‘Break the Cage’: Women’s Body Politics of Respectability and Autonomy in India and Ireland

This thesis unpacks young women’s mobilisations for autonomy through a close asymmetric comparative study of Pinjra Tod in India (against restrictions on women’s mobility) and UCD for Choice’s movement to Repeal the 8th in Ireland (against the constitutional ban on abortions). It unpacks the ways in which the body politics of respectability underpin and operate in these feminist struggles for autonomy. It pluriversalises feminist scholarships on the politics of respectability and bodily autonomy through a theoretical triangulation of Indian postcolonial feminist literature, Irish women’s studies and Black feminist/womanist scholarship from the United States. It uses live methods as a way to map the different ‘cartographies of struggle’ (Mohanty, 2003) in order to understand and visibilise the place of respectability politics in Repeal the 8th through the experiences of young feminist student activists in India, thereby promoting feminist conversations across geographies. It seeks to imagine a transperipheral feminist future (Penney, 2020) beyond issue campaigns by living upto Audre Lorde’s (1987) call for ‘building on the edges of each others’ battles’.