Gender and Technology
Let us begin with three statements of facts and reflect upon them:
1. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ninety per cent of the paintings are about women, and ninety percent of the painters are men.
2. In Star Trek, the space ship is a mother ship that is guided by Captain Kirk.
3. George Eliot, the famous author of novels like Middlemarch and Mill on The Floss is a woman, who wrote under a man’s name.
These sound like disjointed bits of trivia, and indeed, are probably facts that are all too familiar to us. But what joins them together? What are the common implications that these three statements are suggesting to us? We need to see, that the theme that runs common in all the three statements is that they are all about women and their relationship with technology in some form. Let us look at all the three sentences in detail and see if we can work out the implications:
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ninety per cent of the paintings are about women, and ninety percent of the painters are men.
Does this imply that women are less artistic than men? Surely, the question is no; in fact, men who take to the arts, are often perceived as feminine and that arts and culture are in the domain of the women. We, of course, can make a certain historical reading and suggest that art as a profession belonged to the realm of the public and hence women did not have access to these arenas – the choice to be a female painter, or artist, or writer. And that is indeed a valid reading of such a statement. However, deeper than that is the relationship that women had with technology. We often forget that even arts when they first were taken up institutionally, were techniques and technologies. That historically, the art of painting – which was indeed a technology that had its heyday in Renaissance Europe – was also a technology, and one that was unavailable to women for a very long time. It is only when these technologies get superseded by newer technological inventions that they become rare, private, and feminine enough to be granted to women.
However, that does not mean that women did not have any relationship with technology. What the statement draws our attention to is that women were indeed the major subject of technologised cultural productions – as mythical creatures, as objects of erotic representation, as monsters, as demons, as beasts, as goddesses and as sometimes representative of abject and frail human conditions, women have been almost obsessively at the centre of all technology imagination. Even now, when we look around us, at billboards, and advertisements, we constantly see the messages of consumption and selling, as etched on the body of a woman; even in instances when the product being sold or the body of the woman have nothing in particular.
And Virginia Woolf draws our attention to exactly that. At the Ox-bridge library that she is in, she discovers a long list of “women and…”[i] and then reflects, “Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’? ‘Wise men never say anything else apparently.” (Chapter 2, just before footnote 3)
Let us remain with these thoughts for a moment then: that there is, when we talk of technology and technologised production, a certain gendered relationship; that women did not always have access to acts of production and control over technology, and that they were obsessively the subjects of technology and technologised production; and as an aside, that what we today understand as ‘arts’ or ‘artistic’ was historically in the domains of technology and science and that such shifts happen due to a series of socio-political and econo-cultural events which we will think of sometime later. And now let us look at the second statement:
In Star Trek, the space ship is a mother ship that is guided by Captain Kirk.
If you throw back your mind to some of the most iconic and cult representations of technology in almost any of your favourite sci-fi movies, you might realize, that most of these representations are women. Starting all the way from the movie Metropolis, where you have the demonized robot Maria, to Star Trek, where the mother ship is indeed, a mother; to Lara Croft Tomb Raider to the ghost in the machine – the mother board, the mother ship, the robots and the systems that need to be controlled and tamed, are always women or appropriating the female form or feminine in nature. In the slight variations from the law, you have an occasional character like Sonny in the movie I, Robot, but there too, we also have the feminine V.I.K.I. who turns out to be the actual villain of the story. We need to look into why, our imaginations of technology – and we are not looking at technologised production right now, but technology itself – are so gendered in nature. Why is it that we always have a particular idea of technology as feminine, as irrational, as demonic, as something that needs to be tamed and controlled, preferably by men?
Isn’t it a strange thing that on the one hand, we identify science as the domain of the masculine and the male, and the technologies that govern science as feminine in nature? We are going to perhaps complicate our first ideas about the gendered nature of technology now: We are going to say that it is not as if the gendered biases or construction of technology are limited to the cultural production and technologised arts but to the very imaginations of technology itself. When we talk of even our daily electrical gadgets – computers, laptops, cellphones, ipods, wiis we catch ourselves talking about them in a feminine form – objects of consumption, objects we have an eroticized relationship with, and objects which need certain control and mastery. Now keeping these in mind, let us go to the third statement that we began with:
George Eliot, the famous author of novels like Middlemarch and Mill on The Floss is a woman, who wrote under a man’s name.
It sounds alien to our ears, used to listening to the Arundhati Roys and Jhumpa Leharis of our time, to imagine that there was a time when women were not allowed to write; and if they were allowed to write, they were allowed to write only a particular kind of things, and that even if they were allowed to write, they were not necessarily allowed to become published authors within a publishing industry market. It seem perhaps funny, to imagine that there was a time when women tried on the names of men to write; just like it must have seemed funny, to somebody in the eighteenth century, to think that women would have to wear men’s clothes in order to enter the professional world. Once we remove the ‘funny’ quotient from this particular statement, what remains is the hard fact that technologies are a part of the culture industry – there are markets, there are audiences and consumers, there is an economics of visibility and distribution which is at work. And as with other technologies, for a very long time, the technologies of print and writing, also kept women as either the audiences to their products or the subject of their production, but very rarely at the centre, as creators and masters of those technologies. So that, when women wanted to write, not mere romances, but larger fictions, they had to take on the guise of men and write without their own names and identities.
