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This dissertation combines feminist ethnography and archival research to study children’s spatial, material, and linguistic experiences with discourses of hygiene and sanitation in and around schools in urbanizing northern Tamil Nadu, India. Through ethnographic research with 10-15-year-old children across four schools, the study complicates the coupling of education and cleanliness that pervades national and transnational development narratives in India and the Tamil public sphere. Everyday tensions and negotiations that mark children’s subjectivities as ‘clean bodies in school’ are studied through four aspects -- hygiene curriculum in textbooks, school uniforms’ regulation and maintenance, children’s entanglement with plastics in environmental and embodied cleanliness, and verbal hygiene on the school campuses. The research critically contextualizes the complex working out of universal bio-medical narratives and post-colonial public health pedagogies within local socio-political, material, and ecological dynamics, including economic class, gender, caste, and sexuality. By tracing shifting and multiple cleanliness campaigns and children’s roles, negotiations, and representations around them, the study explores and proposes ‘clean bodies in school’ as a versatile framework to analyze the hybrid of children’s relational subjectivities, their lived experiences, and their representations, including historical discourses that surround the children’s bodies. This work denaturalizes figurations of the school as a clean space-time by situating it within a fluid and shifting terrain of materiality and symbols of cleanliness in post-colonial contexts. It argues that children as clean bodies are both produced by the school as well as participate in the production of the school as a clean entity.

http://dissertations.umi.com/graduateschool.camden.rutgers:10055

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-xbz1-y549

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