Relocating the Master’s Domain: Social and Legal Locations of Gender from Post-Disaster to Everyday Life

Abstract

The post-disaster situation provides an insight into the role of rights in the relocation of social and legal spheres and the location of gender within. Grounded in four years of empirical research in the post-earthquake reconstruction process in Maharashtra, India, this article traces the World Bank and state government policy to relocate 52,000 houses and 67 villages. Lorde’s (1996) analogy of ‘the master’s house’ provides a metaphor for the location of women within the patriarchal architecture of the private and public sphere, which I relate to discourses of place and space and the local and global. Drawing upon feminist and post-colonial perspectives, this article challenges the essentialist binary locations of women within public and private domains of rights constructed within the World Bank and state housing policy, the public and private legal system and informal to alternative spheres of social and legal relations. Alternative women’s meetings, street protests and gatherings at the village to international fora intersect and disrupt the boundary walls to relocate women across social and legal spheres. This experience provides the possibility of ultimately becoming the master of the relocation of social and local domains and one’s location within.