Embodying identity through heterosexual sexuality - newly married adolescent women in India

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which newly married working-class adolescent women of Mumbai, India deal with their marital sexual experiences to transform their bodies from a body-for-others to become also a body-for-self. Using qualitative data gathered through repeated focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with 100 women, I examine the ways women used their bodies in culturally expected ways through participation in sexual activity and reproduction to acquire personal honour. Through the daily disciplining of sexual relations, women characterized their sexual bodily experiences to move from reluctance, shyness, and fear to one of pragmatism. Older married women invoked discourses of ideal femininity to normalize what newly married adolescents perceived as unpleasant events. In retrospect these women, who had experienced gains of status as mothers and honour as married women, transformed the disciplining of their bodies into a force for personal transformation, raising the possibility that their actions can be read as both submission and resistance to existing patriarchal norms.