| الوصف: |
Critical sociological studies of education have investigated whether education enables young women to lead independent lives and have argued that it reproduces gender inequalities (Holland & Eisenhart, 1990). In the past decade, since the shooting of the Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, the debates about women’s education the world over have been brought back into focus. Contemporary discourses surrounding women’s education have often been implicitly premised on an assumption that the education of young women would enable them to gain autonomy over their bodies, and reproductive and sexual freedoms. Based on ten months of fieldwork among lower middle-class young women (18-30) who are completing or have completed their college education in Ghaziabad district, twenty miles east of Delhi, I examine the role of education in bringing about a change in gender relations in this region. In analysing education ethnographically, I focus on the meanings and practices of education as a lived experience and investigate the subjectivities and affective practices of educated young women as they negotiate their presence in the city. My examination of the subjectivities of educated young women in UP makes three contributions. First, it highlights that for lower middle-class young women, education is a daily practice that allows certain spatial and sexual freedoms. The practices of education entail an expression of emotional dispositions of rage and pleasure by young women in public spaces, which is an emerging middle-class practice in India. Second, it illustrates that while education enables pre-marital heterosexual intimacy in India, in line with global and Bollywood-inspired romances, it does not transform the institution of marriage. Marriage continues to be decided by parents, and young women are unable to realise their ideals of a companionate marriage, with egalitarian relations between husbands and wives. Third, I argue that young women are haunted by the promises of freedom and autonomy that education had inspired in them. Despite education’s inability to bring promised benefits, young people continue to invest in education because it is the only social institution that makes it possible for them to inhabit, even if for a short period, their imaginations for a better life. Thus, in this post-education landscape, young people maintain a ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) about the institution of education. |
