It was just past dawn on a hot day in the summer of 2025. The air at Sassoon Dock was already thick with the briny tang of fish and sweat. Tucked into the city’s affluent southern tip, the dock is home to one of Mumbai’s oldest and largest fish markets. As gulls screeched and waves slapped against the quay, Laxmi, 38, a fish trader, stood knee-deep in a glistening pile of mackerel. Her faded cotton shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows and buttons loose at the collar, was tucked into a pair of worn-out trousers. Her gravelly voice cut through the clamour towards a porter: “Move it, bhai, we’re late!”
The porter, dawdling with a crate, flashed a grin at her and hustled his steps. A grizzled wholesaler, squinting against the rushing sun, nodded her way and called out, “Laxmi bhai, tu dokyavar basavlas re” [Laxmi brother, you’ve got this dock under your thumb].
Laxmi didn’t blink. She hefted a crate, her biceps taut, and the dock seemed to bend to her rhythm.
As I observed Laxmi and the world around her, I found myself linking her with conventional ideas of masculinity and power. Commanding the dock, she seemed to fold the language and swagger typically associated with men.
Later that day, in a different corner of the city, Reena, 29, was also at work. Ferring home-cooked meals as one of the delivery persons in the dabbawalla community to employees in Mumbai’s many workplaces. The sun beat down on the streets of the upscale neighbourhood of Bandra as she pedalled her battered bicycle past dug-up roads and clouds of construction dust. Behind her, tiffin boxes rattled in a crate. Each one carried a promise to a hungry office worker.
She was clad in a loose-fitting kurta with elbow-length sleeves—an outfit built for speed and comfort. As she rode, a fellow dabbawala on his bicycle shouted to her over the din of the street, teasing her about her pace. Reena let out a deep and guttural laugh and tilted her cap defiantly. “Catch up, bhai!” she yelled back at him as she hauled her bike over a flooded pothole.
Mumbai’s dabbawala network delivers 150,000 meals daily, according to a 2005 report by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad–a number that is likely an undercount today. Working within this informal but highly efficient structure demands relentless grit. Reena traverses about 20 kilometres each day on her dabba-laden cycle. “She’s one of us,” said Vijay, a veteran dabbawala, wiping rain from his face.
Women like Laxmi and Reena—from working-class communities that power our cities even as their labour is invisibilised—have carved spaces for themselves in tough male-dominated fields without much fanfare. Their jobs, their appearance and demeanour, and their ways of belonging and claiming space among men challenge traditional notions of femininity.
I met Laxmi and Reena as part of my research on how working-class women wield authority in Mumbai’s male-dominated labour markets. Their commanding presence in their respective work environments drew me to them. When I began reporting this piece, I was quick to label their identities as masc, queer, butch. My lens—shaped by today’s world—relied on an imperative to fit everyone into categories that were, in my view, a ubiquitous part of the queer feminist zeitgeist.
But the longer I spoke to Laxmi and Reena, the more these frameworks felt like something I was projecting onto them. They were simply doing what it took for them to survive, they told me. They are aware that their ways of being deviate from the norm, but they refuse to name it.
Their stance echoes the findings of a 2023 study published in Child Indicators Research, which surveyed 300 working-class women in Mumbai’s informal sectors: 22 percent reported adopting “male-like” behaviours, assertiveness, and physicality to gain respect, but only a fraction linked those traits to gender. This data, and my reporting, shattered an assumption I had carried into the telling of this story—what if Laxmi and Reena weren’t rejecting gender non-conforming identities out of fear of persecution or because they were in denial, as I had first thought, but simply because their lives didn’t need those words?
Through the process of reporting this story, I realised that terms like ‘masc’ and ‘butch,’ rooted in specific aspects of Western queer culture, were ill-suited to the fluidity of the kinds of contexts that Laxmi and Reena navigate. A 2022 paper published in Gender, Work & Organization warns against applying such labels to working-class Indian women, noting that they preferred terms like ‘provider’ and ‘protector,’ which prioritised their role within a community over individual identity. Reading that paper made me realise that if I were to understand their lives, I had to do so, not through my preconceptions, but through the contours that they had shaped for themselves.