To go back to the question of technology, then, we also need to look at the gender and technology question as not simply a question of art and expression, but also that of economic forces that shape these ideas and reinforce certain kind of images within us.
Let us take for example, the case study that Virginia Woolf gives us, about Judith Shakespeare – William Shakespeare’s imaginary sister.
(Please refer to the text and addresses the following questions on technology and gender relationships:)
1. Why is technology always thought of as more easily accessible to men than women? Is it in the inherent nature of technology that it makes itself available to men or is there an entire social construct to legitimize only some kinds of usages of technology as valid? The story of Judith Shakespeare that Woolf draws, addresses these questions quite effectively. It also points out how, the question of livelihood and gender is also closely linked in with our understanding of technology.
2. How does this masculine imagination of technology change the very nature of the person who controls technology? For example, a man who is not very good at different technologies would be considered effeminate or not masculine enough. On the contrary, men who are more adept at certain kinds of technologies are also considered not male enough. Similarly, women who enter into certain kinds of technology oriented roles, will always be looked upon as ‘women in a man’s world’ or sometimes as ‘one of the boys’; gendered with masculinity, beyond her own control. Extending that logic, women have their own technologies and women who do not take to those are also labeled as aberrant or deviant. We are now trying to posit the idea that it is not as if being a man or a woman precedes technology; but in fact, the socio-political gendered contexts within which technologies operate, indeed create us as men and women, masculine and feminine, in our access to technologies, in our role within the technology paradigm, and our ability to control certain kinds of technologies.
3. The common sense understanding that technologies follow gender – in books like Why Men won’t listen and women can’t read maps; or in bio-deterministic assumptions that boys should be good at numbers and women should be good with languages – needs to be questioned. There is a small (and perhaps very clever) claptrap that comes into being when we try and dismantle these notions. When we question, as Woolf does, any of the tenets of technology, at the level of the imaginary, the arguments that are posited against it are at the level of material technologies. Let’s take that example of the very popular book title, ‘Why Men won’t listen and Women Can’t read maps”. If we were to suggest, keeping the technology and gender relationship in mind, that the maps reading exercise, requires a certain kind of masculine identity, which women are not encouraged to perform and hence, even though they might have the capacity to read maps, they are never trained or indeed discriminated against if they can read maps, the argument that is given to us is that in a given sample, certain percentage of female participants responded in an identifiable pattern which is their inability to read map. The evidence presented is at the level of majority acts, of biological and neural research – research that presumes that technology is a neutral tool to which the brain responds without any kind of external influence; research that further presumes that the brain is an autonomous independent entity that innately responds to certain kinds of technologised stimuli. We need to avoid this kind of oppositional dialectic between the scientific and the cultural, and perhaps learn to understand that science is indeed a social construct and arises out of different cultural practices, and that culture is not merely in the realms of the imaginary but also has very material and significant consequences.
We have so far deduced a few things:
1. That technology and gender are not mutually exclusive domains of understanding but that technology, in its very conception, is gendered.
2. That different technologies are made accessible to certain kinds of gendered behaviours through complex socio-cultural and economic processes.
3. That technologies are not neutral, and indeed, in their imaginary (and sometimes material) construct, demand a masculine or a feminine identity on the part of the person they are interacting with.
4. That technologised productions are indeed about representation and their politics but they are also about the politics of access and livelihood and create a relationship between genders; where one is produced and the other is the producer.
5. That the relationship between gender and technology is one of transactions, where, technology is often treated as the feminine, which would then need to be tamed, domesticated or exorcised of its excesses, and brought under the control of Man with a capital M.
It is with these ideas in the back of our mind that we need to now look at a new relationship between technology and gender. Let us look at how technologies indeed become feminized – not only in their representations and access, but in their economic development and proliferation.
As with the earlier part of the module, let us again begin with looking at three examples, but this time in the very specific realms of digital technologies and computers. We shall go through three exercises and then see if we can bind them together to talk about a different dimension to explore the gendered nature and the gendering role of technologies.
1. Starting with the Father: If you paid attention to the history of computing in your school days, you will remember that the father of the Computer is Charles Babbage. One is not particularly sure what Fatherly function Mr. Babbage performed, but it must be something unmentionable with a circuit board and some vacuum tubes. In the history of technology – even as it is unfolding right now - there are a few names that emerge as the architects, the creators, the fathers, the grandfathers, the builders and the miracle workers of technology.
Especially in the very accelerated world of computers and internet, we always hear of new names cropping up as THE people who made the internet, the www, and now the web 2.0, what it is now. Let us do a quick exercise and try to list down ten names that we think are influential in our contemporary understanding of technology. Let me give you a few of the more obvious ones – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sabeer Bhatia, Jimmy Wales… you can continue with this list till you have exhausted the most famous of your internet icons – the people who made the internet. And now let us pause and review the list. Chances are, that your list doesn’t have any women in them. If there are women, they might be less than one third of your list.
Why does this discrepancy happen? When you look at the IT city of Bangalore, you realize that there are as many women as men employed in the IT sector. Indeed, if we expand the scope of IT to include mobile and networked economies like the BPO and the Outsourcing industry, we know for a fact that the number of women employed and involved by these new economies is significantly higher than the number of men employees. Why then, is the IT still treated as a.) an essentially male domain created and dominated by men b.) as the play ground of the alpha male nerd who controls technology c.) as dangerous or not conducive to women?
