This essay presents a collaboratively curated art-based ethnographic reflection of ‘lockdown-scapes’. The artworks shared depict the peripheralised lifeworlds of queerness and Brahminical patriarchal structures against the backdrop of the COVID-19 lockdown in select locations in India. We creatively mobilise temporal queer lifeworlds residing in marginalised but resilient geographies of the neighbourhood, prison, street and dairy farm. We highlight how art and dialogue can converge to create queer lifeworlds. Our collaborative dialogue across differential intergenerational precarities, dominant advantages and carceralities is situated within the messy boundaries of visual imaging and ethnographic methods. This essay interrupts the boundaries of what are considered respectable and normative methods of anthropological research. Our aim is to amplify creative processes of queer worldmaking that centre art and affect in everyday survival.
I compare two cases of performative practices that emerged in the late 20th century through a mixed lens that combines new materialist philosophy and feminist media theory. I engage with Annie Goh’s new materialist feminist understanding of sound as a material-semiotic actor, capable of both receiving and generating meaning. To address new materialism’s tendency to produce an idealised model of materiality that overlooks media objects and practices, I articulate this proposal by considering sound as a feminist medium, engaging with feminist media scholarship’s accounts of diverse experiences of technological engagement that include forms of resistance. To this end, I introduce situated sound sources as a framework that theorises feminist explorations of unconcealed, sound-producing objects in performance contexts. Applying this combined lens, I examine the lack of representation of women artists whose practices incorporate performance within the historicisation of sound art, contextualising this disregard in relation to diverse late 20th-century approaches to the materiality of sound and showing how materialist conceptions of the sonic medium are challenged through the meaning-making practices explored in works by women performers and sound artists. Drawing on feminist media theorists Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer’s understanding of technologies of containment as devices that extend inwards rather than outwards, thereby reworking the relationship between bodies and technologies, I consider situated sound sources as containment technologies deployed within sound practices. I compare John Cage’s Water Walk and Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen to describe situated sound sources as devices that examine sound’s agency in performance and offer critical and embodied affordances for developing a feminist medium of sound.
This short story depicts the emotional turmoil of Maitri, a young married mother who finds herself in the crosshairs of caste and patriarchy. In India, caste is an all-pervasive hereditary rigid system of social stratification characterised by endogamy and social barriers sanctioned by customs, laws and religion. Public discourse on patriarchy and caste tends to focus on inter-caste marriages and honour killings, neglecting their effect on married women in India. Legally and religiously, a woman carries her father’s caste, which does not change upon marriage. However, the lived realities of married women in India weave a different story at the intersection of caste, patriarchy and the state. The role of a daughter-in-law is steeped in societal expectations to perform caste-gender roles, caste traditions and caste-feminine labour. Caste-gender roles are performed through learning and performing caste traditions for her conjugal family, and caste-maternal labour is carried out through socially constructed maternal responsibilities that disseminate caste traditions to the children. Thus, a woman’s duties are not merely personal; her caste and gender bind them. So, where do we position a married woman, caste and her identity? As Maitri navigates her role within her family and community, she begins to question not only her place within the system but also her own identity and sense of belonging, caught in the intersection of caste, gender and patriarchy.
Gazing at the child protection system in England through the lens of Black feminists Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and bell hooks, I analyse the role of race, gender and class in deciding who is allowed to be a mother. Using ethnographic vignettes, I interrogate how colonialism, poverty and patriarchy has affected one woman's fight to mother her children and document how the state has tried to 'unmother' her. The article is based on an 18-month multimodal ethnographic study with ten children and their mothers, all of whom have experienced domestic abuse and social work intervention in England. All children lived with their mothers and siblings in social housing and had one or both parents from a country formerly colonised by the UK or another European country. The article concludes that the narratives and practices in England's child protection system have deep roots in the colonial discourse on mothering. Through the ethnographic account of one mother, Nicole, I reflect on Sharpe's question of how a woman becomes 'a former mother' or 'unmothered'. I argue that 'the hold' that Sharpe writes about is very much in existence in the child protection system in England.
This article examines the Malayalam film Ullozhukku , directed by Christo Tomy, as a meditation on feminist ethics, affective complexity and intergenerational trauma within Kerala’s layered social structure, which is entangled by patriarchal, class and caste systems. Progressing beyond the familiar feminist tropes of resistance and empowerment, the film presents ethically complicated women who strategically navigate betrayal, care and survival in a system that was never built for them. This article contends that Ullozhukku destabilises the various binaries of victim and agent, complicity and resistance, care and harm, offering a view of feminism that is grounded in contradiction, affective entanglement and endurance. It suggests that the women in the film cannot be neatly positioned as either oppressed or complicit but inhabit ethically complicated spaces shaped by kinship, obligation and systemic constraint. The film foregrounds the texture of everyday life as a space where feminist meaning is lived and negotiated in unfamiliar forms. The article draws on the work of feminist thinkers including Deniz Kandiyoti, who conceptualises the patriarchal bargain, and Uma Chakravarti, who examines how class, kinship and gender mediate survival and complicity. It also draws from trauma studies, engaging Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory and Cathy Caruth’s framing of trauma as belated and unassimilable, and from Sara Ahmed’s and Leela Gandhi’s concepts of sticky objects and affective communities in the field of affect studies. Aspects from hydrofeminism and spatial theory help examine how spatial conditions, particularly floodwaters, catalyse emotional exposure and relational transformation. This interdisciplinary framework situates the film within a transnational feminist conversation that is attentive to ambiguity and the difficult ethics of survival. Rather than arriving at conclusive moral judgments, this research proposes that Ullozhukku articulates a feminism that emerges from the contradictions of ordinary lives, where agency, interdependence, survival and quiet acts of care form the basis of feminist possibility.
