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| 1 |
ID:
171303
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| Summary/Abstract |
The densely populated, multi-ethnic area of Lyari in Karachi is one of the city’s original settlements. The area has become infamous as the site of an ongoing conflict between criminal gangs, political parties and law enforcement agencies for over a decade, and, for this reason, Lyari has been labelled as one of several ‘no-go areas’ in the city. However, for the residents of Lyari, the ways in which they understand their part of the city far exceed these facile labels. While at times their neighbourhoods do become fearful spaces, they are also places of comfort, familiarity and fun. This article explores the multiple ways in which women and girls experience and understand this area. In particular, it documents the various ways in which they express and experience enjoyment in their everyday lives and during exceptional moments. Based on extensive interviews and participant observation in several neighbourhoods, the research shifts attention away from solely using violence as a lens to understand urban space and away from seeing women mainly as victims of violence. Focusing on the pursuit of fun and enjoyment as an area of academic inquiry can be an important way to show how women push against and challenge patriarchal boundaries. By highlighting women’s and girls’ own creative navigations and engagements with their locality and the city, this paper brings new insights into discussions of gender and urban marginalisation more generally.
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| 2 |
ID:
171298
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Tracing his encounters with one particular song during fieldwork on queer nightlife in Bangalore, the author argues for the usefulness of ethnography as a critical method for studying dance and other modes of fun, play and pleasure in South Asia. He argues that ethnography’s many modes (co-performance, interview, observation, auto-ethnography) evidence how expressive practices integrate into the multiple strata of everyday life and political-economy, and how these cultural expressions facilitate inventions of new selves and worlds. While popular, improvised and social dances are challenging to study given their ephemerality, ethnography deepens our understanding of them and allows us to engage in creative dialogue in fieldwork.
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| 3 |
ID:
171300
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Can fun be a serious politics in feminist struggles? That is the question that animates this paper. While claims for the economic and political participation of women have gained increasing legitimacy, the demand for fun may often be seen not just as frivolous, but also as undermining the seriousness of the feminist project itself. The paper engages with three feminist campaigns, two in India and one in Pakistan, that assert women’s rights to occupy the public for fun. The paper refutes critiques that suggest that feminist campaigns to claim public space in the city are illustrative of neo-liberal subjecthood and reflect the birth of new entrepreneurial selves. It also reflects on contemporary feminist debates in India around what counts as feminist, arguing that claims for fun might in fact be central to a feminist politics in the twenty-first century.
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| 4 |
ID:
171301
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India’s ongoing legal movement to decriminalise ‘gay sex’ has been witness to the simultaneous sanitisation of queer spaces. From Pride parades declaring ‘no nanga naach, no flamboyance’ to quotidian policing of excessive dress and gestures, there is a growing emphasis on respectability that stages queerness in the private rather than the public domain. The good homosexual subject is increasingly at odds with public gestures, performances and dresses that might seem too excessive, too flamboyant, perhaps too queer. But what might it mean to sit with the bawdy gestures enacted by kothi, hijra and MSM persons in Prides, in offices, in public spaces and in daily life? This essay makes a case for theorising the fabulousness of gender and sexual minorities in India, pushing homosexuality beyond the registers of legality and epidemiology. By examining the political implications of excessive and risky aesthetic practices, it argues that what is at stake is not only a centring of aesthetics in larger considerations of queer politics, but also the larger work of fabulation: the reinvention of what meanings queer subjectivity can take on in public spaces in India.
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| 5 |
ID:
156692
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper interrogates the exclusionary politics of casino urbanism in Singapore, especially in terms of how this particular brand of urbanism reproduces disciplinary regimes through the uneven consumption of fun and leisure. Singapore’s vision of becoming a world-class “state of fun” is accompanied by increasingly sophisticated measures of boundary making between global leisure citizens and the excluded others, often comprised of the working class and those deemed to be at risk or lacking self-control and responsibility. The evolving biopolitical borders coincide with the multiple borders set up around Singapore’s casino spaces, ensuring the exclusive consumption of Singapore’s casino urbanism by the wealthy few. The fun regimes help to normalize social exclusion, moralize disciplinary control, and give legitimacy to the new class of global consumers under the operations of the state-capital apparatus. This paper argues that exclusive casino urbanism has broader social and political implications on issues of equality, accessibility, and urban participation.
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| 6 |
ID:
171302
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The pleasure of street food provides an opening into the politics and poetics of vernacular taste. Mazaa in cheap viands such as chaat, kebabs and vada pao has the potential to decolonise the palatal and philosophical expectations of gastronomy that are dominant today. Viewed from the bottom up, much street food is a study of mazaa and poor people’s livelihoods in a matrix of cross-class interests. This paper takes the case of popular food cultures—based on a large multi-city collaborative project—to explore questions of liveliness of cities and epistemologies of fun. What are the best ways to register a bottom-up, sensuous materiality and sociability in theory without falling into the gourmand’s trap of pure apolitical pleasure?
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