2. Let’s stay with those questions and see if we can tie them up with the next thing we need to do. Here is a small news-paper clipping from not so very long ago in Bangalore - http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1098752.cms Let’s discuss what are the issues that the article is raising up. Can we see a certain kind of connection between gender and technology being created here, even if it is not clearly spelled out for us? While violence against working women who enter the public sphere, is indeed a concern, the specific nature of the call centre and its technologised economy and related lifestyle is actually more a concern than the women who are working and the violence that affects them. The article, and indeed, much of the discourse that followed this particular case of a call centre employee raped and murdered by the cab driver, very vocally suggested that technology creates conditions of terror for women. Perils and dangers seem to attach themselves to women in the IT industry. There is an underlined sense of danger and fear that is etched whenever it comes to talking about gender and technology and this is one such instance.
3. The third exercise we want to do is to do a bit of profiling. We will look at a list of words and try and imagine what kind of gendered images we produce out of our popular understanding of them:
a. Nerd
b. Geek
c. IT engineer
d. Call Centre employee
e. Systems Administrator
How are these terms gendered and how does our perception of these terms reflect the biases of technology and the material bodies that are made to bear the burden of technologies? How are we conditioned to think of our bodies in relation to technology? How, lastly, do economic factors determine what kind of bodies inhabit what kind of activities, and which, activities, indeed, become more visible, public and masculine.
The reading for this module deals especially with these questions. Light, shows us, in her history of computing, that there was a time when there was a reversal of roles and a reversal in recognizing the most important parts of computing. The system administrator, the Man who created the entire mainframe where the computing took place, was the obviously most important person(s) in the system. The system administrators were able to control the operating system, fix the bugs, and direct women, fresh mathematics graduates, who did the actually computing, to carry the data from one source to another so that results could be aggregated. In those times, when computers were so large that people were actually able to walk through the machines, the women, were actually called computers!
However, as mainframes started shrinking, and as we entered the era of personal computing, the system admin guy was a fast disappearing category. His job was taken over by a reliable assembly line and automated programme aggregators that ensured that assembled machines with pre-installed operating systems were being delivered to the individual users. The women, on the other hand, were the first programmers as we understand them. They had intricate knowledge of the ways in which computing worked and were the only people who actually knew how to write programmes in different languages and lead them to a fruitful execution.
With the change in the nature of programming, the systems admin men slowly took over the role of the programmers and through various figures, like the nerd, and the geek, and the maths wiz, reinforced an older idea that women were not good at numbers, that the new computers were technologised demons which needed to be mastered, and that it is a man’s job to work with the machines and so women should not be considered an integral part of it. So quick and invisible was this transition, that they literally re-wrote history, so that we never really understand the role women played in the history of computing and we don’t remember any mothers of computers or the female architects of the internets. How does such a shift happen? What are the kind of forces that allow for such a radical re-writing of the history? How do economic and market forces, feminize and masculinise technologies, so that the role and the contributions of women in those areas become obliterated and certain prototypical stereotypes get reinforced in a loop?
Light’s essay brings into question the gendered relationship between technology and human beings, but it also draws our attention to questions of livelihood, which we need to ask, following our earlier questions of access. Technologies get gendered, not only through questions of access or historical constructs, but often through figuring out its public reach and market worth. It would be a worthwhile experiment to see, for instance, how, if it is a feminine trait to keep in touch and network, the credit for inventing the first social networking systems, goes to men? What are the institutional processes that keep women’s contribution, labour and efforts within a technology domain as invisible?
And following these, are the concerns of how, even though we see women in the fields of technology, participating and evolving these new technologies, why do we buy so easily into the idea that the relationship between women and technology is always one of danger or terror? Why do we often reinforce the idea that digital technologies is necessarily a domain of the masculine, when it comes to the production of the spaces, but again, the domain more of the feminine, when it comes to consumption of these technologies? Light’s essay demonstrates to us that apart from the imaginary role of technology and its feminization/demonization, there are also material forces and processes by which these technologies get defined as not only available to male or female performers but also marked as feminine or masculine in the kind of roles that it demands from the participants. The material history of technology, from a gender perspective, makes us aware of the fact that the imaginary biases of technology have very real consequences in the lived practices around us and often are subject to the forces of market economies and emerging cultural practices.
[i] The list that Woolf makes in the second chapter and her immediate
reflections after that: “Condition in
Middle Ages of,
Habits in the Fiji Islands of,
Worshipped as goddesses by,
Weaker in moral sense than, Idealism of,
Greater conscientiousness of,
South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among,
Attractiveness of,
Offered as sacrifice to,
Small size of brain of,
Profounder sub–consciousness of,
Less hair on the body of,
Mental, moral and physical inferiority of,
Love of children of,
Greater length of life of,
Weaker muscles of,
Strength of affections of,
Vanity of,
Higher education of,
Shakespeare’s opinion of,
Lord Birkenhead’s opinion of,
Dean Inge’s opinion of,
La Bruyere’s opinion of,
Dr Johnson’s opinion of,
Mr Oscar Browning’s opinion of, . . .
Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does Samuel Butler say, ‘Wise men never say what they think of women’? ‘Wise men never say anything else apparently. But, I continued, leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in which I was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women. Here is Pope:
Most women have no character at all.
