Crafting a Collective Politics of Care: Women Informal Workers’ Struggles in South India | Kalpana Karunakaran

Drawing on my work with trade unions that mobilize women manual workers in the lower tiers of the labor market in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I show how the blurred boundaries between the productive and reproductive domains of women’s lives shape the forms of labour activism that emerge not from designated workspaces (such as factories or industrial workshops), but are anchored within the low-income neighborhoods and communities where the workers reside. Women of the informal proletariat are engaged in vigorous struggles and campaigns that resist slum evictions, defend their ‘right to land’ in city spaces and force recalcitrant governments officials and local authorities to provide basic infrastructure, services and amenities that might ease the burden of ‘domestic duties’ that women perform in their everyday lives. The women workers’ and (women) union organizers’ struggles speak to a collective politics of caring for land, for urban habitats and for one another. But is this necessarily a sign of ‘empowerment’ that we must cheer?

How do we read what appears to be an overwhelming feminization of the formidable efforts and struggles involved in holding state actors accountable for the survival and social reproduction of labouring poor and working class households? In this talk, I will also briefly reflect on the inchoate ways in which the question of women’s unpaid care labour has recently shaped the policies of the state government of Tamil Nadu.

Speaker Bio

Kalpana Karunakaran is Associate Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, IIT Madras (https://hss.iitm.ac.in/team-members/kalpana-k/). Her research lies in the domain of gender and development and, more broadly, Women’s Studies. Her published papers are in the intersecting fields of gender, labour, microcredit (Self Help Groups), women’s work in the informal sector, women’s trade unions and collective action in solidarity-based movements. Her book ‘Women, Microfinance and the State in Neo-liberal India’ was published by Routledge in 2017. She was a member of the National Executive Committee of the Indian Association for Women’s Studies (IAWS) (https://iaws.co.in/) from 2014 to 2017 and will serve again from 2024.

A bilingual public speaker and writer in Tamil and English, Kalpana conducts workshops and participates actively in campaigns for gender equality, labour rights and human rights organized by women’s movements, trade unions and rural development NGOs in Tamil Nadu. She also writes on women’s lives with a focus on the intersections between the personal and the political. Her Tamil book, a memoir, ‘Comrade Amma: Magal Parvaiyil Mythily Sivaraman’ (Comrade Mother: A daughter’s portrait of Mythily Sivaraman) was published in 2018. Kalpana’s forthcoming book ‘A Woman of No Consequence’ that re-constructs a woman’s life and times in the Madras Presidency will be published by Westland Books later this year. Kalpana is currently working on an English translation of the memoir of Lakshmi Amma, a social and political activist from a small peasant household in Tamil Nadu.