Madhuparna Sen (2024)

My research explores the lives of single women, living and working in Mumbai, India. It seeks to understand the complex interconnections between women’s aspirations for ‘work’ and their desires for consumption, pleasure, joy and intimacy. I conceptualise single, here, as a broad category that comprises of different lifeworlds that exist beyond the structures of marriage, including those of never-married, divorced, separated women, and of those identifying as queer. In my research I attempt to interrogate how single women’s lives hold up alternative potentialities in a social context characterised by compulsory heterosexual marriage. I explore how ‘work’ itself becomes a mechanism that helps sustain singleness and the deferral of marriage – not just financially but also in enabling the formation of affective repertoires and discourses around pleasure and joy, more so in the increasingly globalised, ‘open’-economy of contemporary India. My PhD is funded by the Cambridge Trust where I have been awarded the Smuts Cambridge International Scholarship.

Prior to this, I studied sociology in Presidency University, Kolkata (Bachelors) and the University of Delhi (Masters). I was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship from the UGC, Ministry of Education, Government of India.