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Name required. Follow Following. Specters of the Postcolonial City. Sign me up. Publication Type. More Filters. Frictions of everyday mobility: traffic, transport and gendered confrontations on the roads of Accra. ABSTRACT This article explores how experiences related to daily mobility negatively impact and shape the way women in Accra engage with and perceive the city they live in and the opportunities it … Expand.
View 1 excerpt, cites background. Gender and smart city: canvassing in security in Delhi. Cities have been gender-biased; the presence of gendered environments in the form of public transport and governance has raised questions on ways in which women access the city. Women have been … Expand. Underlying this image is deep class prejudice. Like the tapori, lukkha, lafanga, vella, hekaar are other Indian terms used to describe a kind of purposelessness akin to loitering.
They are all uncomplimentary terms suggesting not just the lack of employment but also the unease that the loi- terer is potentially up to no good. Loitering then, as suggested in our discussion of the Mumbai tapori, is read as a suspicious performance of non-productivity. Women are not even in the reckoning since the assumption is that 'even good men don't loiter'. Our intention in this chapter is to rethink the meanings implicit in loitering and to recast it not as an act of loss of choice but in fact as the very opposite, as an act of agency and desire.
When we say loitering we mean not doing anything that has an apparent purpose, or as the dictionary definition suggests, 'to linger aimlessly'.
Loitering unlike flanerie or tapori-giri is not attached to an identity. Its engagement with the city is not voyeuristic but rather organic and visceral for unlike voyeurism loitering implicates the loiterer as actor rather than surveyor. Loitering is an act one can indulge in without professing allegiance to any particular group, morality or ideology.
It is a process that is temporally present. You are a loiterer only while you are loitering. Loitering is fundamentally a voluntary act undertaken for pure self-gratification; it's not forced and has no visible productivity.
Loitering can have no purpose other than pleasure. Pleasure which is not linked to consumption has the power to chal- lenge the unspoken notion that only those who can afford it are entitled to pleasure, thus ensuring that marginal citizens are kept in their place. The possibility of a pleasure that does not cost anything and at the same time brings the 'undesirables' out into the streets making them visible, threatens to undermine established notions of urban social order.
Radical possibilities for gendered dissent Figure Mumbai photo credit: Poulomi Basu. This idea of apparent urban anarchy might be threatening to the maintenance of the status quo but for women it represents the possibility of redefining the terms of their access to public space, not as clients seeking protection but as citizens clai- ming their rights. Imagine varied street corners full of women sitting around talking, strolling, feed- ing children, exchanging recipes and books or planning the neighbourhood festival.
Imagine street corners full of young women watching the world go by as they sip tea and discuss politics, soap operas and the latest financial budget. Imagine street corners full of older women contemplating the state of the world and reminiscing about their lives. Imagine street corners full of female domestic workers planning their next strike for a raise in minimum wage.
If one can imagine all of this, one can imagine a radically altered city. We articulate four propositions to suggest exactly how loitering might succeed where other strategies fail, in creating a more inclusive city. Loitering holds the possibilities of disrupting the everyday performances of normative respectable femininity in public space through which an oppressive gender-space formation is maintained.
To fully recognize the extent of these possibilities, it is essential to view gen- dered space as a constant process of becoming; gender as something we do rather than something we are Ainley In doing so, we draw on the conception of gender as being a 'regulatory fiction' in society Butler and space as being a ShilpaPhadke etal.
When we see hegemonic gender-space as something that is not just con- tested but also constantly being brought into being through the everyday actions of men and women in space, rather than something women are subjected to by exter- nal totalitarian forces, it allows us to imagine possibilities of interrupting and open- ing up gaps in the relentless replication of unequal gender formations; gaps within which we can re-imagine a rightful place for women in the city.
One might therefore propose loitering as an act that has the possibility to allow the subject to renegotiate sedimented roles, to contest societal and personal expec- tations, and to enable interventions that fulfil and subvert definitional 'practices' of being. In this context, then, the errant, arbitrary, circuitous routes of the loiterer mark out a kinetic map of pleasure.
In the dialectical relationship between social structure and space, it is the body that becomes the medium through which socio-spatial formations are not just expe- rienced, but produced, reproduced, represented and transformed. Bodies that chal- lenge hegemonic notions of masculinity and femininity, or transgress the boundaries of appropriateness, pose a threat to the 'normalized' social order.
Many lesbian women in our discussions articulated that when they chose to dress in less feminine, more 'butch' attire, they encountered hostility - ranging from staring to loud comments and occasionally attempts to physically evict them - mostly in all women spaces like the ladies compartments of trains and women's toilets.
