Meghna Mohandas

For migrant communities, rental housing is an important infrastructure to establish themselves in new cities (Naik, 2015). However, for Indigenous migrant women from the Northeast Indian borderlands and the Himalayan foothills employed as beauty parlour and spa (intimate economy) workers in metropolitan Indian cities, the ‘private’ spheres of their rental homes are ‘genderscapes’ (Datta, 2016), i.e., spaces where they are subjected to racial harassment, sexual violence, and increased surveillance by landlords and neighbours (Bhattacharyya & Pulla, 2020). It has been established that marginalised communities experience widespread discrimination while accessing housing in urban regions around the world (Rolnik, 2014). Rental housing in particular has received considerable attention in urban planning research as it is a key resource for people, particularly migrants, to establish themselves in new cities. However, ‘othering’ in the context of rental housing has predominantly been studied from the perspective of discrimination (Naik, 2019; Pati, 2022). In parallel literature, feminist sociologists and geographers have argued that gendered violence against women manifests primarily inside the private sphere of ‘home’ (Fluri & Piedalue, 2017). Yet, this strand of research has largely focused on experiences of domestic violence (eg. Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005; Clough et.al, 2014; Zufferey et.al, 2016) rather than the process of ‘othering’. For planners to build safer and more inclusive cities for Indigenous migrant women employed as intimate economy workers, an analysis is urgently needed of the manners in which rental housing experiences are shaped by sexualized and racialized forms of ‘othering’ perpetuated by people who are not intimate partners inside the ‘private’ sphere of the ‘home’. This is the knowledge gap I seek to address. Indigenous migrant women employed as intimate economy workers have been hyper-sexualised, advertised by employers as providing ‘Southeast Asian aesthetic labour’ and stereotyped as ‘loose’ and ‘sexually promiscuous’ by mainland Indians (Deori & Rajagopalan, 2018). Moral anxieties pertaining to their bodies have subjected them to ‘othering’ in urban India (Haokip, 2021). While this translates into racialised and sexualised violence in ‘public’ spaces such as streets (Puri, 2006) and their workplaces (McDuie-Ra, 2013), I focus specifically on how marginalisation manifests inside their rental houses. In addition to an asymmetric tenant-landlord relationship, hegemonic influence of Hindu nationalism has emboldened Hindu landlords and neighbours to perpetrate violence against people characterised as ‘threatening their culture’ (Das, 2006; Bernroider, 2018). I seek to analyse the role of this socio-political context in rendering ‘private’ rental houses of Indigenous migrant women as unsafe spaces. I use the term political ‘genderscapes’ to indicate how it is the politicisation of the bodies and intersectional identities of Indigenous migrant women that shape their rental houses as spaces where they experience racial discrimination, sexual violence, and control. I believe that this is an important topic to be studied as rental houses are key resources for migrant communities, and if planners are to plan for truly inclusive cities, we must extend our understanding of ‘othering’ beyond the public sphere and analyse the particular power dynamics manifesting within rental houses. I will pursue this research in Bengaluru, a metropolitan city that is one of the top six destinations for Indigenous migrant workers in India (The Hindu, 2021).