Gender and Precarity

Abstract

This chapter takes a look at how diverse groups of economically underprivileged Muslims in Old Delhi negotiate precarity in contemporary India. While both men and women have to negotiate precarity, the chapter focuses on the everyday labor of Muslim women from such families as they struggle to make ends meet and support their families in neoliberal India. As Muslims face increasing economic insecurity in neoliberal India, women's labor has become crucial to meeting the everyday needs of families. Defying gendered stereotypes that configure women, especially Muslim women, as housewives rather than breadwinners and as helpless victims of oppressive and deterministic cultural systems, the Muslim women labored to ensure the survival of their families and communities in the face of deepening economic insecurity. Their productive and reproductive labor is not only central to negotiating economic insecurity in Old Delhi, but it also enables the wheels of the economy to keep turning even as everyday life becomes more difficult for so many in contemporary India.