The smell of nicotine hits me from two meters away. I read the signboard over the shop again – My Bakes Juice Shop[i], Taramani, is printed in bold letters of blue and red. My male friend and I edged our way in through the tiny gap between the counter and the bench where three men sat smoking. We make our way to a slightly better-lit but far filthier sitting area, surrounded by spilt drinks and cigarette butts. All around us are signs that say ‘NO SMOKING’, and yet this tiny juice shop has been converted into nothing more than a smoking joint. We order lime juice, at which the shop owner looks extremely surprised (he asks us to repeat the order twice). We may have been the first people in a long while to order juice from this juice shop, and I, the first woman in a long time to sit inside the shop.  As we settle down, we take a good look around at our surroundings and one of the first things that engulfs me, aside from the sickening smell of smoke is the suffocating ‘man-ness’ that overwhelms and slightly unsettles me. There is not a single other woman around. What has made this open to all juice shops so extremely male? Is it merely the widespread socio-historical disapproval surrounding women smoking (given that this shop has been so conveniently converted into a smoking area) or is there something else that causes this entirely? I sought to identify the elements that re-configure and transform a public, open space into a ‘male zone’.

Often, young women’s construction of smoking is viewed as both feminine and unfeminine, with unfemininity being associated with lack of cleanliness, disease, dirt, etc that revolve around the activity and femininity being associated with certain graceful mannerisms of smoking, power, wealth, female rebellion, etc. Cultural constructions of women smoking are also reconfigured by intersectional identities of social class and education (Triandafilidis et al., 2017) and drawing on this, it is not uncommon to see women in college smoking. The general attitude toward women smoking has changed very much in the last couple of years and it is no longer regarded as this is more common among women in state institutions than in independent ones (“Smoking among Women College Students,” 1925). Moreover, most of the women I have come across in college are quite open and unabashed about their indulgence in social smoking. What other possible reason could there be for the glaring absence of women in this place?

The shop was pretty dimly lit, with lights only on the very inside and the entire stretch of the road being dark and unsettling at night. The lack of hygiene in the shop and the overwhelming physical presence of men in such a tiny space with their body odour and general loudness are likely major factors that keep women away. Research highlights that women users of public spaces see themselves as illegitimate users at night; moreover, women feel uncomfortable in male-dominated spaces including cigarette shops, primarily for the fear of harassment and are often accompanied by men to such areas if at all they need to be there (Viswanath & Mehrotra, 2007). Any feeling of insecurity on my side was often slightly softened by frequent glances at my male friend who kept reiterating, ‘Let’s leave now.’ The physicality of this public, open and accessible-to-all-juice shop and its constituents can be confirmed as one of the primary reasons women steer clear of the place.

Eventually, another woman walks in with her male friend who purchases cigarettes as she walks in to grab a cool drink from the cooler. Her friend offers her a cigarette, she lights it and immediately walks out and away from the vicinity of the shop and the crowd of men there.  Her friend followed her and I walked out behind them to see where they had gone too. They stand a little away from the shop, engaged in soft conversation, smoking together almost as though they had entered some sort of a private space. Why hadn’t this woman stuck around the shop? She wasn’t ‘embarrassed’ or ‘ashamed’ of her smoking for she lit her cigarette very publicly. Her leaving, I deduced, likely had to do with the ‘male gaze’ – literally and figuratively- and the conversion of this space into a male-dominated enclave. I noticed several men staring at her unabashedly as she walked in, in the same manner I was stared at. Long stares, cursory glances, frequent looks, top-down examinations – she was spared of none. Despite the lack of conversation among the men smoking, their rugged unruly appearance, their haphazard occupation of space in the tiny shop, their unregulated 360-degree wide manner of blowing out smoke and most importantly the stares of men more frequently associated with objectification and condescension are likely to have made her conscious of her security – this can also be one of the reasons she had a male companion with her. Studies have often catered to this female perception of men and the male gaze in public spaces (Roy & Bailey, 2021).  These stares were not just exclusive of college students, but even of the old men and the police officer who walked in -ironically, the famed male gaze is not infrequent of ‘reliable’ law enforcers either.  Women often make constant efforts to negotiate such conditions through prevention, protection and avoidance and internalize the process of negotiation instead of reclaiming their rights (ibid) – here, variations of all three have been employed by the woman.

The gendering of space is also most notable in the distinctions that associate the public and private with the binary, with the public space being perceived as male and the private as female, and this results in social practices that project certain activities and spaces as male preserves (Hesse, 2020). In this case, smoking, which is common, open and accepted among both male and female college students in private settings –spatially or socially- has been employed to appropriate public space, the juice shop, into a masculine environment that prevents women from claiming her rights over what is inherently a public space. I vividly recollect one of my classmates, exclaiming out loud to several people, “I need to go to T-gate[ii] for a cigarette”, on getting his not-so-great marks for an exam, symbolic of the above argument. In this case, his going to a place like T-gate for a smoke was something that could even be paraded out loud, something you would hardly ever do as a woman for the conscious and consistent reminder of not just how smoking is traditionally disapproved but also publicly associated with a male space.

As Bourdieu says, belonging to a category is seen as the creation of a ‘spatially based homogenous grouping’ to enforce power structures in space. Here, the separation of women from men in a public space has thus been enforced through an overwhelming male presence or gaze and smoking, which has historically and symbolically been associated with masculinity and patriarchal power, notwithstanding the contemporary context of a college setting where both male and female smokers are not uncommon.

References:

Hesse, S. (2020). Gendered Spaces in India Processes of Claiming Space through Feminist Street Art in Delhi. https://www.uni-potsdam.de/fileadmin/projects/wci/Gendered_Spaces_in_India_Hesse.pdf

Roy, Sanghamitra & Bailey, Ajay. (2021). Safe in the City? Negotiating Safety, Public Space and the Male Gaze in Kolkata, India. Cities. 117.

Smoking Among Women College Students. (1925). Christian Education, 8(4): 165–172.

Triandafilidis, Z., Ussher, J. M., Perz, J., & Huppatz, K. (2017). Doing and Undoing Femininities: An Intersectional Analysis of Young Women’s Smoking. Feminism and Psychology, 27(4): 465-488.

Viswanath, K., & Mehrotra, S. T. (2007). “Shall We Go Out?” Women’s Safety in Public Spaces in Delhi. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17): 1542–1548.

[i] ‘My Bakes’ is a juice shop outside Taramani Gate, one of the three gates of IIT Madras.

[ii] Taramani gate

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Prarthana Banarji is a second-year student pursuing an integrated MA in Development Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.