Harvard-Brown-MIT Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics (In Person)
Date and Time
Location
"The Patriarchal Political Order - The Making and Unraveling of the Gendered Participation Gap in India"
Speaker:
Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stanford University.
Discussant:
Anirvan Chowdhury, Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Scholars Program. PhD, Department of Political Science, University of California Berkeley.
Contact:
Selmon Rafey
srafey@fas.harvard.edu
Cosponsored by the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University, the Center for International Studies at MIT, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University.
Attendance Information:
Please register to attend this event.
Chairs:
Ashutosh Varshney, Director, Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia; Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences, Brown University.
Mashail Malik, Faculty Associate. Assistant Professor of Government, Department of Government, Harvard University.
Gautam Nair, Faculty Associate; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Business and Government. Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Abstract:
Women across the Global South, and particularly in India, turn out to vote on election days but are noticeably absent from politics year-round. Why? In The Patriarchal Political Order, Soledad Artiz Prillaman combines descriptive and causal analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from more than 9,000 women and men in India to expose how coercive power structures diminish political participation for women. Prillaman unpacks how dominant men, imbued with authority from patriarchal institutions and norms, benefit from institutionalizing the household as a unitary political actor. Women vote because it serves the interests of men but stay out of politics more generally because it threatens male authority. Yet, when women come together collectively to demand access to political spaces, they become a formidable foe to the patriarchal political order. Eye-opening and inspiring, this book serves to deepen our understanding of what it means to create an inclusive democracy for all.