1st Edition
Women in 'New Nepal' Through the Lens of Classed, Ethnic, and Gendered Peripheries
This book brings rarely voiced lives and experiences of women in Nepal to light and combines rich ethnography with discourse analysis. Multifaceted and critical, the volume situates its narrative in the profoundly transformative period after the turn of the century when ‘New Nepal’ was rising on the horizon and sheds light on Nepali women’s experiences in multiple sites, crossing class and ethnic lines. It is based on extensive fieldwork among women domestic workers, construction workers, street vendors, women from the indigenous community of Hyolmo, and others. Mainly through an ethnographic approach, the author explores Nepali women’s experiences on the ground, mostly situated in classed, ethnic, or other socio-cultural peripheries in Nepali social landscape.
Through the unusually intimate narrative on these women from the global south, who are still prone to be cast into a deeply colonial, simplistic image of ‘victimized women’, readers will get a nuanced perspective of the multidimensional diversity among these women as well as a sense of kinship with oneself.
The book will be invaluable for researchers and students of gender studies, global south studies, development studies, cultural anthropology/ethnography, Nepal studies, and feminist geography. It will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, policymakers, and those with an interest in global gender issues.
Introduction. Part I From the Classed Peripheries 1. ‘Satisfied with My Job’: Exploring the World of Women Construction Workers. 2. ‘Domestic Workers are Workers’: Present State of Women in Paid Domestic Work. 3. ‘Self-employed’: Street Vendors in the Age of Neoliberalism. Part II From the Ethnic Peripheries 4. Hyolmo Women on the Move: Marriage, Migrant Work, and Relocation to Kathmandu. 5. Talking Feminism with an Indigenous Woman: Dolma’s Life Story. Part III From the Gendered Peripheries 6. Women’s Place in Nepal’s Democratization. 7. From the Peripheries of Nepal’s Developmental Order: Views of Janajati and Dalit Women. 8. Women’s Body in Public Spaces: Exclusion in the Form of Sexual Harassment
Biography
Seika Sato is a professor at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Teikyo University. She has worked on ethnographic studies in Nepal, centering around various issues in lives of minority women. She is the author of Conversing with the Hyolmo Women: An Anthropology of Life/Story in Nepal (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2015, in Japanese).
