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Abstract

This qualitative study examines how “mankeeping”—invisible emotional labor— undermines women’s political autonomy and sense of belonging in rural India, despite the implementation of gender equality policies. Women often perform unrecognized emotional, interpretive, and relational labor to maintain intimate relationships and community cohesion. Drawing on contemporary concepts of intersectionality, epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and the “third shift,” this study systematically employs a reflexive, narrative inquiry approach focused on Varsha, a forty-five-year-old lower-caste woman from Uttar Pradesh, India. The study reveals how her daily care work, such as caregiving, managing household dynamics, and navigating community expectations, affects her access to rights and resistance to subjugation. These burdens, compounded by gender, caste, and rural marginalization, also reflect how rural women’s emotional labor reduces their opportunities for political participation. The reflexivity method integrates my position as a researcher with secondary data from ethnographic studies about gendered labor. The analysis highlights resistance strategies, such as women’s participation in self-help groups, drawing on studies of how married women navigate patriarchal barriers amid modernization. Additionally, the study emphasizes how women align with collective care and resistance economies after becoming landholders. By investigating one rural Indian woman’s voice, this study extends feminist scholarship by foregrounding the political costs of childrearing, contributes to studies of epistemic injustice, and illuminates discourses related to gender equality and labor recognition in the Global South.

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