[Reader-list] Invite: 28 March 2012: Talk at Asiatic Society: Unfriendly Bodies, Unfriendly Cities: Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space

[Shilpa Phadke]

Dear All,

Please do come if you can make it.

warmly,

Shilpa


 ---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *Asiatic Society of Mumbai* <asiaticsociety1804 at gmail.com>



The Asiatic Society of Mumbai
takes pleasure in inviting you and your friends to the


*Eighth Professor L. B. Kenny Endowment Lecture*

by

*Dr. Shilpa Phadke*
Assistant Professor, Centre for Media and Cultural Studies,
Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)

on

*Unfriendly Bodies, Unfriendly Cities:
Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space*

on

Wednesday, 28 March 2012, at 6.00 p.m.

at the Durbar Hall of the Society
*
Prof. Kamla Ganesh*
Department of Sociology, University of mumbai
will preside


Kindly join us for tea at 5.30 p.m.

A.P. Jamkhedkar Vivek Ganpule

Vice President Hon. Secretary


Synopsis:
In this presentation I seek to further develop the ideas around loitering
put forth in Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, a book I
co-authored where we argued that the celebration of loitering was an
important way of claiming city public spaces in defiance of laws against
loitering after sunset and before sunrise. We argued that the only way in
which women might find unconditional access to public space was if
everyone, including those who were not necessarily friendly to women also
had unconditional access. Subsequently in conversations with feminist
activists who work particularly with young women we’ve been challenged
several times on the grounds that everyone loitering includes even those
‘others’ (often young men) who intimidate young women and inhibit their
access thus in fact restricting the access of young women.

In this presentation I reflect on the question of unfriendly bodies in
cities: who they might be and what they might mean for varied marginal
groups’ access to public space as well as the idea of unfriendly cities;
understood both as cities full of all kinds of risks as well as cities
premised on exclusion in quest of ‘global sanitized utopias’.
Focusing on a politics of justice in access to public space, this paper
asks: What does it mean to stake an equal claim for all to loiter in public
space? How does one engage with the threat posed by one group of such
loiterers to another potential group? How does one understand claim staking
in a context where city public spaces are surveillanced and policed? What
are the claims of different kinds of bodies and how can we arrive at an
idea of justice that at least attempts to address the claims of as many
different groups as possible?