Taanya Kapoor is a final year doctoral researcher at the Department of International Development, Oxford, with an interdisciplinary background in journalism, politics and development studies. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of gender, class, state and society. Her DPhil research focuses on the contradictions of modern daughterhood in middle and upper middle-class India, exploring the persistence of son preference and discrimination against daughters in educated, affluent families. She has worked previously as a consultant for the UNFPA and as a policy researcher at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi exploring implications of state policies from a sociological perspective. As a consultant to a Co-impact project at IIT Delhi, she has worked on the barriers faced by women in STEM at various levels and has published articles on the subject. Most recently, she was associated with the GendV project, based out of the University of Cambridge, which looked at the evolving forms of gender violence in the wake of urban transformation, in a comparative study of India and South Africa.
Current Research:
My DPhil research is an attempt to move beyond the framing of gender discrimination as a problem of poverty, as it has been traditionally understood in state and public discourses in the Indian context. Instead, it focuses on the contradictions of modern daughterhood in middle and upper middle-class India, in an attempt to explain the counter-intuitive persistence of son preference and discrimination against daughters among educated, affluent, urban Indian families.
In the context of changing gender relations, evolving intergenerational contracts, and new forms of dependency emerging between parents and daughters, my thesis looks at the costs and constraints that expectations of being a ‘good daughter’ places on young women, in return for the love and opportunities they have received from their parents. I use the notion of ‘good daughterhood’ as an analytical lens to explain how and why young Indian women continue to adhere to traditional patriarchal scripts despite increased agency, and to reflect more broadly on how change and continuity co-exist in Indian society, especially for young women, despite all the privileges they have been afforded. Ultimately, this thesis uses the intersections of class, gender and morality to understand change in contemporary India.
Areas of Study:
Gender, Son Preference, Daughterhood, Sociology, India, South Asia