Parliament as a Workplace: Dilemmas of Vernacularisation and Professionalisation

Abstract

In this article, we engage with recent calls to research parliaments as gendered workplaces, which build on earlier international discursive turn and institutional reform initiatives towards gender-sensitive parliaments. Our engagement explores this workplace framing and how well it translates across pluralised, global parliamentary paradigms. We develop our arguments with a special focus on the Indian parliament as a gendered institution. Viewing the parliament as a gendered workplace through an intersectional lens, we show how gender dynamics and institutional configurations of power are embedded in class, race, and caste inequalities but can shift over time through reflexive challenges. We organise our discussion through two approaches to studying parliaments as workplaces—vernacular and professional—to argue that paying attention to these approaches critically can contribute to sensitising the workplace debate to a more capacious, theoretically nuanced reading of parliaments as more gender-sensitive, gender-inclusive, and gender-responsive representative institutions. In outlining the case for paying attention to the vernacular critically, we ask whether such an understanding can help to effectively bridge local and global understandings of parliaments as workplaces and institutionalise them. In studying professionalisation, we examine the paradox that professionalisation could lead to the depoliticisation of parliaments, which might affect the nature of gender-sensitivity that is being institutionalised. This analysis thus brings together institutional, postcolonial, and intersectional strands of work to think anew about gender-equal political practices in representative bodies.