About

Priti Ramamurthy is a professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is a feminist political economist whose research focuses on questions of social reproduction—how marginalized individuals craft meaningful lives through daily and intergenerational processes of reproduction. Her work includes two major research studies: one titled 'City Lives, Rural Ties,' which explores the lived experiences of urban migrants in India and their ongoing connections to rural villages, and another examining the relationship between rural social reproduction and agrarian transformation in Telangana, India, over three decades. Ramamurthy has contributed to methodological advancements through her articulation of feminist commodity chain analysis, a framework for tracking value creation and gendered identities within global production. She has also co-edited and co-authored 'The Modern Girl Around the World,' a study on modernity, consumption, and globalization. Her research engages with themes of gender, labor, development, and transnational social processes, and she has received numerous fellowships and grants supporting her scholarly work.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Archaeology
• Biology
• Law
• Gender studies
• History

Selected publications

• Preface

  Feminist Studies · 2024-01-01

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• Biogeochemical evidence of the Oligocene and late Miocene–Pleistocene climatic variability from two deep sediment cores of the South China Sea

  Journal of Earth System Science · 2024-08-29 · 3 citations

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• Preface

  Feminist Studies · 2022-01-01

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  Preface Judith Kegan Gardiner, Ashwini Tambe, Attiya Ahmad, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Treva Lindsey, Kathryn Moeller, Bibiana Obler, Priti Ramamurthy, Matt Richardson, Lisa Rofel, Megan Sweeney, and Millie Thayer this is the fiftieth anniversary issue of Feminist Studies. We celebrate a half century of groundbreaking scholarship and research, creative expression, and political commentary. Since 1972, our founding year, women around the globe have gained considerably greater access to higher education, professional occupations, and political participation. But apparent advances for women have occurred in contradictory contexts to which we can too often be inattentive. In 1972, too many people in the United States had only begun to recognize its deeply entrenched heritage of racism, and the country was embroiled in a cruel and misguided imperialist war in Vietnam. Average wages were at an inflation-adjusted peak then, but increased inequality means that they have eroded since. And many technologies devised in past decades have contributed to a series of climate emergencies harming our planet. In other words, in celebrating the journal's past, we also look somewhat soberly toward the future in this issue. As we write in 2022, Iranian women and men are heroically protesting a repressive theocratic state's effort to strip them of their rights to education, work, and bodily autonomy. The Kurdish revolutionary slogan "Woman, life, freedom!"—is also an aspiration for others around the globe. For us in the United States, the terms "woman," "life," and "freedom" reverberate with questions. We now understand "women" as a vital [End Page 587] but ambiguous category variously dissected by old debates about culture versus biology and more recently divided by changes in our categories and systems of gender and sexuality. What "life" means is very differently interpreted by "pro-life" crusaders, advocates for women's reproductive choices, and again by those who decry humanity's arrogance in usurping the claims and opportunities of non-human entities. And "freedom" confronts the devastating persistence of wars and the too-feeble institutions dedicated to peace and justice. In the face of such challenges, the essays published in this issue clarify our categories, illuminate the struggles we face, and interrogate our efforts toward solutions. The first scholarly essay in this issue, Clare Hemmings's "'But I thought we'd already won that argument!': 'Anti-gender' Mobilizations, Affect, and Temporality" re-evaluates debates among feminists about "gender" and "sex." Tracing the "affective teleologies" in what she labels as the positive, "loss" and "return" narratives among feminists, Hemmings implicates her own position as also responsible for the separation of feminism and women's rights in the global field. Hemmings argues that we should return to Gayle Rubin's exposition of the sex/gender system that shows the co-constitution of gender and sex and its extension by Hazel Carby that demonstrates how the sex/gender system oppresses both those women who are exchangeable and those, like Black women—and Hemmings adds trans people and all others marginalized—who are coded as disposable. The stakes are high, she reminds us: we need to reconstruct an expansive feminist canon that does not inadvertently find our positions aligned with right-wing normative politics about sex difference, family, and nation. Robyn Wiegman, in her essay "Loss, Hope: The University in Ruins, Again," uses her signature clear-eyed approach to think through feminist power within contemporary universities. She addresses the "kinds of institutional power we already have and don't want to lose" as well as stressing the kinds of transformation that this political moment calls for beyond "issues of self-representation and non-complicity." She offers a sharp albeit pessimistic view of the current state of our field, recognizing the hazards of uncritical optimism. The essay also dwells on varied moments of apocalyptic thinking and refuses the "theological" ring of such framings. A more positive view of feminist scholarly collaboration and the advantages of women working together appears in the "Notes of [End Page 588] Appreciation" from authors published in this journal who join us in celebrating fifty years of publishing Feminist Studies. Gratifyingly, many of our authors thank the journal for its attentive and detailed review processes, and several authors indicate how publication in Feminist Studies helped start their...

