Mounica Sree Sai Vegi

My dissertation explores how Indian women labor activists understand and navigate their marginalization as working-class and caste-oppressed women, workers, and activists in the intertwined spaces of activism, workplace, and home. Drawing on literature on social reproductive labor and women’s activism, my project posits the intimate-familial sphere as an under-examined necessary site of labor activism. To understand how women reckon with organizing spaces structured by heteropatriarchal caste ideals, I will conduct 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the understudied South Indian coastal town, Visakhapatnam, located in the historic center of Indian labor organizing. I employ feminist-activist and community-engaged methods to study the daily lives of women labor activists and how they transform patriarchal understandings of gender, labor, and activism through their work. Examining how these women contest brahmanical-patriarchy and capitalism across work and unions, as well as neighborhoods and homes, my project highlights the complex intersections between different spheres of their lives in an economy being restructured towards neoliberalism. By making visible how the marginalization of women is reproduced within organizing spaces central to their emancipation and how they contest it, my research provides opportunities to collaborate over strategies to change hierarchical union cultures, continuing to plague labor movements worldwide.