Women's “timepass”

Abstract

AbstractIn a poor neighborhood of Delhi, women try to cope with unemployment among male breadwinners, and in so doing they often frame their practices as a way of passing time. From the long wait at service points to contentious involvements in work and politics, they depict a host of different and seemingly contradictory activities as meaningless idleness. My analysis of these discourses uncovers a wider pattern of minimizing in which women sometimes internalize and sometimes quietly oppose the constraints that limit what they can do with their time. In a gender landscape where public waiting has usually been associated with men destabilized by a lack of opportunities, women's conversations about lost time become a playing field for alienation, resilience, and subversion, even as the practices that hide underneath allow us a glance into their untold public involvements.