“In Mumbai’s fish markets and delivery networks, women claim space by mastering the physical and social demands men usually dominate,” said Gayatri Nair, a sociologist at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi who studies Mumbai’s informal economy. “Their toughness isn’t rebellion; it is survival, proof they belong in spaces that rarely welcome them. Assertiveness isn’t masculinity, it is necessity; queerness doesn’t apply when survival trumps identity.” In her book Set Adrift, Gayatri describes this phenomenon as “classed resilience” and critiques both feminist and queer circles for overlooking the harsh economic realities that make this toughness essential.
According to a 2021 report by the International Labour Organisation, 81.8 percent of women’s employment in India comes from the informal economy—the kind of jobs Reena and Laxmi hold. A report by the Institute of Social Studies Trust, a New Delhi-based non-profit research and educational organisation, observes that gender discrimination is often more severe in the informal labour market than in other kinds of work.
So not only do the women engaged with this market work in male-dominated spaces, they do so inside an economic system where discrimination is baked in, where the price of entry is a constant readiness to adapt and push back. Their swagger, their grit, even their refusal to label themselves are essentially a survival strategy shaped by this inequality.
Minding their business
At the Sassoon Dock, Laxmi is a force of nature. She tells me how a wholesaler once tried to shortchange her on a batch of pomfret. She met his gaze, unflinching, her voice low and steady. “You think I can’t count?” she recalled saying, running the numbers aloud—weight, rate, total—faster than he could blink. The dockhands around her fell silent, she said. The wholesaler backed down, paid up, and hasn’t crossed her since.
“They don’t mess with me twice,” Laxmi said. Her eyes glinted with pride on recollecting that victory. She spoke with an apparent ease. It was clear that her presence anchored the frenetic energy that surrounded her. She seemed to belong there as much as any man.
In March, when fish prices tanked, Laxmi said she split her crew’s meagre earnings evenly, ensuring no one went home short. Later, under the sodium glow of a street lamp, she bought rounds of cutting chai for the group, her laughter mingling with theirs.
“Laxmi runs this dock like nobody else,” said a wholesaler, his shirt stained with fish guts, as he stacked crates. “She’s tough, won’t let you cheat her, but she’s fair, always splitting the take right. That’s why we call her bhai.” By this point, I had realised “bhai” wasn’t just a nickname—it was a title she had earned.
Reena’s world, though different, echoes this ethos. Pausing at a Bandra intersection, she wiped rainwater from her eyes and mused on her work. “I’ll keep riding till the wheels fall off,” she said, her voice steady, a grin flickering. “Someone’s got to feed the family.”
Her family—her mother, and her younger siblings—all rely on her. “Reena’s always been our protector,” Sunita, her mother, proudly told me. “Out there biking, bringing home money, she’s tough like a son, but her heart’s soft. She is always checking on us.”
When neighbours once whispered that a girl shouldn’t be out cycling with men, Reena said she ignored them. “People used to say it was wrong for a woman to do this kind of work,” her mother recalled. “But Reena proved them wrong. She’s stubborn.” As I listened to Reena and her family, I began to understand stubbornness not as declarative, defiant resistance, but as a quiet persistence—one that bent the rules of a place without asking permission, until the new shape simply became the norm.
A 2023 report from Sappho for Equality, a Kolkata-based NGO focused on queer labour, noted that 68 percent of queer women in informal sectors prioritise “community loyalty” over personal gain— I couldn’t help but see that number in Laxmi buying rounds of chai.
What I had first taken to be personal generosity began to look like something larger: an ethic of looking after your own. Shruti Tambe, a gender studies professor at Savitribai Phule Pune University, contrasted this ethos and the Bollywood lone-hero trope, where machismo is a solitary conquest. “Working-class ‘butch’ women often build bonds, not hierarchies,” she told me. “Their strength lies in collective resilience, not individual glory.” And I realised that the swagger I’d been watching all along wasn’t about standing above the crowd—it was about moving with it.
