Women’s Inequitable Incorporation into Representative Democracy: An Anthropology of Gendered Exploitation in Local Politics in India

Abstract

In India, women participate in electoral politics in large numbers, making exclusion a poor basis to explain female political underrepresentation. Inequitable incorporation excavates the terms of women’s participation, experienced as exploitation. Ethnographic research reveals the affective value women produce, the mechanisms through which their political labor is invisibilized, devalued, or coded as nonpolitical, and how the political capital women generate is appropriated or accumulated for the benefit of male political elite. Three temporal registers of experience–immediate/affective, reflective, and anticipatory/fantastical–indicate why women consent to their inequitable incorporation into democratic politics, thereby contributing to the persistence of male political dominance.