Counseling Women

Julia Kowalski

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press 2022

Counseling Women

Kinship Against Violence in India

Julia Kowalski

https://doi.org/10.9783/9781512822830

Overview
Contents

About this book

Drawing on ethnographic research at counseling centers in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Julia Kowalski reassesses Western liberal feminism’s notions of what it means to have agency and retheorizes the role of interdependence in gendered violence and inequality as not only a site of vulnerability but a potential source of strength.

Women’s rights activists around the world have commonly understood gendered violence as the product of so-called traditional family structures, from which women must be liberated. Counseling Women contends that this perspective overlooks the social and cultural contexts in which women understand and navigate their relationships with kin.

This book follows frontline workers in India, called family counselors, as they support women who have experienced violence at home in the context of complex shifting legal and familial systems. Drawing on ethnographic research at counseling centers in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Julia Kowalski shows how an individualistic notion of women’s rights places already vulnerable women into even more precarious positions by ignoring the reality of the social relations that shape lives within and beyond the family. Thus, rather than focusing on attaining independence from kin, family counselors in India instead strive to help women cultivate relationships of interdependence in order to reimagine family life in the wake of violence. Counselors mobilize the beliefs, concepts, and frameworks of kinship to offer women interactive strategies to gain agency within the family, including multigenerational kin networks encompassing parents, in-laws, and other extended family. Through this work, kinship becomes a resource through which people imagine and act on new familial futures.

In viewing this reliance on kinship as part of, rather than a deviation from, global women’s rights projects, Counseling Women reassesses Western liberal feminism’s notions of what it means to have agency and what constitutes violence, and retheorizes the role of interdependence in gendered violence and inequality as not only a site of vulnerability but a potential source of strength.

Author information

KowalskiJulia:

Julia Kowalski is assistant professor of global affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre DameJulia Kowalski is Assistant Professor of Global Affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.

Reviews

Counseling Women is an effective, enlightening, and unique book that is delicately written, and persuasively argued.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Note on Transliteration Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Neutral Experts: Counseling between the Family and the State Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
2. Adjusting and Explaining: The Multiple Voices of Counseling Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	60
3. Law’s Single Voice: Counseling in the Context of Domestic Violence Legislation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
4. Careful Speech: Generating Change through Seva Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
5. Labeling Violence versus Ordering Interdependence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Pages
- Main content: 240
Keywords: gender domestic violence; India; family; kinship; counseling; mediation; NGO; interdependence; women’s rights; care; agency; patriarchal kinship systems; Asian and South Asian studies; human rights; Jaipur; western liberal feminism; ethnography; multigenerational; in-laws

eBook

Published: October 11, 2022
ISBN: 9781512822830