TY - JOUR
T1 - Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship
T2 - Water, Infrastructure, and Gender in the Global South
AU - Sultana, Farhana
N1 - Funding Information:
I am grateful to four anonymous reviewers for feedback that helped to improve this article and to Annals Section Editor James McCarthy over the multiyear gestation period of the article marred by unforeseen setbacks after the article was first submitted in 2017. Most of all, I am deeply indebted to residents of Korail, Banani, and Gulshan for allowing me access to their lives and stories. I also thank officials of DSK, DWASA, WaterAid, World Bank, BRAC, Dhaka City Corporation, UNICEF, and Dhaka University for their time and assistance. All errors remain mine.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by American Association of Geographers.
PY - 2020/9/2
Y1 - 2020/9/2
N2 - Scholars have demonstrated that citizenship is tied to water provision in megacities of the Global South where water crises are extensive and the urban poor often do not have access to public water supplies. Drawing from critical feminist scholarship, this article argues for the importance of analyzing the connections between embodied intersectionalities of sociospatial differences (in this instance, gender, class, and migrant status) and materialities (of water and water infrastructure) and their relational effects on urban citizenship. Empirical research from the largest informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as surrounding affluent neighborhoods, demonstrates that differences in water insecurity and precarity not only reinforce heightened senses of exclusion among the urban poor but affect their lived citizenship practices, community mobilizations, and intersectional claims-making to urban citizenship, recognition, and belonging through water. Spatial and temporal dimensions of materialities of water and infrastructure intersect with embodiments of gender, class, and migrant status unevenly in the urban waterscape to create differentiated urban citizens in spaces of abjection and dispossession. The article argues that an everyday embodied perspective on intersectionalities of urban citizenship enriches the scholarship on the water–citizenship nexus.
AB - Scholars have demonstrated that citizenship is tied to water provision in megacities of the Global South where water crises are extensive and the urban poor often do not have access to public water supplies. Drawing from critical feminist scholarship, this article argues for the importance of analyzing the connections between embodied intersectionalities of sociospatial differences (in this instance, gender, class, and migrant status) and materialities (of water and water infrastructure) and their relational effects on urban citizenship. Empirical research from the largest informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as surrounding affluent neighborhoods, demonstrates that differences in water insecurity and precarity not only reinforce heightened senses of exclusion among the urban poor but affect their lived citizenship practices, community mobilizations, and intersectional claims-making to urban citizenship, recognition, and belonging through water. Spatial and temporal dimensions of materialities of water and infrastructure intersect with embodiments of gender, class, and migrant status unevenly in the urban waterscape to create differentiated urban citizens in spaces of abjection and dispossession. The article argues that an everyday embodied perspective on intersectionalities of urban citizenship enriches the scholarship on the water–citizenship nexus.
KW - citizenship
KW - embodied
KW - infrastructure
KW - intersectionality
KW - urban
KW - water
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U2 - 10.1080/24694452.2020.1715193
DO - 10.1080/24694452.2020.1715193
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85081003563
SN - 2469-4452
VL - 110
SP - 1407
EP - 1424
JO - Annals of the American Association of Geographers
JF - Annals of the American Association of Geographers
IS - 5
ER -