Articulating a life worth living: the affective morality of married women’s suicide tales in Delhi-NCR

Thesis

Indian women's suicide s account for over a third of female suicides globally, yet this phenomenon is mostly unknown and has yet to enter mainstream discourses within the country (India State Level Disease Burden Initiative Suicide Collaborators 2018; Mayer 2016a). Through an ethnographic study set in the country’s National Capital Region (NCR), this thesis analyses urban women’s narratives about observed or known instances of suicide. Such suicide narratives act as a space for women to reflect on the worth wholeness of gendered lives.

Paying attention to ‘what moves’ women emotionally and ‘what matters’ to them in recounting their stories of life and wilful death, the thesis traces how women deploy specific affects such as desire, care, and feelings of precariousness in narrating both suicide stories and their lived experiences (Lutz 2017). The use of such affects enables them to make ethical comments on public discourses about what constitutes ‘middle class Indian womanhood'. Such affects also become a medium through which women subvert, critique, or uphold dominant narratives that either strip worth from or bolster the meaningfulness of the lives they are living. Moreover, the use of emotions, sentiments, and sensations, in women’s suicide stories, can draw attention to gendered suffering or obscure it. The suicide story, thus, emerges as a space where women can exercise their agency to make moral claims about their lives that question existing gender relations, evaluate prevailing social ethics, and comment on gendered suffering.

Authors: Krishan, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-kq658pb08
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: India; storytelling; suicide; evocative ethnography; gender; affect theory; middle-class
• Subjects: Anthropology; India; Gender; Suicide; Feminist anthropology