Women’s Well-being and Gendered Practices of Labor and Workspace in Traditional Craft Productions in Orissa, India

Abstract

Caught between the old and new ways of labor demand and values in the commercial and tourist oriented crafts production, the gendered practices of labor and selfemployment of women in the unpaid work sphere become an important link between the private domain and public sphere of the workplace and business transactions. This article explores how the gendered nature of the multiple roles of craftswomen at their domestic workspaces is valued in the religious and commercial oriented paintings. By focusing on the narratives of craftswomen engaged in patta paintings, I show that relations at the places of production are not just marginalization processes changing through local and global relations of capitalism, but are discursively constituted by local gendered ideology and socio-spatial relationships. Crajtswomen ’s subjective perceptions, values, and beliefs about the domestic division of labor, culture specific notions ofappropriate producers, ’purity/impurity of the body’, and ’dutiful wives,’ as well as the broader social and ideological underpinnings underlie women ’s self-employment in Orissa. The article emphasizes that a grounded and locally meaningful understanding of women ’s capability and well-being cannot afford to ignore such complex body-space dynamics within which they negotiate their identity(ies).