And here is La Bruyère:
Les
femmes sont extrêmes, elles sont meilleures ou pires que les
hommes——
a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite. Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account. Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”
This module looks at the ways in which cities are constructed, focusing on debates around questions of gendered safety and risk. It looks at how even as debates about women’s presence is public space take place, they are simultaneously debates about the construction of a particular class at this point in relation to globalization.
If the 19th century represents a point at which the Aryan woman was being located as the ubiquitous Indian woman (Uma Chakravarti, XXXX), then in many ways the last two decades have meant contestations about who the contemporary modern Indian woman is. Using the lens of public space, this module interrogates not just the woman question in late 20th and early 21st century India but also the crystallization of the contemporary middle class. This module focuses only on urban public spaces, and is particularly relevant to metros.
The module is structured in six sections:
1. Space as Gendered
In the last two decades, as the category ‘gender’ has been questioned and challenged as a stable category of analysis, simultaneously there has been a new way of conceptualising space. The analysis has shifted its focus from seeing space as a neutral setting against which social events and processes take place to seeing space as something that is both influenced by and influencing society and social structures. The focus has increasingly shifted to understanding how socio-spatial constructs are implicated in the production and reproduction of various social relations and in the construction of various hierarchies.
Among the scholars who engaged in this discussion of space as a social construct was Henri Lefebvre, (The Production of Space, 1991). Lefebvre writes:
“social space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity—their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder” (p.73)
Further that “social space is produced and reproduced in connection with the forces of production (and with the relations of production).” These “forces…are not taking over a pre-existing, empty or neutral space, or a space determined solely by geography, climate, anthropology…” (p.77).
Doreen Massey (Space Place and Gender, 1994) suggests the identities of ‘place’ are seen as being always unfixed, contested and multiple.
Rosa Ainley suggests that gendered space is in a constant process of becoming; where gender is something we do rather than something we are (New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender, 1998).
We also need to acknowledge that space is not just gendered. Spaces, both private and public, are hierarchically ordered through various inclusions and exclusions. In the context of access to public and other kinds of spaces the power structures that operate include: gender, class, caste, ethnicity, religion, age and physical ability.
Activity: Examine the space of your college and look at the various ways in which this space is constructed by and in turn constructs gender relations. Think about the spaces that men and women occupy at different times. Then also think of how these spaces are not just gendered but also classed.
2. Private and Public Space
We often use the terms public and private spaces as if there were clear defining lines between the two. This is not the case at all. In fact notions of public and private space blur into each other where what is public for one may well be very private for another. Think for instance of the ways in which couples carve out spaces of intense privacy for themselves in busy parks.
Further, for instance women are often “allowed” to access public spaces on the condition that they constantly demonstrate through symbolic markers that they actually belong in the private. These markers include among others symbols of matrimony or particular ways of dressing that are defined as modest in that cultural context at that time. Think for instance of these functioning as veils that demonstrate that the woman is actually in a private space of her own making. When such a woman marked as private accesses public space, she renders it simultaneously public and private.
The public and private then must be seen as categories that move in complex ways between one and the other. In scholarly terms then it is hard to use the terms public and private without being aware that they do not mean any one thing. Nonetheless one often uses them because narratives around public space are often conducted in very strong binaries of boundaries, especially those between public and private, and it is difficult to avoid using these terminologies.
Using these categories one must also be aware that the understanding of what is constructed as public and what is constructed as private changes over time. Notions of the gendered public and private are also deeply marked by class and economic and political issues.
For instance, geographer Linda McDowell speaking in relation to Britain, points out how the ideal of domesticity glosses over the fact that almost a third of all women have been in paid employment since 1881. She suggests that the domestic ideal for the middle class implied a more leisurely existence, only because it depended on the labour of working class women. McDowell suggests that the focus should be on the changing relationship between “patriarchy and the organisation of domestic labour” which would lead to “questions about why and which areas of reproduction became socialised and which became privatised”. This she averred would lead to “a more satisfactory focus than the over simple dichotomy between the public and the private sectors, work and home, that is common in much feminist urban analysis”.
Activity: Interview your mother/aunt and grandmother/aunt in regard to the spaces they were allowed to access as women in their teens and early 20s. Think about how the understanding of women’s location has changed over time.
Activity: Write a diary for one week about the various public and private spaces you traverse – what makes these spaces appear public or private?
Activity: View the documentary film ‘Freedom Before 11’ and discuss how women in hostels are seen as in need of protection in order to clearly define the blurry public-private boundaries.
3. Contested City Public Spaces
Public spaces in the city are zones of contestation where various power relations are played out. One of the arguments in relation to public space is that it needs to be policed else it will get taken over by those who are seen to be a danger to society.
Open spaces like parks are often seen as an invitation for what is often termed ‘anti-social-activity’. The assumption is that if spaces are provided then people – that is those who do not really belong to the city – will somehow misuse them.
