“I’ll Be Like Water”: Gender, Class, and Flexible Aspirations at the Edge of India’s Knowledge Economy.
This article examines the ways in which ideologies of aspiration, inclusion, and women’s empowerment associated with India’s globalizing knowledge economy are re-framed by young women workers in a small-town business-process outsourcing (BPO) center two hours outside of Bangalore. Drawing on forty i...
| Publicado en: | Gender & Society Vol. 27; no. 6; pp. 777 - 799 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Sage Publications Inc.
Dec2013
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=91947925&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 91947925 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 08912432 GES jtl: Gender & Society issn: 08912432 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Dec2013 vid: 27 iid: 6 pid: 344 pub: Sage Publications Inc. artinfo: ui: 91947925 10.1177/0891243213499445 ppf: 777 ppct: 22 formats: tig: atl: “I’ll Be Like Water”: Gender, Class, and Flexible Aspirations at the Edge of India’s Knowledge Economy. aug: au: Vijayakumar, Gowri su: India Young women Women employees Economic development Middle class Class differences Business process outsourcing Vocational interests Neoliberalism sug: subj: Young women Women employees Economic development Middle class Class differences India Business process outsourcing Vocational interests Neoliberalism keyword: aspiration globalization information technology middle classes aspiration globalization information technology middle classes ab: This article examines the ways in which ideologies of aspiration, inclusion, and women’s empowerment associated with India’s globalizing knowledge economy are re-framed by young women workers in a small-town business-process outsourcing (BPO) center two hours outside of Bangalore. Drawing on forty in-depth interviews, I show that, in contrast to their managers’ expectations of individualized work aspirations, women workers draw on both individualistic and domestically embedded articulations of the future in a formulation I call “flexible aspirations.” In articulating flexible aspirations, they draw both on the gendered language of neoliberal self-improvement for the global economy and on the nationalist ideal of rural middle-class feminine domesticity. While insisting that the future is uncertain, young women use flexible aspirations as a symbolic resource to distinguish themselves from both old-fashioned village housewives and promiscuous urban call center girls. I briefly compare these flexible aspirations to young men workers’ strategic articulations of aspiration, which, rather than relinquishing hopes to an unpredictable future, adjust plans to fit known social limitations. This article, drawing on feminist interpretations of Bourdieu, extends the literature on the Indian middle classes by analyzing young women’s aspirations in non-elite social locations. It builds on this feminist scholarship by highlighting ways in which young women use articulations of flexible aspiration as a mode of gendered class distinction. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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