Jakimow, Tanya2025-12-162025-12-161554-477XORCID:/0000-0002-8780-1753/work/194842873https://hdl.handle.net/1885/733794890In 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.This research is funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, grant number FT190100247. Fieldwork was conducted with the assistance of an NGO in Dehradun. I am very grateful for their long-term partnership, support, and friendship. Initial ideas have been refined through my conversations with Sonia Palmieri and the participants of the European Conference on Politics in Gender, Ghent, 2024, with special mention to Erin Tolley who provided valuable comments as the discussant on our panel. The text was nuanced and enhanced through the feedback of an anonymous reviewer, to whom I am very grateful. Any oversights or absences remain my own. Thank you to Michael Fitzgerald for putting together this special issue on an important theme, and for inviting me to take part. My sincere gratitude to the inspiring Parshads and karyakarta of Dehradun who gave their time and shared their knowledge for this project.19enPublisher Copyright: © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.anthropologyelectoral politicsIndiainequitable incorporationwomen’s representationWomen’s Inequitable Incorporation into Representative Democracy: An Anthropology of Gendered Exploitation in Local Politics in India2025-09-1710.1080/1554477X.2025.2552571105016597049