For instance one article in the Hindu said: “In the absence of illumination, many of the parks are taken over by criminals and anti-social elements after nightfall. Hordes of beggars, lepers, drug pushers and sex workers invade the precincts. The ornamental lamps that adorned the once verdant parks in the city have either been stolen or damaged. Burnt-out bulbs are seldom replaced and street lamps in the vicinity do not function. Saplings planted by Corporation gardeners are often stolen. Citizens complain that the parks double up as operating bases for burglars.”(The Hindu, Tuesday, Sep 09, 2003)
The response to the presence of ‘anti-social activity’ or ‘elements’ has been to either not have parks at all or to turn them into spaces which are watched and policed in order to keep them beautiful. Citizens groups want to take over parks and reorder them to comply to a notion of middle class aesthetics and morality. Here the preservation of a certain kind of middle class aesthetic of order – timings for the when the spaces open and close, rules about taking edibles to the park, lists of rules put up in the park, the presence of a visible security – is taken simultaneously to be a marker of not just beauty but also of morality.
Writing about Fortress Los Angeles, Mike Davis (1992) points to the aggressive use of outdoor sprinklers in parks. He offers the example of Skid Row Park, where to ensure that the park could not be used for over-night camping sprinklers were programmed to come on at random times during the night. The measure was copied by stores to drive people away from the footpaths at night.
The provision of parks is underscored not by the principle of inclusion but by the idea of exclusion.
Another clear instance of how space is contested in the way in which couples in public space are perceived. In relation to parks and other open spaces like sea-fronts and promenades, couples too are seen as a source of disorder.
In December 2005, in Meerut (Uttar Pradesh), the police humiliated couples (including students and married couples) in Gandhi park in the city. A group of policewomen slapped couples in full view of television cameras. The crack-down, called “Operation Majnu”, was purportedly a drive in Meerut against eve-teasing in public but in fact targeted consenting couples. Following this, the Uttar Pradesh government suspended the additional superintendent of police and the circle officer of the city and ordered a high level inquiry into the incidents. (Press Trust of India, Meerut, December 21, 2005). When couples are arrested often for ‘indecent behaviour’ it is the women who are sought to be shamed by asking whether their parents know what they are up to.
Akshay Khanna (2005) points out that “if private spaces are difficult to come by for heterosexual love, they simply do not exist for a vast number of same-sex desiring people. As such public parks, or 'cruising areas' as they are also called, are often the only spaces where queer people may meet other queer people. The public park, in other words, is as much a space for socializing and romance for heterosexual couples as it is for same-sex desire. This is one of the reasons that a large part of the government's 'outreach' work for HIV/AIDS prevention amongst 'men who have sex with men' is located in public parks”. He suggests that in the Meerut case at least the right of the heterosexual couples to be there has been supported. Two policewomen have been suspended; the National Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Women have both taken up the case suo moto. The media and politicians across the spectrum have opposed the 'moral policing'. For those couples seeking same-sex intimacy no such support is forthcoming.
Activity: Go through old newspaper reports on the internet and look at the times couples have been harassed by the police in public spaces in various cities. Make a list of these instances and the dates. Also analyse the language in which the media has covered these events.
Activity: View the film ‘Morality TV and Loving Jihad’ and discuss how the policing of couples is connected to other issues of class and gender.
4. Gendered Discourse of Safety in the City
Does this then mean that women are not welcome in the city at all? Not at all. Women, particularly in their roles as professionals and consumers, are more than welcome into the city as their presence signals a desirable modernity and makes a claim for the city as a global city, one where women are safe. The question is whether the discourse of safety is one that expands access to public spaces for women unconditionally. The answer must be an unequivocal no.
First of all, this notion of safe cities is aimed not at everyone or even at all women but at a particular kind of woman, the middle class woman. And not just any middle class woman but, the middle-class, Hindu, upper-caste, able-bodied, heterosexual, married or marriageable woman. Shilpa Phadke writes:
“Its (the discourses’) focus on middle class women rather than working class or poor women allows the discourse to be only about women and therefore about gendered safety. A discussion on working class or poor women would compel an engagement with concerns of not only gendered safety but also class safety, one that would then mean contending with the question of working class and poor men’s access to public space as well. Bringing the discussion to focus squarely on the middle class woman helps to unravel the fact that the discourse of safety is in the interests of not even the women for whom it is ostensibly meant but rather serves to reinforce the boundaries of class and gender in access to public space.” (Dangerous Liaisons, 2007)
The exclusion of women from public space cannot be seen in isolation. As I have suggested in the preceding sections, the exclusion of women from public space is linked critically to the exclusion of other marginal citizens. Also as suggested in the discussion on parks this safety for women is juxtaposed against the presence of some other ‘Others’. These others include the poor, slum dwellers, bar dancers, sex workers, hawkers, loiterers, Muslim men, unemployed men all of whom must be banished from public space so that it is rendered safe for middle class women.
Shilpa Phadke further argues: “This then sets up the central fallacious opposition around which people are excluded from public space – that between the ‘vagrant’ man (read: lower class often unemployed male cast as migrant outsider) and our central protagonist the middle class woman. The rationale for denying women access to public space is the danger posed by the lower class unemployed man. Both the person perceived to be the potential molester and the potential victim of the act of molestation are both denied legitimate access to public space on these grounds. This line of thinking casts both lower class men and all women as outsiders to public space and the anxieties attached to women’s presence are simultaneously expressions of the anxiety attendant upon the presence of the lower class man.
….
