Abstract
In the indenture-resistance narratives of the early twentieth century, a pivotal and socially evocative theme was the degradation of women’s sexual mores, a discourse sustained through exemplars of indentured women, and which provided a counter-narrative to the colonial positioning of indentured women as “sexual mercenaries”. Recent research has also challenged the predominantly negative portrayal of indentured women in colonial discourse; however, the discursive emphasis remains on presenting women as individualised beings. The discourse thus fails to engage with another recurring colonial theme, which positioned indentured women as “negligent mothers”. This chapter addresses the significant gap in the field of indentured women’s agency through its attention to women’s motherhood discourse. The research applies an indenture-centred methodology, Narrativization Analysis Framework (Gounder 2011) to provide a critical analysis of two women’s life stories on motherhood and childhood experiences on the indentured plantations. The study demonstrates that within these subaltern narratives, the women resist the hegemonic “veil of dishonour” via positionings of women as mothers vis-a-vis others within social networks to appropriate cause and effect, praise and blame for events in situated time and space. Through the analysis of women as relational beings, the study develops a typology of resistance strategies that women utilised to negotiate agency as mothers within the indenture plantation world.
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Gounder, F. (2020). Gender Performativity in Subaltern Life Stories: Changing Discourses of Indentured Women as Mothers and Labourers. In: Pande, A. (eds) Indentured and Post-Indentured Experiences of Women in the Indian Diaspora. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1177-6_2
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