Gendered Violence in Public Spaces

SwathiKrishna S. is assistant professor of English in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Management at IIT Bhubaneswar, India.Srirupa Chatterjee is associate professor of English in the Department of Liberal Arts at IIT Hyderabad, India.

• Introduction: Hostile Terrains, Empowering Textual Spaces: Neoliberal Literature and the Female TravelerSwathi Krishna S. and Srirupa ChatterjeeChapter 1. No Longer Innocent: Male Gaze, Violence, and Female Kinship in Kishwar Desai’s The Sea of InnocenceSwathi Krishna S. and Srirupa ChatterjeeChapter 2. Peripheral Urbanization as Queer Identity in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost HappinessJana FedtkeChapter 3. Mirrors of Reality: Toxic Masculinity, Traveling Women, and The Representation of Acid Attack Victim-Survivors in Priya’s MirrorNidhi ShrivastavaPart II: Bollywood’s Traveling Women (I): Misogyny, Roads, and Female VulnerabilityChapter 4. Stepping Out: Global Bollywood, Gendered Landscape, and Undercurrents of Neo-liberal PleasuresMadhuja MukherjeeChapter 5. Celluloid Women Rewriting Rules of Travel in Contemporary Hindi CinemaRima BhattacharyaPart III: Bollywood’s Traveling Women (II): Vexed Dualities of Freedom and FearChapter 6. The Conditional Promise of Empowerment and Pleasure: An Intersectional Analysis of Hindi Film Portrayals of Women Navigating Public Spaces in IndiaUttara ManoharChapter 7. Traveling Women and their Male Companions: Framing Risks and Vulnerabilities in Indian Road FilmsPronoti BaglaryPart IV: Troubles of the Outdoorsy Woman: Multiple Genres/Multiple VoicesChapter 8. Roads, Dreams, and Violence: Tracing the Mental Landscape of India’s Domestic WorkersBonnie Zare and Ditto PrasadChapter 9. Negotiating Violence and Traversing the City: Female Vulnerability in Delhi Crime (2019) and She (2020)Shreya Rastogi and Srirupa ChatterjeePart V: Struggle for Survival: Working Women and Pitfalls of Indian RoadsChapter 10. Working Night Shifts, Traversing Neoliberal Roads: Spatial-Temporal Confluence and the Male GazeSucharita SenChapter 11. Women Journalists Negotiating Space in India’s ‘Small’ Cities”Ranu TomarPart VI: Traveling Solo, Traveling Strong: Women Braving Neoliberal RoadsChapter 12. Travel with Care: Reinforcing Patriarchy through Tips for Solo Female Travelers in IndiaKiranpreet Kaur BaathConclusion

What happens to women who travel? To those who transgress into male dominated spaces (e.g. the world)? Gendered Violence in Public Spaces provides insights into these questions. Comprised of 12 beautifully written chapters, the book explores how women’s travel has been represented through literature, film, and print. Anxiety, anticipation, joy, risk, comfort, violence, vulnerability, and danger – these are all things the reader will encounter in this book which makes a valuable contribution to feminist geography, literature and media studies.