The discourse of safety for women is actually the discourse of sexual safety. The concern is not that women will be killed or even run over by vehicles but that they will be sexually assaulted. This focus on sexual safety is rooted in conservative class and community structures, particularly those of sexual endogamy. This notion of safety encompasses not just sexual assault but also undesirable sexual liaisons even if they are consensual. Situating the discussion in relation to safety rather than ‘sexual endogamy’ isolates the question of gendered risk, pushing the question of both class safety and (unwanted) cross-class-sexual-affiliations out of the frame of concern. The discourse of gendered safety then is inextricably linked to the manufacture of respectability and immediately excludes an overt discussion of the anxieties attached to a mixing of classes, especially to any association between lower class men and middle class women.” (Dangerous Liaisons, 2007)
Where then might Muslim women, the women of the ‘others,’ be located in this discourse?
Sameera Khan writes:
It is commonly perceived that Muslim women are more marginalized and have less access to the world outside their homes than women of other communities. But as our research in Mumbai revealed, the restrictions imposed on Muslim women’s mobility and access to public space were actually quite similar to the curbs exerted on women from other communities. These included controls on timings, purpose, place, dress, and companions, with similar concerns voiced regarding their sexual safety and respectability. … Since their community is one that particularly feels under threat and surveillance, the issues surrounding Muslim women’s access to the public and sexual safety become all the more complex. … The fact that their entire community is looked upon with hostility and habitually fears violence, means that Muslim women not only have less of a chance to venture out of community boundaries but also that their movements and behaviour are more closely policed by their families and their community. (Negotiating the Mohalla, 2007)
Activity: Examine the cases where there has been violence against romantic couples belonging to different castes or religions. Think about why these couples are seen to be a threat to ‘Indian culture’.
5. Global Cities and the Place of Women
While it is true that women are barred from public space, not all women are barred in the same way. Through their access to both economic capital through private infrastructure and cultural capital through education, middle class women have greater access to public space.
As suggested earlier there are spaces where middle class women as consumers and professionals are welcomed, such as the new spaces of consumption – shopping malls and coffee shops, where the presence of a certain kind of woman is a marker of the modernity of the city and its claim to global status. It is important at this point to underscore that these are not ‘public’ spaces, but privatised spaces that masquerade as public spaces, where entry is ostensibly open but in reality regulated through various subtle and overt acts of (intentional and unintentional) intimidation and exclusion. The suggested safety of middle class women in these spaces defines particular spaces in the city as desirable places for the middle classes to live, work or be entertained in. The presence and the performance of a class habitus of these women are very important in the construction of the global city. (Phadke 2007)
These spaces allow them to be in the ‘public’ in particular ways that permit visibility without compromising respectability. This however, comes with a price tag attached and we are not merely referring to the cost of the coffee. The private and the public are no longer clearly distinct but embedded within one another in the same space, creating a potential ambiguity and therefore the need for women to continuously demonstrate their respectability.
The fact that women’s access even to such places of new consumption is fragile is demonstrated by an incident in an up-market neighbourhood of Mumbai. In May 2006, the local police in Lokhandwala in Andheri West alleged that they had received complaints that women sex-workers were fixing up clients in the open seating spaces outside some popular neighbourhood coffee shops. As a result, the police prohibited the coffee shops from serving customers in the outer open area outside their restaurants. The connotation was clear: any woman sitting in these spaces could be perceived as soliciting. This accusation was met with outrage, but nonetheless many women stopped sitting outside. Even in these spaces then, women have to carefully monitor their own movements and demeanour.
Class is an important determinant not only of access to public space, of who might be seen where, but also of how notions of threat and ideas of risk are constructed in relation to public space, contextualised around unspoken, but no less real, boundaries that control these spaces. The intersection of class and morality complicates not only women’s negotiations of risk but also the kind of visibility they may have access to and the modes through which they are represented.
Example: BAR DANCERS CASE IN MUMBAI – expand.
These spaces however circumscribed they are also continue to be contested.
More recently members of a group calling themselves the Sri Ram Sene attacked women in a pub in Mangalore citing the desecration of Indian culture.
Activity: Track the recent Pink Chaddi campaign as the response to the assault on women in a Mangalore pub. How successful do you think this campaign is? What are the limitations of this campaign?
Activity: Examine the bar dancers’ legal case in Mumbai and think about why they chose to focus on issues of livelihood.
6. The Right to Risk
“So what is risk and how does modern 21st century urban living calibrate risk? Ulrich Beck (1992) suggests that we now live in societies where risk is manufactured and managed and even deliberately undertaken for the sake of benefits conceived of in advance. Similarly, Anthony Giddens (1991) suggests that the institutionalisation of risk is a fundamental character of modern society where risks are endlessly analysed, profiled and reflected upon.
The question here is how then can one situate the precise nature of the risk question in relation to women in public space? How are different risks understood and ranked in relation to women’s access of public space. I would like to enumerate the various possible risks to women in relation to public space:
The first three are risks associated with accessing public space, the fourth is a risk related to not accessing public space.” (Phadke 2007)
The city is often cast as a space of risk and danger for women particularly in ways that do not think about the violence enacted on men in public space. Concerns about violence in public space are expressed most often in relation to the woman as the vulnerable victim of attack. The concern is not that women will be killed or even run over by vehicles but that they will be sexually assaulted.
