Dwelling in the Present: Confinement and the Temporalities of Gendered Property Work in Kolkata’s Marginal Neighbourhoods

In this paper I will relate the institution of marriage and its gendered implications to the state-led politics of urban restructuring that have marked classed and gendered effects of being ‘stuck’ in a neighbourhood and /because of marriage, which is equally enforced by the state. After a brief outline of the ongoing history of displacement of the urban ‘poor’ in Kolkata, I turn towards the women’s experience of infrastructural labour of homemaking whilst ‘stuck’ in marriages, homes, and neighbourhoods. By linking the displacement into legal and spatio-political grey zones, shows women as doubly trapped: in marriage through specific regimes of migration and the effects of property regimes, and in neighbourhoods that are sites patriarchal control. The carcerality of marriage is shown to be directly related to the gendered violence of the street/neighbourhood as a site of surveillance and vigilantism, whilst gendered experiences of legal, spatial and political regimes are marked by the constant affirmation of informality of differing degrees and scales.