| Summary/Abstract |
This essay draws from an ethnographic study on nurses and attendants in the city of Kolkata to re-turn to the question of women’s consciousness and agency. I trace women’s reluctance to participate in union activities both to the failure of formal mechanisms of collective bargaining in representing workers’ interests, and to gendered norms that come in the way of organizing women workers. I explore how the performance of respectable femininity, legitimized by class and caste norms, inhibits women’s participation in intensely politicized masculine domains. Though at first glance it may seem that women’s reluctance to participate in union activities is gender neutral, I demonstrate that gender norms produce a social field that denies women political agency.
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