“There is a public face to the insistence on sexual safety in the way in which questions of risk play out when women are actually assaulted in public space. Before we engage further in this discussion it is important to point out that the perception of risk has little to do with the actual possibility of danger. Statistics regularly show that when it comes to actual violence, women are victims of violence more in their homes than outside. Men on the other hand face far more incidents of actual violent behaviour in public space. Yet the narrative of danger in public space is unequivocally centred around the figure of the woman. This might have something to do with the fact that non-sexual physical violence is seen as more acceptable than sexual violence which violates the respectability of the woman and in turn brings dishonour to the community. Furthermore the overt attention on gender based violence in public space, actively discounts class, caste and religion based violence that takes place simultaneously.” (Phadke 2007)
“If one were to turn the safety argument on its head, one might argue that what women need in order to maximise our access to public space as citizens – is not the provision of safety, for even so called safe environments are not necessarily comfortable for women, but the right to engage risk. I argue that what women need in order to maximize their access to public space as citizens is not greater surveillance or protectionism (however well meaning), but the right to engage risk.
If we were to argue that the worst thing to befall women in relation to public space is to be denied access to it, we would place ourselves and the debate in an entirely different discourse – the discourse of rights, not protectionism. Seeking the right to take risks rather than making a claim for safety and protection would entail an altogether different kind of engagement. Given that for men, ‘risky’ behaviour is seen as acceptable, even desirable, claiming this right for women would undermine the very definition of appropriate feminine public behaviour.
As feminists, while one seeks safety for women in public space, to seek it in relation to women’s chastity or sexual virtue can only provide conditional protection and not the right to public space. A feminist demand for public space located in an understanding of rights would clearly distinguish it from a more paternalistic claim to safety (therefore protection) in public space. What we might seek then is an equality of risk – that is not that women should never be attacked but that when they are, they should receive a citizen’s right to redress and their right to be in that space be unquestioned.” (Phadke 2007).
When feminists claim the right to public space, implicit in this demand must be the claim to public space for all marginal citizens for it is only when this right is uncontested for all that it will be unconditional.
Activity: Examine the ways in which the media covers violence again men and violence against women in public space. What is the difference in tone?
]]>course “gender and culture”
module 2 – feminism and knowledge
This course, in one sense, revisits the ‘and’ in “gender and culture”, and the overlap of these categories in understanding work for feminism in India. Are these – gender and culture – different standpoints or analytic categories that help us understand work for feminism in India? Do these reside in happy coalition, as the ‘and’ might suggest, or do they speak different, and antagonistic languages? What have been the implications of these two terms/ categories in the various gender-culture debates that have populated the women’s movement and feminist theorizing in India? What have been the overlaps between the terms/ categories? What has been the ‘place of woman’ in theorizations of culture?
To get to this point, we might look at the registers that research into each of these categories has occupied. Culture, in the overarching presence of the colonial ‘then’, and of the ‘global’ now,[1] is a politicized term, with many connotations – Indianness, heterogeneity, niché, locality – to name a few. The work of studying culture – through history, through literature, through the impact of postcolonial work on these and other disciplines – has partly been to mix frankly political terms with those not so obviously part of the political lexicon (like the ‘private sphere’, for instance) and thus to make culture a political term – one constituted through various other entities, gender among them. Some of this work has been detailed in the first module of this course.
Feminism, on the other hand, that undertakes research into issues of gender, has ‘naturally’ stood for the political in the popular consciousness, and, significantly, in intellectual work, including work in women’s studies departments. With specific reference to the Indian context, the feminist slogans - “The personal is the political”, or “Women’s studies is a perspective, not a discipline”, come to mind for the significant ways in which they have shaped feminist thinking and teaching in India. We could see, in a closer examination of these slogans, the ways in which feminism as critique both of mainstream knowledge systems and political narratives gets shaped around such a notion of the ‘naturally’ political. Given this, feminism would make possible a political critique of epistemology, but would not wish to work toward an epistemology of its own.
In centering this module around an ‘ism’ in the shape of feminism, we deliberately take up the political question of gender but differently from the above. In centering this module around an ‘ism’ yet wishing to propose a movement out of ‘isms’, we might actually interrupt the conventional register of the political – a register that recognizes feminism as ‘naturally’, and as only, political. By doing so, this module introduces the question of feminism as knowledge, not in a movement away from politics but more significantly, as a productive and perhaps necessary connection between the political and the epistemological.
Keeping these points in mind, this module seeks to ask the following questions for feminism –
· Is feminism about producing knowledge, or is feminism about a political critique of universalist knowledge and systems of knowledge? Are the two activities – critique and knowledge-production – separable?
· In other words, is “feminist knowledge” about pointing to the empirical and conceptual exclusions on which first order theories stand – a more naturally political task – or does it have a ‘positive’ epistemological content of its own? What might that be?
· Talking more of positive content, if feminist knowledge is a possibility, is it important to ask - “who knows”? Is such a question a sufficient movement away from “universalist knowledge” that presumes there is only one knowledge, one way of getting to it, and that it is true for all as well as for all time?
· If feminism were to suggest, as an alternative to universalism, ‘situatedness’ as a condition for knowledge, what would be meant by such situatedness?
· In traditional thinking, a statement is made about a linear relationship between women and feminism. Are women therefore situated knowers? How would we, in the present, respond to such a statement?
