Alternative Readings of Spaces: Spatial Resistance Practices by Thiruvananthapuram’s Coastal Women, India

The coastal community in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital city of India’s southern state of Kerala, is seen as an outlier, both geographically and socio-economically, within the state of Kerala’s Model of Development. The Indigenous community in this area, mostly Mukkuvar–Christian (Latin Catholics), have their origin in Dalit conversions and faces caste-based discrimination and ‘othering’ within society. The women in these communities face marginalisation at the intersections of gender, caste and class. State-led development projects, such as port projects, further marginalise the community, threatening their livelihood, social practices and housing. This thesis responds to a context where coastal women’s agency in responding to oppression has been marginalised through narratives of passivity and victimhood, not only in their resistance practices but also in their agency to narrate their stories of resistance. By critically analysing state development narratives, problematising modernity/coloniality in India, and using a decolonial-feminist lens, I centre the lived experiences of those marginalised in narratives to understand their spatial resistance practices. Guided by feminist and decolonial theories, urban and resistance studies and a relational onto-epistemological stance, I use narrative inquiry with spatial investigation (storytelling with counter-mapping) to translate interlocutors' spatial practices and spaces of resistance. I study their spatial practices across two modalities of resistance, the everyday (livelihood and housing) and the spectacular (protests against a state-corporate-led development project in the city at Vizhinjam), to understand women’s agency in responding to their marginalisation and oppression. Agency is understood as a situated, relational capacity to act and resistance as practices of agency to recreate and reconfigure spaces, informing alternative readings of spaces. To analyse their roles and practices, I conceptualise intimate resistance as the embodied practices of coastal women’s agency through bodily and place-based relational assertions in space. This thesis is grounded in data from spatial and ethnographic methodologies. I conducted in-depth interviews, walking and talking interviews and spatial mapping with 39 interlocutors, primarily women, including fish vending women, activists and community leaders, and observations from across the coastal villages in Thiruvananthapuram. The key contribution of this thesis is an integrated and intersectional analysis of women’s spatial resistance practices across the three domains (livelihood, housing and public protest). This understanding reconceptualises resistance practices temporally, spatially and historically, centring women’s agency. It critically analyses state development narratives and centres decoloniality through the women's narratives and practices to inform alternative readings of spaces.