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ABSTRACT
About 20 years after Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana’s acclaimed essay ‘Problems for a contemporary Theory of Gender’ was written, suddenly women – of different ages, castes, classes, from diverse regions, and with various religious affiliations – have again taken the centre stage from the power corridors of policy-making to the debates in student organisations. In the last few years there has been an exponential increase in the coverage of violence against women in the media, several Government policies on the girl children have been launched, both sexual harassment and gender sensitisation have attained the status of everyday vocabulary amongst a significant section of the population, and yet feminism has remained a rather exclusive term from which the gentlefolk of urban India tends to keep a safe distance.
The question remains, how do we make sense of this new visibility – which becomes glaring and blinding at the same time? Are we experiencing a resurgence in Women’s Movement? Is it a result of the nation-wide shockwave after the Delhi Gang rape in December 2012 when middle-class India came down to the streets? Is it the first wave of the new movements that are sweeping through university campuses and the ways in which new Dalit mobilisations are articulating economic and social rights? Is it connected to the visibility of protesting bodies on streets along with virtual solidarities in social media platforms, indicating debates on the layers of inequality and discrimination that accrue at this juncture of economic liberalisation and consumer culture? Probably it is all of them and more. This is an effort to engage with different ways of seeing, different genealogies of vision vis-à-vis gendered bodies in both public and private domains and explore the configurations of collective mobilisation around ‘women’s issues’. While voice and speech have been part of critical feminist discussions for the last three decades, the turn to visual constructions of gender is a recent one with brilliant but sporadic predecessors like Donna Harraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges’ (1988). This essay intends to conjoin vision with voice in understanding gender politics in India and unpack the ways in which multiple registers of women’s agency connect with each other.
KEYWORDS:
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Gupta, ““Matribhumi” No More”.The clash between women and men passengers was not limited to the day of 24th August and had happened before. From news reports in Bengali dailies it becomes quite clear that clashes continued until December 2015.
2. Bhattacharya, “Thele Fela Hoy Ni, Joy Meyederi.”
3. Roy Mullick, “Mar Kheye Benke Galo Churi, Chhitke Porlo Kaner Dul.”
4. Majumdar, “Jiban Ekar Hoy Na, Ei Asahishnuta Bhoyonkar.”
5. Chakrabarty, “Bhranta Naribad Ki Purushder Manush Korbe.”
6. Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution of Women’s Question”; Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
7. Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women; Sen, Citation1999.
8. Kumar, History of Doing; Kumari and Kidwai, Crossing the Sacred Line.
9. Tharu and Niranjana, “Problems for a contemporary theory of gender,” 232.
10. Government policies at the central and state level have launched several schemes of financial insurance and assistance to families with girl children. Policies like ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’, ‘Dhanlakshmi Yojana’, ‘Kanyasri Prakalpa’, ‘Ladli Scheme’ are directed to maintain a favourable sex ratio for girl children, to prevent school drop out among girl children, and to prevent forced marriage before girl children reach the legal age of consent. Well-known film personalities or figures from the world of sports often star in the advertisements of these policies.
11. Rao, “Understanding Sirasgaon”; Loomba and Lukose, South Asian Feminisms; Gill, The Peripheral Centre.
12. Hayes, “Visual Genders.”
13. Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking.”
14. Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms.
15. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201–202.
16. Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye.
17. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581.
18. Teltumbde, Persistence of Caste; Rao, “Understanding Sirasgaon.”
19. Sunder Rajan, “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing,” 332–359.
20. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” 86–101.
21. Ibid, 91.
22. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 6–18.
23. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, 1–14.
24. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 29–38 [first published in 1981].
25. Haraway,“Situated Knowledges,” 584.
26. Benford and Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements,” 611–639.
27. Snow, “Framing Processes, Ideology, and Discursive Fields,” 384.
28. ‘Delhi protests are by “dented and painted” women: President Pranab’s son’, NDTV, 27 December 2012.
29. Roy, “What do Men Have to do with It?” https://kafila.online/2012/12/28/what-do-men-have-to-do-with-it/. The readers’ comments on this post reveal the debate regarding the intersections of class, caste, and region over the issue of violence against women.
30. Roy’s films When Four Friends Meet (1999), Majma (2001), Till We Meet Again (2013)are explorations of masculinity and gender relations in urban spaces and situate his characters within labour and class relations and religious affiliations. Roy has recently published a graphic book on masculinities titled A Little Book of Men, Yoda Press, 2008.
31. Saha, “Kunan Poshpora.”
32. Pandit, “Shopian Rape, Murders a Family Feud?”
33. The protest against Manorama’s killing was perhaps the most spectacular demonstration by women in India when several elderly Manipur women had shed their clothes in front of Kangla Fort a few weeks after her death and held a banner with words ‘Indian Army Rape Us’.
34. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing,” 89.
35. Sinha, “Refashioning Mother India,” 623–644.
36. John, “Gender and Development in India,” 3074.
37. Talpade-Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 61–88; John, “Gender and Development in India,” 3071–3077.
38. http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:LowLevelEntityToPrint_TOINEW&Type=text/html&Locale=english-skin-custom&Path=TOIL/2012/12/30&ID=Ar00104; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/31/delhi-rape-india-damini; .
39. McClintock, Imperial Leather.
40. Escobar, “Beyond the Third World,” 207–230.
42. Interviews with student activists in December 2014.
43. Arafat, “Should Muslims Fear the Kiss.”
44. Thomas, “Protest against Strip Search Goes Viral.”
45. Sharma, “The Open Discussion on Menstruation Is #Happy.”
46. Dhawan, “‘Pink Chaddi’ Campaign a Hit, Draws over 34,000 Members,” 2009.
47. G. Arunima, ‘Who’s Afraid of the Pink Chaddi Campaign, or the Politics of the Panty Protest,’ personal communication, 2011.
48. Mendes, Slutwalk.
50. Hayes, “Visual Genders,” 522.
51. Sunder Rajan, “The Story of Draupadi’s Disrobing,” 333.
52. Devi, Draupadi, 100–111.
53. Tapasi Malik was a young woman from Bajemelia village in West Bengal who was killed during the Singur movement in 2006. Suzette Jordan was a rape survivor who decided to join the protest movement against sexual violence against women. For details see Sinha Roy, “Rethinking Female Militancy in Postcolonial Bengal”, 124–131; http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/suzettes-story/.
54. Ferree and Merrill, “Thinking about Social Movements,” 247–261.
55. Passionate politics refers to the rethinking of the role of emotion and affect in political activism in the field of social movement studies. A number of significant essays, edited volumes, and book-length studies have appeared in the last couple of decades to mark the nuances of emotional attachment, commitment, and activism. For details see, Jasper, Goodwin and Polletta, Passionate Politics.; Flam and King, “Emotions’ Map,” 19-40.; Hemmings, “Invoking Affect,” 548–567. Passionate detachment as first used by Laura Mulvey (1975) to explain the dialectics between the look of the camera and the look of the audience and to break the voyeuristic pleasure in cinema. The idea has later been taken up by Annette Kuhn (1982) and Donna Haraway (1988) and developed as a feminist visual methodological perspective.
56. Oyewumi, The Invention of Women.
57. Ibid, 3.