In a relative sense the female body, located 'properly' in the private space of the home, has the greatest potential to disrupt the structures of power in public space.
The bubble of private respectability that women are expected to cloak themselves in cannot withstand the act of loitering because the two are based on contradictory imperatives-the former, one of maintaining privacy even in the public and the lat- ter, that of taking pleasure in the public for its own sake.
The presence of the loite- ring female body can then challenge the hegemonic discourse of gendered public space by reconstructing the connotative chains of association that connect loite- ring, respectability and normative femininity. This has the capacity to create a new set of relationships within and with public space through the ensemble of practices associated with women; relationships, which have the power to not just disrupt the dominant order in public space but to have a more long-term impact on how space itself is visualized.
The subversive potential of a visceral and 'subjective' engagement with the city has been explored by social thinkers starting from the second half of the twentieth century, ostensibly in reaction to the totalitarian master narratives that character- ized the early part of the century.
The potential in loitering might be visualized as an extension of the power of walking itself so eloquently imagined by de Certeau whose vision of walking as being simultaneously an organic act of belong- ing and a subversive engagement with the city informs our idea of loitering.
For de Certeau, as people walk they reinscribe the city again and again, often in defiance of established patterns of urban order, each time differently making new meanings.
Walking, according to him, is fundamentally an act of'enunciation' through which Radical possibilities for gendered dissent the city, and in effect, social order is personalized, and in the process, altered. In a variety of languages the terms used fortransgressive women in public space are related to the act of being on the streets without purpose - strolling, roaming, wandering, straying, rambling - all terms that Solnit points out suggest that women's travel is invariably sexual or that their sexuality is inevitably transgres- sive when it travels.
It is precisely because loitering is an embodied practice that seeks to transform the everyday acts of walking and looking in the city from acts that are means to an end to acts that are meaningful in themselves, that loitering becomes a compelling tool for change, allowing us to re-imagine the gendered experience of city spaces.
Loitering encompasses a politics of visibility that is different from the sub- terfuges that women engage in to access the city anonymously.
Women have often sought to access the pleasures of public city spaces by slip- ping into the city, merging with the crowd and not drawing attention to themselves. Scholars such as Wilson and Young suggest that large cities offer women some access to public space through anonymity.
Wilson also points out that, within the heterosexual discourse, the male gaze is focused largely on young and therefore sexually desirable women. It is women who are old or eschew the 'mas- querade of womanliness' who could potentially become invisible, an act that brings a 'kind of negative freedom; but also a kind of social extinction' Garber also underscores the limitations of the liberating potential of anonymity, arguing that even for women, whose sexed identity is often obviously visible, the capacity to claim space rests on political organization and the ability to make the transition from invisibility to identity.
For although in the short term, anonymity may be the obvious choice for women to enhance access to public space, the poten- tial longer term risk of seeking anonymity could well mean the loss of substantive freedom and eventually a kind of political death wherein women forever remain outsiders to public space Phadke Expanding access through anonymity is not the same as staking a claim as citizens and will not in any way change women's location in or relationship to public space.
Loitering, on the other hand, m ight often be unobtrusive but it is far from invisible. This means that the loiterer might sometimes merge into a crowd and at other times stand out. The loiterer is often unidentified but not anonymous. In fact, by the very ShilpaPhadkeetal. Loitering then has the potential to chal lenge gendered restrictions of access to publ ic space by its very visibility.
Loitering has the capacity to challenge the new global order of the city by compelling an engagement with the idea that the right to public spaces is a core component of citizenship. Urban scholars studying cities across the industrial and developing world have argued that people's access to public space and its resources reflects various hie- rarchies and patterns of discrimination. Access to public space is often sacrificed at the altar of safeguarding' law and order'.
Safety and order are prized in the new glo- bal city, and both are presented as the antithesis of what is embodied, literally and metaphorically, by the poor: their slums are unsanitary, their homes makeshift, their bodies unhygienic, and their very existence a source of threat not just to the middle classes but to the city itself.
However, as historical evidence shows, attempts to cleanse and sanitize cities have often had the opposite effect of making cities even more fraught, violent and unsafe Appadurai , Davis , , Mitchell The global claims of Mumbai are still new and fragile and therefore to be guar- ded zealously. One of the ways these claims can be buttressed is by clear definition of spaces as being inside-outside; public-private; recreational-commercial. The act of loitering, in its very lack of structure, renders a space simultaneously inside and outside; public and private; recreational and commercial, rendering it in a constant state of limina- lity or transition.
