Kalpana Kannabiran and Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen - Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy

Gender Regimes and the Politics of Privacy

Kalpana Kannabiran

Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is, in some sense, a culmination of two decades worth of conversations. Although we only began writing it in earnest over the last two years, many of the chapters are the result of exchanges weve had about the lived political and private lives of the gendered body for much longer: first, in the classroom as student and professor; then, as colleagues with different institutional positionalities; and, over time, as friends with shared camaraderie and as chosen family. The kernels of our arguments are in a plethora of texts and messages over the years with re-reads and commentaries on each others writings, thoughts, and ideas, all of which will never get footnoted or referenced in any objective way. In fact, many of the central themes about the fluidity of categories, interpersonal positionality, and temporality were cumulatively learnt from a range of our own everyday praxis, by being in conversation and relationship with each other and our chosen (and sometimes accidental) others. While the Puttaswamy judgment certainly offered a central node from which this decades-long conversation grew, it is to the versatility and persistence of the relationships these conversations produced that we owe our most humble acknowledgement.

For helping us think through important logics and debates at different stages of writing this manuscript, including reading drafts and responding to pitches of our argument, we are grateful for conversations with and comments from Raj Mohan Tella, Meghaa Ballakrishnen, Peter Goodrich, Sandile Hlatshwayo, Suryapratim Roy, K. Parameshwar, Maithili Pai, Rupali Samuel, Danish Sheikh, Keertana K. Tella and Ramya K. Tella. For research and editing assistance, we are grateful for the time and keen attention of Laura Castillo; and to the librarians at the University of California Irvine School of Law, especially to Jessica Pierucci who helped source many of the comparative materials; to Sreekar Aechuri, who organized the citations, bibliography and case summaries for the entire manuscript; and to Dianna Sahhar and Jeff Latta who made sure we always had all of the academic resources we needed. Tanvi Joshi, our editor at Zubaan, has been a pleasure to work with. We thank her sincerely for her engaged reading of the manuscript and valuable suggestions, and to Nithya V., the Production and Design Editor at Zubaan.

For giving us a chance to document these recursive conversations and build theory around them with resolve, we thank Urvashi Butalia, who not only ran with our initial 30-page pitch with excitement, but also stayed deeply supportive and patient as we worked on the manuscript over the past year. Responding to her feedback and suggestions over the course of the project made this a better manuscript, and Zubaan is a perfect home for a book such as this.

Institutional homes have been central to grounding each of us as we took many flights of intellectual fancy (and actual flights to see each other), and for this luxury we are grateful to the administration and our colleagues at Council for Social Development, Hyderabad and Delhi, NYU Abu Dhabi, and UC-Irvine School of Law. This book also benefitted from being workshopped and presented in various parts and iterations at ICAS-MP meetings, CSD, Asmita Resource Centre for Women, the Law and Society Association meetings, and the Transnational Feminism Long Table at NYU Abu Dhabi. For comments, push back and creative extensions, we thank Eman Abdelhadi, Fawzia Afzal-Khan, May Al Dabbagh, Saba Brelvi, Rachel Brule, Gayatri Gopinath, Vrinda Grover, Ratna Appnender, Sujit Kumar Mishra, Maryam Khan, Nighat Bunny Said Khan, and Raya Lakova.

Families (chosen and otherwise) always get the last lines in acknowledgments such as these for a reason. They do the brutally magnanimous, yet somehow most easily invisible, work of keeping us whole. To our humans across three continents that have done this work (and helped us do ours), we owe a debt of gratitude that we can never repay. Theyve joked rather than be mad about our absentmindedness at dinners and birthdays, fed us and let us be as our silent selves worked in rooms of our own together and apart in Abu Dhabi, California, Madras, and Secunderabad. They have found ways, oftentimes by just existing, to make us see larger pictures so we could be more precise at the more intimate frames. We hope they know we are grateful. But if our work has taught us anything, it is that recall and voicing credit matters. None of this would be worth anything without them. We are so glad they are not just our imagined communities. This work is dedicated to them.

INTRODUCTION

The Constitutional Imagination and Gender Regimes

On 24 August 2017, a nine-judge bench in the judgment of the Supreme Court of India in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy & Ors vs. Union of India (Puttaswamy) held that the right to privacy is a fundamental right under the Constitution.

This introduction consists of four parts: the first section attempts to provide a situated account of Indian history and culture as a counterpoint to the extremely reductionist renderings in courtroom conversations that have a bearing on the life and liberty of women, especially those belonging to sexual, religious, caste and ethnic minorities; the second opens out to a cursory view feminist explorations of the state and citizenship in order to suggest a deeper understanding of the relationship between the Constitution and the state, as it constitutes gender regimes, even while affirming rights; the third looks at debates on religion and minorities that provide the context for a gendered elaboration of rights before, in, and beyond