Feminist Mothering? Some Reflections on Sexuality and Risk from Urban India

Abstract

Post-globalisation India has seen the rise of several moral panics around questions of sexuality and safety. In this paper, I ask how women who see themselves as feminist mothers in urban India reflect on a variety of concerns, including clothing, fashion, consumption, sexualisation, sexuality education and sexual choices. I reflect on the complex ways in which young women are exercising choices around sexuality and how feminist mothers reflect on these choices in relation to questions around risk and morality. This paper represents the beginning of an inquiry into the question: what does it mean to be a feminist mother raising daughters in twenty-first-century urban India?

Keywords:

• Feminism
• mothering
• sexuality
• risk
• agency

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ira Raja whose suggestion that I think about families led me to conceive this ongoing project. I would also like to thank Abhay Sardesai, Amit S. Rai and the anonymous reviewers of my paper for their critical insight and intellectual generosity. Special thanks to the feminist mothers who shared their experiences and dilemmas, some of whom also commented on the essay.

Notes

  ¹ Since the feminist mothers I interviewed all belong to the middle class, this dictates that the kinds of risks explored are most relevant to middle-class young women. I am aware that lower-class young women are subject to both similar as well as different kinds of sexual risks not addressed here.

  ² Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978).

  ³ Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976).

  ⁴ One of the reasons I chose to engage with online blogs is a 2001 essay by Amy Koerber, who researched an online community of feminist mothers and argued that this space facilitated a conversation not easily addressed in the offline world (p.230). See Amy Koerber, ‘Postmodernism, Resistance, and Cyberspace: Making Rhetorical Spaces for Feminist Mothers on the Web’, in Women's Studies in Communication, Vol.24, no.2 (2001), pp.218–40.

  ⁵ This group of women belongs to a similar class and educational cohort as my interviewees.

  ⁶ All names have been changed to ensure the anonymity of my interviewees. I am myself one of the persons cited as interviewed. For the purposes of this study, the women interviewed are called (in alphabetical order) Isha, Kamila, Kyla, Maya, Meera, Nina, Priya, Ramya, Rose, Sapna, and Vani.

  ⁷ Chaddi is a colloquial term in Hindi and Marathi for underwear, devoid of any sexual overtones.

  ⁸ This framing of conservative versus progressive and the contestations around it is a recurrent theme to which I will return.

  ⁹ Utbtkids.com, ‘Sexualization of Young Children’ (17 Nov. 2007) [http://utbtkids.com/2007/11/17/sexualization-of-young-children/, accessed 15 May 2012].

¹⁰ Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter (New York: Harper, 2011).

¹¹ Reg Bailey, ‘Letting Children be Children: Report of an Independent Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood’ (2011) [https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/Bailey%20Review.pdf, accessed 8 Aug. 2012].

¹² Meg Barker and Robbie Duschinsky, ‘Sexualisation's Four Faces: Sexualisation and Gender Stereotyping in the Bailey Review’, in Gender and Education, Vol.24, no.3 (2012), pp.303–10.

¹³ Ragged Robin, ‘The Sexualisation of Children Debate’ (1 June 2011) [http://theraggedrobin.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/the-sexualisation-of-children-debate/, accessed 15 May 2012].

¹⁴ Maddy Coy and Maria Garner, ‘Definitions, Discourses and Dilemmas: Policy and Academic Engagement with the Sexualisation of Popular Culture’, in Gender and Education, Vol.24, no.3 (2012), p.259.

¹⁵ Mary Jane Kehily, ‘Contextualising the Sexualisation of Girls Debate: Innocence, Experience and Young Female Sexuality’, in Gender and Education, Vol.24, no.3 (2012), p.257. Much of this scholarship is from the UK, but it resonates with some of what my interviews reveal—that the field is deeply complex.

¹⁶ Rosalind Gill, ‘Sexism Reloaded, or, It's Time to Get Angry Again!’, in Feminist Media Studies, Vol.11, no.1 (2011), p.65.

¹⁷ The preference for cottons and handlooms reflects a particular economic as well as cultural and political class since these products are far from inexpensive.