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• The Gender of Value: Punctuated Violence and the Labor of Care

  Feminist Studies · 2021-01-01 · 6 citations

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  546 Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani The Gender of Value: Punctuated Violence and the Labor of Care Usha is the eldest daughter of a high-caste, Rajput family from a small village in eastern Uttar Pradesh in north India.1 She married into a family that owns three bighas (approximately 1.8 acres) of land. But no one in her marital family has tilled it for the last three generations . Usha's husband and her husband's younger brother have opted to tread a path that is increasingly commonplace for men of their generation and younger: they have chosen to migrate to a city. The land is cultivated by lower-caste sharecroppers. But it has not been sold. Even as the city's gravitational pull deepens, land retains its affective value. It is more than property. It is the guarantor of patriliny. It is an asset that gives, forms, anchors a sense of personhood in place. It is also a sentiment and a promise. And one that travels with the thousands of rural migrants who flock to India's cities every day, every month, every year. Usha, daughter of a communist party comrade who roamed nearby villages trying to organize agricultural laborers for the revolution that never came, has capitalized on the art of land to firm her foothold in the city. But more on this later. Usha's past still tugs. 1. All names are pseudonyms. Usha's family read and commented on this essay, and it is with their permission that we share it. We recognize gender identities and expressions do not necessarily align with those assigned at birth or presumed. The people we talked with identify and express themselves as cisgendered. Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani 547 Her communist father used to work in a munitions factory in Kolkata before he was summarily dismissed for trying to organize a union. He came home to their village in eastern Uttar Pradesh, severed from his factory wage and land poor, still flush with red zeal and still a Rajput, unable to stoop to agricultural wage labor to support his household. That task fell to Usha's mother, who lent out money—the provident fund her husband had earned as a migrant worker in the gun factory—to cultivators in the village and was paid interest in grain to feed her family of nine, two adults and seven children. A formidable woman, Usha's mother was beaten up several times by their Rajput neighbors, for talking out against these dominant agrarian upper caste men. Usha was eighteen when she married Dinesh Singh, who was a year older. Her father sold one bigha of land for the wedding. That Usha's marriage was arranged to a man, whom she had never seen, from a Rajput family in a village about twenty miles from hers, is not unusual.2 She entered her new joint family of eight and was quickly overpowered by a complex grammar—violence—that was to tattoo itself, painfully and indelibly, on Usha's being. As we will hear, her body, her memories, her conduct, her comportment all still bear the marks of her torment in the early years of marriage. Her mother-in-law, Usha says, was sharp-tongued (tez)3 and demanding. There was no room for empathy for a young girl of eighteen, wrenched from her natal home. The housework was punishing, and Usha was expected to do it all. After the wedding, her husband soon departed for Delhi, leaving Usha behind with her in-laws. This, too, is not unusual for the Hindi belt from which Usha hails.4 2. Caste is reproduced through kinship in India. In this part of the country, north India, in addition to caste endogamy—marrying within the same caste—the norm is village exogamy, that is, marrying into a village other than your own since a girls' village brethren are considered her kin. Patrilocality , patrilineality, and a corporate organization of households with several generations residing in the same household space characterize and solidify regional patriarchy. In translocal households, generations are split across village and city, with older generations, daughters...

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• A feminist commodity chain analysis of rural transformation in contemporary India

  2021-09-21 · 1 citations

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  Feminist commodity chain analysis – a methodology which tracks the creation of value in global commodity circuits – offers a more dynamic and nuanced study of rural transformation in contemporary India than the two opposing depictions of it as "agrarian crisis" or "rural resurgence." By developing a gender analysis of the changing dynamics of agriculture and rural lives on the ground, in one commodity chain, GM cotton seed, this chapter argues that caste and patriarchy, masculinities and femininities are being re-articulated by smallholder capitalists within their households in meaningful and positive, if contradictory, contested, and perplexing ways.

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• Special Issue on Feminism and Capitalism

