Speaker: Dr. Yaffa Truelove 

Abstract: 

Over the last decade, a growing number of North Indian cities have been declared “waterless,” referring to the temporary stoppage of piped water delivery for days or weeks on end. While receiving widespread media attention for these moments of water crisis – with newspapers often showing images of middle-class residents queuing in long lines at off-grid water sources – urban “waterlessness” is an everyday reality for working class residents who altogether lack access to the centralized network. These residents piece together fragmented and off-grid infrastructures as a normative practice, enabling water to flow to homes and across neighborhoods, maintaining city life. Through conceptualizing bodies as part of infrastructure, this research traces the ways the social and material work of the body helps to build, develop, and maintain cities and their water networks in North India. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to infrastructure studies, I specifically show how gendered/casted/classed bodies act as part of urban infrastructure through the quotidian practices and labor of finding and circulating water to households in Delhi, Mohali, and Shimla. By examining when and how bodies become “internalized” as part of infrastructural networks, this research aims to render visible often overlooked dimensions of infrastructure and our analytic view of it. I argue that conceptualizing the body as infrastructure helps make visible 1) the embodied labor, maintenance and care work that subsidizes and enables infrastructural assemblages and networks, 2) the socio-political processes and forces that produce the necessity for particular gendered /casted/racialized/classed bodies to act as infrastructure in the first place, and 3) situated forms of infrastructural violence that emerge from everyday practices that enable water’s circulation in cities.