¹⁸ Angela McRobbie suggests that young women are located as individual agents and as subjects of consumption. She argues that a certain level of sexual freedom, which is allowed in the discourse of new femininities, must be read as ‘new technologies of the self’ rather than celebratory expressions of female subjectivity. Responding to both MacRobbie as well as the ongoing debates that draw on the work on Michel Foucault on the creation of disciplined bodies and the idea of power as constitutive, one needs to consider how and where this particular kind of sexualisation fits into the larger picture of globalised consumer citizenship in Indian cities, where, increasingly, wearing particular kinds of clothing has come to represent a politics of modernity and belonging in a context where those who cannot buy (the have-nots) are being not just marginalised, but also vilified and seen as responsible for their poverty because they are unable to be part of the new economies of desire. There are several other concerns that came up in my interviews which I do not have the space to explore here—concerns about weight issues and skin colour are only two of them. See Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009).

¹⁹ In 2009, in response to the Ministry of Human Resource Development's reported decision to provide sex education to students from class six in CBSE-affiliated schools, a Rajya Sabha committee wrote a report seeking a national debate on the introduction of sex education. The report stated: ‘Message should appropriately be given to school children that there should be no sex before marriage which is immoral, unethical and unhealthy’. They suggested no sex education be given, but were willing to include appropriate chapters in the biology syllabus, but not before the plus two (classes eleven and twelve) stage. Further, chapters such as ‘Physical and Mental Development in Adolescents’ and ‘HIV/AIDS and Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases’ were to be removed from the existing curriculum and included in biology books at the plus two stage. As of November 2010, the AEP remains suspended in five states—Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. Rajasthan, Gujarat and Kerala suspended the programme in 2007, but have recently started their own versions of AEP. See website of the AEP, National Campaign for Comprehensive Sexuality Education [http://knowyourbodyknowyourrights.com/fundamentals/adoloscence-education-program/, accessed 15 July 2012].

²⁰ A concern that came up in relation to sex education was sexual abuse, where many women talked of the dilemmas of first discussing sexuality in the language of danger. This is a theme I have been unable to engage with fully in this paper and I hope to be able to do so elsewhere.

²¹ Meera's comment on the trust she implicitly offers her daughter raises several questions: How do we decide what questions to ask and when? What are the boundaries we draw and what is their impact? These concerns merit a much longer discussion than is possible here.

²² ‘Having your back’ is a colloquial expression meaning being supported or being stood up for, and so having a sense of security.

²³ In 2005 a young college girl was raped in broad daylight by a police constable inside a police station at Marine Drive in Mumbai.

²⁴ Shilpa Phadke, ‘But I Can't Carry a Condom! Young Women, Risk and Sexuality in the Time of Globalisation’, in Sanjay Srivastava (ed.), The Sexualities Reader. Oxford India Studies on Contemporary Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

²⁵ Shilpa Phadke, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men; Risk and Reputation in Mumbai’, in ‘Review of Women's Studies’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol.42, no.17 (2007), pp.1510–8.

²⁶ Flavia Agnes points out that women's consent is rarely the premise on which decisions are made. She writes: ‘[C]hoice, or desire, as expressed by a woman, is somehow intrinsically illicit when it is against parental diktat and caste or community norms, and therefore needs to be contained and controlled. Girls who exercise active agency to defy convention pose a threat to the established social order, and are confined by reframing consent itself’. This is yet another area that merits a much longer discussion. See Flavia Agnes, ‘Consent and Controversy’, in Indian Express (12 May 2012) [http://www.indianexpress.com/news/consent-and-controversy/948277/, accessed 1 June 2012].

²⁷ Joan Jacobs Brumburg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), pp.97, 197 (emphasis in original).

²⁸ Mary Piper, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), p.12.

²⁹ Evelyn Resh, The Secret Lives of Teen Girls: What Your Mother Wouldn't Talk About But Your Daughter Needs to Know (New Delhi: Hay House Publishers, 2009).

³⁰ Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire (London: Vintage, 1998).

³¹ Ibid., p.239.

³² Gill, ‘Sexism Reloaded, or, It's Time to Get Angry Again!’, pp.62, 63.