Unveiling Gender Negotiation in Everyday Life

-A notable conceptualisation of gender, as advanced by Candace West and Don H Zimmerman (1987), is to view it in terms of routine acco­mplish­ment embedded in the everyday inter­actions. The focus thus shifts more towards interactional and institutional arenas as the “doing” of gender is a situated doing, in the presence of others who are assumed to be involved in its production and reproduction. It is then an outcome of certain social situations that in turn further legitimises such arr­ange­ments and fundamental societal divi­sions. Against this backdrop, the article exa­mines the evolving gender experiences and changing social milieu in ­rural Haryana with respect to the everyday experiences of women, by particularly focusing on the changing notion of femininity as a result of the sports culture. It will further help to understand how the common sense notions of gender are being challenged and the ways in which cultural expectations that construct them are being transformed.

The study will briefly outline the theoretical interventions that followed regar­ding the (re)construction of gender. It will then examine the sociological and gender studies on sports with a brief review of liter­ature on gender construction in the context of the state of Haryana. Based upon these conceptual underpinnings, the findings of the fieldwork focus upon a unique development of the growing spo­rts culture among women. Given the larger social fabric of the region where women have fought tough battles of survival and resistance, their entry into the arena of spo­rts deserves close and careful attention.