(Dis)empowering the feminine? Spatializing the interlace of gender-class-neoliberal managerialism in a women-only café in India

Abstract

Using the Lefebvrian triad, we explore spatial organizing of classed-gendered work and working bodies in a cafe space that emerges from urbanized claims of empowering “rural poor women” to become entrepreneurs by employing them in a cafe. Our critical-interpretive ethnography analyses the process of installing a neoliberal-managerial path along which foodwork and working bodies are hierarchized and disciplined, creating spatialized hegemonic gendered positionalities interlaced with elite urban-working class rural binaries. The womanized workers came to embody the binaries and the dialectical contradictions they created, yet performing alternative femininities in the free spaces and times in the cafe.