we discuss how individuals organise their lives in terms of the public and
the private.
Let us discuss these ideas one by one before we discuss the relationship between the
public and notions of gender.
Activity 8:
Using the following discussion as a handle, do a short assignment on your neighbourhood,
mapping the ways in which notions of the public and the private are interwoven into our
gendered experiences:
An emerging field which seems to be directly addressing the question of the various
gendered contestations in the public is that of urban studies. By taking on a
conventionally understood public space like the city for analysis, this field encounters
gender as a question directly. Discussing the city of Bangalore, historian Janaki Nair
makes the following observations:
The general absence of women in most spatial representations is
insufficiently explained by the conventional distinction between
‘private’ and ‘public’ city spaces. Neither is the private merely a
woman’s domain nor are men the exclusive users of public space. The
rules of gender, nevertheless, do operate in assigning, physical, social,
and political space to men and women, although only for women is
temporality a so crucial a determinant. The zones of women’s visibility
and power, for instance, are coded according to a temporal as well as a
spatial logic, and their mobility – whether the movement of the
woman’s body through the space of the city or their circulation as
commodities – is governed by a set of rules that are neither forged nor
consulted by the town planner. To the extent that the town planner or
even real estate developer considers only the physical attributes of
space, the spatial practice of women remains invisible. The ‘temporal
neutrality’ of the town planning apparatus, moreover, is a form of
gender neutrality and does not reveal the operations of gendered power
in the city (Nair 2005: 300-301).