Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

“From Dance Bars to the Streets”: Moral Dispossession and Eviction in Mumbai

“From Dance Bars to the Streets”: Moral Dispossession and Eviction in Mumbai Recent debates around bar dancing in Mumbai shed light on the connection between class, space, and intimate labor in a global city. Dance bars emerged as morally suspect spaces alongside the decline of Mumbai as an industrial city and its development as a global financial and entertainment capital. For a brief period, women bar dancers were able to make a living in the peripheral spaces that opened up during Mumbai's transformation into a global city, but their livelihoods were undercut when they were banned in 2005 as a “moral threat” to the city. The author argues that central to the moral hysteria around bar dancing was the perception that bars were places where cash was hypervisible. The uneasy and contradictory relationship between unregulated and “unproductive” cash and “productive” capital was highly visible in the debates around the ban. The control of space required to make Mumbai a global city also created conditions of material and moral dispossession for poor and working-class women. Courtroom arguments on the ban had greater implications for the fate of people disposed by the ban and living in the “shadow spaces” of the city's margins. intimate labor global cities dispossession moral dispossession http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

“From Dance Bars to the Streets”: Moral Dispossession and Eviction in Mumbai

Lakkimsetti, Chaitanya
positions asia critique , Volume 24 (1) – Feb 1, 2016
Download PDF
26 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/from-dance-bars-to-the-streets-moral-dispossession-and-eviction-in-WGJHgENkPo

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-3320113
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Recent debates around bar dancing in Mumbai shed light on the connection between class, space, and intimate labor in a global city. Dance bars emerged as morally suspect spaces alongside the decline of Mumbai as an industrial city and its development as a global financial and entertainment capital. For a brief period, women bar dancers were able to make a living in the peripheral spaces that opened up during Mumbai's transformation into a global city, but their livelihoods were undercut when they were banned in 2005 as a “moral threat” to the city. The author argues that central to the moral hysteria around bar dancing was the perception that bars were places where cash was hypervisible. The uneasy and contradictory relationship between unregulated and “unproductive” cash and “productive” capital was highly visible in the debates around the ban. The control of space required to make Mumbai a global city also created conditions of material and moral dispossession for poor and working-class women. Courtroom arguments on the ban had greater implications for the fate of people disposed by the ban and living in the “shadow spaces” of the city's margins. intimate labor global cities dispossession moral dispossession

Journal

positions asia critique – Duke University Press

Published: Feb 1, 2016

There are no references for this article.