Risky Routes, Safe Suspicions: Gender, Class, and Cabs in Hyderabad, India

Abstract

Abstract A robust body of literature documents how women manage their self-presentation and perceptions of sexual risk when navigating city spaces. Yet we know less about how these strategies and tactics interact with existing class relations in society. This study investigates how, in the metropolitan city of Hyderabad in India, upwardly mobile women who commute via ride-share apps and lower-class men employed as drivers navigate the temporarily shared space of the car ride within the broader context of growing public anxiety around women’s safety in the city. Drawing on interview data and participant observation, I show two empirical patterns: 1) women commuters and men cabdrivers each view the other through the lens of suspicion as relatively more powerful than themselves; and 2) while women construct men drivers as sexually rapacious and dangerous, men understand the upwardly mobile woman commuter as entitled and abusive of her class power. I argue that competing understandings of risk exacerbate social distance and reproduce class and gender hierarchies between men drivers and women commuters. I suggest that the desire for safety vocalized by women passengers, while understandable, seems to rest on a set of processes that further pathologize and “otherize” the lower-class male subject.