Between Gender and Kinship: Mediating Rights and Relations in North Indian NGOs

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the past three decades, transnational women's rights discourse has promoted the category gender as a universal tool to evaluate questions of inequality. Building on fieldwork in Jaipur, India, this article argues that the discursive economy of women's rights renders gender global by framing kinship as a local, harmful element of women's social worlds. Mid‐level staff at women's rights organizations, called “family counselors,” demonstrate the complexities of kinship in women's rights institutions. Counselors work with the constraints and possibilities of north Indian kinship systems to support female clients. Yet globally circulating representations of gender inequality as a problem of “Indian patriarchy” present them with a dilemma. Relying upon kin relations marks their work as inexpert, even as such interdependent relations are crucial to both the families they support and the women's rights institutions they serve. By analogizing kinship with local and backwards and gender with global and progressive, women's rights discourse provokes counselors to reimagine the possibilities of kinship, and then erases their efforts. [gender, kinship, women's rights, interdependence, India]