One of the powerful transformations brought on by almost four decades of relentless pursuit of neoliberalism, followed by the ascendance of fascist politics across India as a form of late neoliberal governmentality is the rearrangement of desires in intimate spaces.
From households to familial contexts to broader extended arrangements, affective registers have been reshaped by the relentless pursuit of more and more.
The ever-expanding spheres of individualized desires rendered as natural have organized the self around the relentless pursuit of greater consumer comfort.
This pursuit of consumer comfort is simultaneously reworked to extract from relationships the returns that optimize pleasure.
Simultaneously, the construction of dissatisfaction as the way of life forms the basis for the desire for the market.
Relationships are thus defined by their use value in offering the greatest pleasure at the least effort. There is an underlying ideology of efficiency that shapes how relationships are approached, as functional resources that enable the optimization of pleasure.
Simultaneously, these relationships are also sources of continual dissatisfaction as one measures them in terms of his/her entitlements.
From re-defining leisure as everyday trips to the mall to re-crafting comfort in air-conditioned spaces, neoliberal desire is fed on the destruction of registers of affect and care.
A form of individualized consumerism that is organized around the feeding of the self in continuous demand has shaped the ongoing assault on spaces of extended familial care and affection.
Refusal as a register for transformation then must recognise the vitality of walking away from spaces organized through commodity logics.
Refusal is vital in the politics of structural transformation that resists the twin forces of neoliberalism and Hindutva.
In intimate spaces within families, refusal is a necessary strategy for structural transformation.