Gender, Power and Social Space in a Himachal Village

Abstract

Gender is a socially constructed domain, which situates power relations differentially across constituent categories of female and male. In a patriarchal setup, the gendered approaches to power are usually based on the Marxist principles of viewing power as a mechanism of oppression imposed on the subjugated by the dominating. Such an approach treats power as some entity concentrated in certain institutions/individuals producing a binary grading of power on the lines of domination-subjugation, which has its own fallacies of overlooking not only the dynamic nature of power, which appears as dispersed, embodied and discursive in actual settings, but also the role of individual agency in maintaining, contesting and articulating it. This paper attempts to move away from such an approach in order to show that power ubiquitously appears in every social relation making these relations of power. The agency-centred nature of power appears through actors enmeshed in the web of power relations who occupy a certain position in their social space and are in a continuous struggle to maximise their power, bringing to focus the contesting nature of power across the domain of gender as against the polar ends of domination and subjugation in the village Lag Baliana situated in the district of Kangra in Himachal Pradesh.