The body as infrastructure, the body as prosthesis: Gender, intersectionality and the everyday circulation of water in Delhi

Keywords: water, infrastructure, gender, feminist political ecology, bodies, Delhi
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 50

Abstract

This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of fragmented water infrastructures in Delhi, India. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how bodies act as urban infrastructure through the quotidian practices and labor of finding and circulating water to households across neighborhoods. Using the concept-metaphor of “prosthesis,” I argue that conceptualizing the body as a prosthesis to infrastructure helps make visible 1.) the embodied labor, maintenance and care work that subsidizes and enables infrastructural assemblages and networks, 2.) the politics that produce the necessity for particular gendered/casted/classed bodies to act as infrastructure in the first place, and 3.) everyday forms of infrastructural violence, including the valuation/devaluation of particular bodies and urban lives in relation to urban infrastructure. The paper concludes by calling for further analyses of the body as the site by which the sociopolitical and material dimensions of infrastructure are affected, resisted, negotiated, and lived.