Description
This paper examines women’s protest beyond visible forms of mobilisation such as marches, sit-ins, and direct confrontation, asking how survival itself can become a political act under conditions of gendered and climate precarity. Set in rural India, the paper focuses on the body as a central site through which power is exercised and resisted: the body that is tired, hungry, menstruating, ageing, exposed to heat, denied rest, made responsible for care, or forced to continue labour under conditions of environmental stress. Rather than treating women’s bodies only as objects of vulnerability, regulation, or harm, the paper asks how embodied practices of endurance, refusal, care, and continued presence may become forms of protest against social, institutional, and environmental injustice.
Empirically, the paper draws on qualitative research with rural community women living under harsh climate conditions in India. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with women selected through purposive criterion-based sampling, and analysed through thematic analysis, the paper examines how women narrate the bodily, emotional, and social labour of surviving climate stress. Their accounts show how heat, water scarcity, food insecurity, livelihood strain, and health neglect are not experienced as isolated environmental problems, but as deeply gendered conditions that reorganise care, mobility, work, rest, and bodily autonomy.
Preliminary findings suggest that women’s everyday survival practices can become politically meaningful when they contest the structures that make their bodies overworked, disposable, unsafe, or invisible. Women described fetching and managing water, protecting family health, seeking care despite institutional neglect, continuing paid and unpaid labour through exhaustion, sustaining informal support networks, and insisting on bodily dignity as everyday acts of negotiation and refusal. The paper does not romanticise survival or collapse all coping into resistance. Instead, it asks: under what conditions does survival become protest?