Laxmi and Reena’s lives were not without difficulties. But they shaped them with intent—carving a space for themselves in the worlds they inhabited. “I was always lifting crates, outrunning boys, being me — life didn’t give me time to be anything else,” said Laxmi. Reena’s childhood story runs parallel: “As a girl, I climbed trees, fought for my share; this is just who I am, femme or not,” she told me. Both have dreamed of wearing clothes more conventionally feminine than the ones they don for work—a saree, or a salwar kameez. But concerns such as financial and social security took them in another direction.
For Laxmi and Reena, toughness isn’t a pose or a rebellion. Their rolled-up sleeves, their clipped banter, their ease in commanding respect among men — these are not just traits but strategies, forged in a place where survival demands you hold your own.
Defying labels
When I asked Reena if she felt masculine, she looked amused–like I’d just said something absurd. “Masculine? Like a man?” she repeated, before shaking her head. “I’m strong because I have to be. This job, this city, it doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman. You deliver, or you’re out.” Her answer didn’t just sidestep the label; it dismantled the question.
In her book Changing the Subject, Srila Roy, a sociologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, argues that working-class women’s ‘masculinity’ is less a statement of identity and more a tactic for survival in neoliberal labour markets. “These women embody ‘masculine’ traits to navigate patriarchal economies,” she said.
Reena told me she likes women, but she said it without ceremony. She lives with another unmarried woman, a tailor she’s known for years. They aren’t a couple, not in the way the city’s rainbow marches might imagine, but their companionship is deep, shaped by years of holding each other’s lives together. “Queer? That’s for city people with flags,” she said. “I’m just Reena.”
Her mother, Sunita, put it plainly: “Our gods don’t judge love, so why should we?”
Ruth Vanita, a queer scholar at the University of Montana, has written about precolonial same-sex kinship traditions, where queerness was cultural, rather than sexual. “Working-class ‘butch’ women aren’t ‘queer’ in a Western sense,” she told me. “Their bonds, like Reena’s friendship, echo precolonial kinship without needing labels.” Hearing this, I found myself loosening my grip on “queer”—wondering if the word could sometimes obscure more than it reveals. Ruth believed that such connections represent cultural continuity—and that queer activism could find space amid these connections, but only if it is rooted in class solidarity.
Others, like author Richa Nagar, see potential for bridging worlds. In her 2006 book Playing with Fire, she describes “subaltern queerness” as a form of defiance among marginalised women who belong to working-class communities, and are often also from lowered-castes. They reject normative gender roles and societal expectations through their everyday practices, relationships, and survival strategies, without necessarily adopting urban, elite queer identities. “Their friendships and toughness are queer in defying norms, but labels alienate them,” she said.
Listening to them all, I started to see what Anjali Monteiro, a sociologist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, meant when she said that gender expression is often pragmatic, not ideological in such contexts. “They’re not performing masculinity for a manifesto,” she told me. “They’re surviving.”
And that was perhaps where my own need for tidy categories collapsed. I had arrived thinking I was researching “butch” or “queer” lives in working-class Mumbai. I left with a different understanding where toughness and care aren’t opposite poles, and where swagger can be a form of tenderness.
Laxmi’s stern orders and Reena’s pedal strokes aren’t about winning over others or standing apart. They’re about keeping your people close, making sure no one is left behind. It’s a machismo of connection, not conquest, a slow refutation of the gender debates happening far from these docks and streets.
One morning, I watched Laxmi stand at the water’s edge. The sky was just beginning to bruise with light. “This dock’s mine as long as I can lift a crate,” she said, half to herself. Across town, Reena pushed on through the traffic, shirt clinging to her back.
So I end where I didn’t expect to: without a conclusion, but with a widening horizon. Laxmi’s squint against the sun, Reena’s easy shrug, they don’t answer my questions. They make me live with them. Maybe the point isn’t to label, but to learn to stand in that space between definitions, as wide and restless as Mumbai itself.