We submit that it is precisely this ambiguity that makes loitering potentially liberating. The very power of the liminal state lies in its lack of defini- tion, in its defiance of being named.
Loitering mocks the authority of any one group of people to determine the future of the city by speaking with visceral bodies and through the indeterminate nature of the identity of the loiterer. The presence of the loiterer acts to rupture the controlled socio-cultural order of the global city by refusing to conform to desired forms of movement and location, ins- tead creating alternate maps of movement, and thus new kinds of everyday interac- tion.
It thwarts the desire for clean lines and structured spaces by inserting the ostensibly private into the obviously public. The liminality of loitering is seen as an act of contamination, defiling space. Loitering is a reminder of what is perceived as the lowest common denominator of the local and thus is a threat to the desired image of a global city: sanitized, glamorous and homogenous.
Loitering then as a subversive activity has the potential to raise questions not just of'desirable image' but also of citizenship: Who owns the city? Who can access city public spaces as a right? In a time when the performance of a consumerist hyper-productivity is becoming deeply significant in global-aspirational Mumbai, the choice to demonstrate non- productivity can be profoundly unsettling.
Loitering is a threat to the global order Radical possibilities for gendered dissent of production in that people are visibly doing nothing. It disrupts the image of the desirable productive body - taut, vigorous, purposeful - moving precisely towards the 'greater global good'. Loitering is also a threat to the desired visibility of capitalist consumption in that there is no recognizable product; if a beverage is being consumed it is likely to be unbranded roadside cutting chai three-quarter-cup tea.
Loitering, in its defiant demonstration of lack of purpose, immediately refutes the possibility of being co- opted within global practices of consumerist inclusion. Finally, loitering makes possible the dream of an inclusive citizenship by dis- rupting existent hierarchies and refusing to view the claims of one group against the claims of another.
Young suggests that the ideal of city life is not communities, for commu- nities by their very nature are exclusive, but a vision of social relations as affirming group difference which would allow for different groups to dwell together in the city without forming a community.
She argues that reactions to city life that call for local, decentralized, autonomous communities reproduce the problems of exclu- sion. Instead, Young imagines a city life premised on difference that allows groups and individuals to overlap without becoming homogenous. The kind of exclusion that Young suggests is seen clearly in the local citizens' groups in Mumbai which are often founded on a corporate vision for the city built around zoning, segregation and finally exclusion. Our understanding of loitering in public space is based on the right of each individual, irrespective of their group affiliations, to take pleasure in the city as an act of claim and belonging.
This is, however, not a notion that is located in a crude understanding of capitalism where each individual maximizes her pleasure in the city leading to the greater pleasure of society. Loitering is an act that could be solitary or in groups. At no point do we perceive the individual as divorced from her multiple locations and identities. When we ask to loiter then, the intent is to rehabilitate this act of hanging out with- out purpose not just for women, but for all marginal groups.
The celebration of loi- tering envisages an inclusive city where people have a right to city public spaces, creating the possibility for all to stake a claim not just to the property they own, nor to use the ownership of property as grounds for being more equal citizens, but to claim undifferentiated rights to public space. This is the potential we see when we seek to reclaim the act of loitering as an act of the most basic citizenship. Here, we not only see citizenship as being linked to cities rather than nations Holston and Appadurai but also understand it, not as an a priori position sanctioned by the state or collective agreement, but as a space to Shilpa Phadke etal.
This enactment of citizenship through loitering is further premised on the quest for pleasure, which, as suggested earlier, has the potential of being both non-divisive and inclusive. It is only when the city belongs to everyone that it can ever belong to all women. The unconditional claim to public space will only be possible when all women and all men can walk the streets without being compelled to demonstrate purpose or respectability, for women's access to public space is fundamentally linked to the access of all citizens.
Equally crucially, we feel the litmus test of this right to pub- lic space is the right to loiter, especially for women across classes. Loiter without purpose and meaning. Loiter without being asked what time of the day it was, why we were there, what we were wearing and whom we were with. For more information on the project, please see www. Very special thanks to Rahul Sri vastava for his sustained and multi-layered engagement with our work. We would also like to thank Abhay Sardesai and Amit Rai for their thoughtful comments on a draft of this article.
Notes 1 Responses to the online blog campaign 'I Wish. I Want. I Believe' February run by the Blank Noise project, which campaigns against sexual harassment on Indian streets. Fora discussion on Mumbai's history see Dossal
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