2024
Gendered Money and Relational Work: Women’s Money and Labor in Matrimonial Disputes in India
By Upasana Garnaik
Abstract:
What is the meaning and role of women’s money in matrimonial disputes? Economic sociologists have challenged the notion that money is uniform and fungible. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I highlight the legal and familial mechanisms through which money becomes gendered. By integrating concepts from economic sociology on relational work and Daniel’s (1984) concept of invisible labor, I conceptualize “invisible money”. By doing so, I show how gendering of money in family disputes renders women’s money invisible. This article expands on the meaning of relational work to include institutional relational work i.e., how institutions outside the interpersonal dynamics distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate claims and have an effect on women’s material reality. Therefore, this study provides new evidence and broadens our understanding of the social meaning of money, the temporality in relational work and highlights the gendered nature of relational work and money itself.
Keywords: Relational work, Gender, Household labor, Economic Sociology, India
About the author:
Upasana Garnaik is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research interests are in gender, law and economic sociology particularly examining women’s experiences in family disputes in India. Upasana received her LLM from Duke Law School and has worked in New Delhi, India as a lawyer and taught at the Jindal Global Law School.