  Feminist Studies · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

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  Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 479 7 preface 8 Why is feminism so good at understanding capitalism? Because gender, like capital, is never separate or pure in its expressions. Feminism has theorized gender as an intersecting system that configures and distributes power not just between female-identified and male-identified persons and within households, but also between classes and between producers and reproducers. It does so within and across these boundaries, and it questions the boundaries themselves. Always relational , feminism is adept at thinking about gender and capital as constitutive and in relation to difference—of sexuality and sex, race and caste, disability and debility, public and private, rural and urban, human and nonhuman animal, and Global North and Global South. Feminism is a critique of knowledge formations. This includes critiques of “classical ” Marxism and how capitalism is approached by the disciplines of history, economics, anthropology, geography, science, and by ethnic studies and area studies. Whether decolonial or postcolonial, anti-capitalist feminism challenges the telos of modernity by asking where women ’s liberation under capitalism dead-ends rather than progresses, and by questioning the Western-centrism of feminist knowledge production that does not scrutinize its own provenance. In its commitment to alternative worlds, feminism embraces humans, especially those gendered female, as embodied producers of situated knowledge, connected to kin and community, not the disembodied individual rationalists nor the “free” wage laborers capitalism depends on. Feminism is transdisciplinary in its choice of methodologies to apprehend capitalism. At times it is transnational, and at others, location-specific in tracing out the gendered workings of capital at multiple scales. Feminism is always auto-interrogatory, which makes it agile in its response to capitalism in its always restless and mutating forms. Special Issue on Feminism and Capitalism 480Preface Feminist activists and scholars theorize capitalism as a political and economic conjuncture, a hydra-headed monster configuring and distributing power unevenly across difference to produce multiple interrelated crises. Months prior to the COVID pandemic, when we issued the call for this special issue on feminism and capitalism, we indexed our contemporary conjuncture as one in which inequality is at an unconscionably high level. Hundreds of millions of people are poor, hungry, and in a perpetual search for bad jobs and precarious work. Sexual and domestic violence, and violence based on the hardening of gender, racial, caste, religious and ethnic differences is increasing. Migration and displacement within and across national boundaries are at record levels. An environmental apocalypse appears to be unfolding. The pandemic has exacerbated these crises and underscores the urgency of feminist interrogations of capitalism. Several works in this special issue focus on this very task, including Leslie Salzinger’s discussion of how capitalism is foundationally and structurally dependent on social reproduction, and Rebecca Herzig and Banu Subramaniam’s examination of “housekeeping ,” the “invisibilized, undercompensated, and utterly indispensable labor” of social reproduction in US universities, both of which have been intensified by the pandemic whose burdens have fallen in disproportionately gendered and racialized ways. Ana Hernández’s reflection on contemporary socialist feminist activism in Venezuela similarly points to how COVID has worsened longstanding capitalist, imperialist, and patriarchal processes, including increasing domestic violence and further restricting poor and working-class women’s access to food, medicine , and reproductive health. Sushmita Chatterjee and Kiran Asher’s essay extends our focus from humanist conceptions of labor and history in their examination of “COVID capitalism,” drawing our attention to the deep dependencies of human-animal relationships in the production of value. While examining the intersection of capitalism and the pandemic is one way of traversing this issue, there are other paths to take. We invite you to find your own, and in what follows, we suggest a few possibilities. Feminist activists and scholars, long dissatisfied with abstract generalizations about value-making in the realm of production and market exchange in capitalism, have sought to show its constitutive dependence on what it casts as outside: the gender-differentiated creation of life and labor. This, the realm of social reproduction, has witnessed a Preface 481 resurgence in feminist scholarship and movements in recent years. A cluster of essays provides a genealogy of feminist engagements...

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• Chapter Two. Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-11-15 · 1 citations

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• contents

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-11-15

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• Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion

  The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology · 2020 · 9 citations

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  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science

  At the end of January 2020, three weeks before Italy reported its first Corona virus infection, the Chinese community of Prato, around fifty thousand people—a quarter of this small northern textile...

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• Translocal Householding

  Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East · 2020-05-01 · 10 citations

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  Abstract The urban experience remains inextricably entangled with the rural for millions of poor migrants to cities in the global South who labor in informal economies. Translocal households, households that share the labor and costs of social reproduction spatially across the city and the country, are an important site of entanglement, empirically and imaginatively. The dynamics of translocal householding in the oral histories of two migrants to Delhi reveal intermittent pathways of escape from and recuperation of normative hierarchies of social difference—especially of gender and caste—over life times and spaces. The need for care and rejuvenation lead to creating new forms of community and unexpected friendships in cities, with village households a fallback. In the process of seeking aspirations, refuge, belonging, and a final resting place, it is likely that hierarchies based on social difference shift but are recuperated in translocal households.

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Frequent coauthors

• Ashwini Tambe

  5 shared

• Vinay Gidwani

  University of Minnesota

  5 shared

• Judith Kegan Gardiner

  4 shared

• Alys Eve Weinbaum

  University of Washington

  3 shared

• Lynn M. Thomas

  3 shared

• Madeleine Yue Dong

  University of Washington

  3 shared

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs

  3 shared

• Uta G. Poiger

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Society of Scholars, Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2019…
• Fulbright-Nehru Academic & Professional Excellence Fellowshi…
• ACLS Research Collaborative Fellowship, 2015-17
• American Institute of Indian Studies Fellowship, 2015-2016
• American Institute for Indian Studies Fellowship, 2006-2007