1 - Partly Free: Gender Roles and Women's Sexuality in Rural India

This paper aims to describe the mixture of change and intransigence in village life in rural India over the last two decades from the perspective of gender, and discusses the values and beliefs underlying this dynamic. Recently, various transformations have been witnessed in villages in Bihar State, India. With the expansion of girls' education, more women in these villages now work in diverse fields outside of agriculture. Some women confidently express gratitude for the unprecedented freedom they now enjoy. On the other hand, some discourses and customs relating to gender roles, access to technology, and women’s sexuality persist or are even reinforced today. In proximity to a room where a smartphone is being charged, women utilize cow dung fuels for cooking and wash the entire family's laundry in a bucket. While their husbands use motorcycles to complete local errands, female schoolteachers and NGO workers have lengthy commutes via unreliable buses. With regard to embedded discourse, the belief in the superiority of the caste-based arranged marriage leads people to speak in negative tones when discussing a teacher's interreligious marriage against her parents' wishes, which reinforces the cultural norms of parental control over women's sexuality and perpetuates these values. Such absence of change manifests the entrenched nature of the cultural values that govern women's everyday lives. Nonetheless, these values are not impervious to change. As observed in the gradual softening of attitudes toward the teacher’s interreligious marriage, deviant behaviors and the negotiations of interpretations can bring about unforeseen shifts in social norms.