Chapter published in:
Identity Struggles: Evidence from workplaces around the world
Edited by Dorien Van De Mieroop and Stephanie Schnurr
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 69] 2017
► pp. 147–164

Indian women at work

Struggling between visibility and invisibility

| IIM Indore
| KU Leuven
Over the last two decades, an increasing number of women have joined the Indian workforce, but, as Indian society is still largely patriarchal, they struggle for full membership in the professional ingroup. Drawing on Lewis and Simpson’s ‘(In)visibility Vortex’ (2012), we investigate from a discursive angle how these concepts are talked into being in interviews with female Indian professionals. Zooming in on one interview, we found that the interviewee’s stories demonstrate a general tendency towards ‘invisibility’, but they also uncover gender-based boundaries within the male dominated workplace. Finally, we also discuss how the interviewee’s transgression of such boundaries clashes with Indian cultural norms of acceptable female behavior, and instead of leading to inclusion in the workplace, it actually leads to ‘visibility’ and an emphasis on the interviewee’s otherness in identity terms.
Keywords: India, gender, narratives, interviews, identity, (in)visibility vortex, inclusion, ingroup, otherness, narrative analysis
Published online: 26 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.69.08cha
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