Graduate Seminar Series 2025/26 - Session 1

First Seminar

(In)Formal Labour and the Role of Women's Bodies

November 19, 2025

Click on this link to join the seminar at 15:00 (GMT).

Ilaria Ravazzolo

University of Warwick

The Politics of the Everyday: Gastrofeminism and the Gendered Meanings of Food Work

This seminar explores the conceptual terrain of feminist food studies and gastrofeminism, examining how food practices shape, and are shaped by, gendered identities and relations of power. Engaging with feminist and decolonial scholarship, it considers how women’s food work—often dismissed as mundane or apolitical—reveals complex negotiations between care, identity, belonging, and resistance. Using the presenter’s ongoing research on Italian (grand)mothers in Switzerland and their experiences of identity and belonging in their food practices as a point of reference, it reflects on how everyday acts of cooking and feeding can be understood as sites of both continuity and constraint, empowerment and obligation. Through this lens, gastrofeminism becomes a critical framework for interrogating the entanglement of the personal and the political, challenging essentialist narratives of femininity and domesticity. Ultimately, this presentation calls for greater attention to the affective, embodied, and historically situated dimensions of food work, proposing that understanding women’s relationships with food is crucial to a broader feminist critique of labour, identity, and belonging.

Anjali Chauhan

University of Delhi

The Labour Chowk as Feminist Counter-Common: Everyday Liminalities of Women Garment Workers in Delhi NCR

This paper draws on feminist ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Peer Baba Labor Chowk*, an exclusive women’s informal labor market located in the urban village of Kapashera, through which women seek work in the nearby factories in Udyog Vihar, Delhi NCR. It explores how migrant working-class women, navigate the intersecting precarities of informal work, gendered space, and urban marginality, while simultaneously asserting forms of collective agency, dignity, and survival.

This paper endeavors to conceptualize Labor Chowk as a liminal space which is neither home nor workplace, neither wholly public nor entirely private. It is in this in-between space that women carve out forms of presence, refusal, and mutual care. The paper builds on this conceptualization to argue that the labor chowk operates as a feminist counter-common: a space sustained not by ownership or legality but through embodied co-presence, shared routines, and relational survival. In this ephemeral common, the act of waiting becomes more than economic necessity; it is transformed into a collective social and affective infrastructure.

This study contributes to the conference theme in four interlinked ways. First, it offers an empirical account of informal labor that attends to the everyday, affective dimensions of work. Second, it speaks to decolonial and intersectional approaches by foregrounding the voices, bodies, and spatial strategies of women who are simultaneously marginalized and agentic. Third, it rethinks “women and work” not as narrow economic participation but as a terrain of spatial politics and collective life.

_{* labor chowk is an informal street-side hiring space}

Aastha Thakur

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Guarding Through the Cycle: Menstruation and Embodied Labour of Women Security Guards

The architectural skyline of urban India is complemented by a large workforce on the ground - the private security guards. The available literature highlights the precarity, informality, health concerns, and the significant presence of males in this sector. However, menstruation remains an overlooked dimension of labour. This inquiry engages with three questions. First, what do the everyday lived experiences of female private security guards look like working at student residential properties? Second, how does menstruation as a monthly natural process affect the work experiences of female security guards vis-à-vis male security guards? Third, what strategies do women employ to navigate their workplace with their menstruating bodies? The data was collected through a combination of semi-structured interviews and participant observation over a period of four months (January to April 2025) among 15 security guards (ten male and five female) working in the student residential hostels in South Delhi. Thematic analysis is utilised to interpret the data. Drawing on feminist theories of embodiment and bio-politics, the findings reveal that menstruation is often rendered an invisible part of workplaces by treating it as a ‘private inconvenience’. The study argues for feminist re-imaginings of bodily equality at work by centering menstruation as ‘embodied labour’.

Adeela Zaka

Tu Dortmund University

Sweat as Feminist Matter: Reclaiming the Leaking Body in the Age of Climate Crisis

Sweat is seldom theorized, yet it unsettles the boundaries between purity and pollution, the body and its environment. Within dominant hygienic imaginaries, perspiration is perceived as a failure and excess, a leakage that needs to be contained (Douglas, 1966; Shove, 2003). Feminist new materialisms, however, invite a reorientation: bodily fluids possess ontological agency and epistemic resonance (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013). If matter, as Barad suggests, is active and entangled, then sweat registers not only corporeal exertion but planetary distress.

Drawing on textual and visual analyses of postcolonial climate narratives, this paper traces how the moist, leaking body reveals the colonial legacies shaping ideals of cleanliness and racialized heat (Ahmed, 2010; Mbembe, 2019). In many contexts, sweating bodies mark both exhaustion and endurance; they bear the scent of unpaid labour, the residue of feminized care, and the memory of infrastructural neglect (Puar, 2017; Chatterjee, 2020).

By reimagining perspiration as a feminist sensorium, the paper asks whether bodily leakage can serve as an ethics of vulnerability and resistance. It contributes to feminist environmental sociology by positioning matter, moisture, and care as intertwined strategies of survival, critique, and collective resilience (Grosz, 1994; Alaimo, 2016).

Centre for the Study of Women and Gender