(De)constructing Gender?
Women laborers and building site photography in western India, 1850-1990
The first OMHI publication is out! This conference paper was part of the themed session "Construction Labour in Times of Crisis," organized by Christine Wall and Linda Clarke and chaired by Paolo Tombesi at ETH Zurich. The peer-reviewed conference proceedings are available in open access, and the paper can be read on the OMHI website (link in bio). The paper is part of the 2024 volume *Construction Matters: Proceedings of the 8th International Congress on Construction History*.
Abstract
In India women, both historically and today, form a considerable part of the labor force in construction projects. Official records, such as colonial building specifications and twentieth-century industry reports contain normative descriptions of women, mostly associating them with 'unskilled' work. Seeking to leverage the potential of photography to 'spring leaks' to alternative viewpoints, this paper studies photographic evidence from building sites in western India for the compliance with or challenging of gender norms. The study draws upon four sets of images of railways and road construction work which offer snapshots of the period before and after Independence in 1947. Photographs are contextualized with contemporary sources, to simultaneously question the position of women on the building site and their representation in the historical record. The findings suggest that gendered task divisions in infrastructure construction–though more dynamic than has often been assumed–have changed little over time. Yet photographic depictions of women vary considerably as visual tropes evolved. The paper reveals how the depiction or absence of women in photographs of construction work is related to gendered labor divisions, building site regimes, the production contexts of the photographs, as well as to evolutions in the medium of photography itself.
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