Abstract
Caught between tradition and modernity, India has
increasingly taken women and their status into account since the 1970’s. That
raises the question of the conditions of Indian women empowerment. How are
Indian women in Rajasthan part of a movement going on for a long time but still
debated today – feminism and the affirmation of women’s political power in the
broad sense (affirmation of their identity, their legitimacy within the public
space and their will to assert themselves as equal to men in a society which is
still strongly influenced by patriarchal norms)?
Following
interviews and observations in the region, the somatic style appears to be the
favourite medium through which women assert their political and social role and
presence in the public space of Rajasthan. The ritual preparation of the body
takes place in a singular temporality, as if the woman had to stop in time so
as to observe herself and turn her body into a tool aimed at assertiveness and
empowerment. So, is the consciousness of the body and of its potentialities the
base of the process of empowerment? And does this process contribute to create
a contradictory heterotopia – in Foucaldian terms – i.e. the specific
spatiality, temporality and rhythm of somaesthetics as it unfolds in order to
proclaim the power of women? We show how women, growing aware of the power
their bodies contain, can now invest the public space and the political sphere
in a country traditionally governed by men.
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IJAHSS by IPRPD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.