Understanding Exclusionary Inclusion

Chapters 4 utilizes interview and participant observation data to focus on Sikh women’s lived experience of exclusionary inclusion in civil society and the home. Chapter 4 demonstrates how research participants construct the category of woman in relation to home and marriage, and how they naturalize exclusionary inclusion through the following unwritten and informal rules: (1) women’s rights and duties, (2) public policies, (3) women’s religiosity, (4) women’s purity, and (5) women as perpetual outsiders. A majority of research participants understand gender equality and religious autonomy as competing goals, which makes it more difficult to achieve equality. The ethnographic data reveals that Sikh women do not experience civil society as an uncoerced space of voluntary associational life, and they do not experience the home as a place of safety, security, and respect. Rather they experience exclusionary inclusion in both these spaces.