· Would this response be a movement away from older understandings of the political, and of feminism as its natural home? In other words, would this be a movement away from feminism as an ‘ism’ or ideology (“the set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests” [Williams 1976:128-9])? If so, how?
· Would culture be such a situation of knowledge-making? Would such a knowledge-making ask questions of culture-as-knowledge?
· Going back to the first question, if feminism is about critique as well as about knowledge-making, would such knowledge be a liberatory tool, or, Frankenstein-like, carry its own demands of the knower? What would the elements of the knowledge produced through such an understanding look like?
One – introduction – feminism and the political
Both culture and gender have been vantage points for the critique of the universal character granted to knowledge; a specific example of this would be the response to the apparently universalist character of Western science in Indian contexts. In talking about gender as a vantage point, we need to bear in mind how feminism as critique both of mainstream knowledge systems and political narratives gets shaped around a notion of the ‘naturally’ political. To understand this would require an examination of self-perceptions of feminism in various spaces and political contexts. The specific instance of feminism in India will be taken up for discussion in this section – how feminism as the natural home for the ‘political’ begins to be articulated in both feminist activism and intellectualizing in India.
Readings –
Denise Riley.
Rosemary Tong on an overview of 2nd wave feminism.
Christopher caudwell on a bourgeois philosophy.
Raka Ray – Fields of Protest.
Exercise –
Examine the trajectory of the relationship between “the personal and the political” in Marxist and feminist writing.
A discussion on the two slogans - “The personal is the political”, and “Women’s studies is a perspective, not a discipline”.
Two – experience and women/ women and feminism– traditional ties.
This section will elaborate on the ways in which feminism as a world-view has been attached to women, and how this tie has contributed to critiques of universalist knowledge. The notions of the everyday/ the personal/ the experiential, which are seen as the world of women in patriarchy, have been re-activated largely in 2nd wave feminism in order to critique dominant knowledge forms. Among the many forms this has taken, two will be discussed – one, feminism as expected to begin from and therefore be representative of women; two, feminism as attached to exploring the ontic question “woman”. Examples of efforts in this direction include on the one hand the movement toward uncovering women [thus bringing women into visibility], on the other hand movements like ecriture feminine or ecofeminism or prakriti [thus activating an alternative symbolic or ‘world’ that may be named feminine]. Thus the effort of feminist work has been to point to the conceptual and empirical exclusions on which first order theories stand. Such work has permeated feminist takes on literature, history, as well as theory.
Readings –
Margaret Whitford on Irigaray. The Feminine in Philosophy.
Butler – Introduction to Bodies That Matter.
Vandana Shiva.
Possible exercise –
Examine women’s studies publications from an Indian or other university.
Or
Syllabi of gender paper.
Note – the point of this module is not to cut the link between women and feminism but to examine the ways in which it has been established.
Three – feminism and experience – traditional ties
This section will examine roughly three ways in which feminism in India has called upon women’s experience in order to challenge dominant political formations as well as dominant, propositional models of knowledge production culturally embedded in what is called the ‘West’. These ways move from the application of feminism as ideology to critique universalist knowledge systems, to that of women as directly confronting such systems and making their own contingent negotiations with both power and knowledge. This last part of the section actually examines ways in which the women-feminism link was challenged through such work. The three approaches to be discussed are –
- The global universalist approach that concerns itself with gender and culture, that wants to work with an attention to women everywhere and from every culture, that believes in “one” knowledge but is concerned with its access by women of all cultures. Martha C. Nussbaum, who sees her work as an example of feminist political philosophy, is the best example of this approach.
- The local, soliloquous approach that takes modern science or western forms of knowledge to be by definition violent, reductionist, and capitalist, with an exclusionary attitude to the experiences of women in the third world, and therefore advocates a return to the third world women-nature combine as a response.
- Global gender work disdaining the universalist approach - this works toward identifying moments of resistance – arbitrary and non-ideological - in women’s lives. This approach is in alignment with postcolonial thinking that works within a framework of hybridity.
Readings –
Martha C. Nussbaum.
Cecilia van Hollen.
Vandana Shiva.
Possible exercise –
An examination of posters from the reproductive health movement, available at and to be collected from hospital clinics.
Four – experience and knowledge – traditional binaries
The discussions in the last section bring us to the classical science-experience binary that has been the pillar of most critiques – including feminist – of universalist forms of knowledge. Both gender and culture have been used as the experiential question to the ‘reasonableness’ of western models of knowledge. The work around culture seen in postcolonial writings, and the Marxist legacies of feminist thinking in India, demonstrate this approach. Such a binary, of experience versus knowledge, that informs both culture and gender critiques of western knowledge forms, undergoes further adjectivization – third world experience versus western reason, third world women’s experience versus western reason, and so on, thus assembling gender and culture as similar vantage points for critique – an argument that in itself we might find ourselves in disagreement with. It is such a legacy that ultimately also informs the feminist drawing on women’s experience to counter Reason that has in turn been adjectivized as male. One of the chief areas where Reason is said to underpin language and policy is mainstream development frameworks, and it is here that feminism in India, among other critiques, has made some of its more forceful argument. It says that the underpinning of mainstream development practice is provided by the language and practice of (modern western) science, which assumes the following: knowledge and subsequent use of knowledge is independent of both knower and the user; therefore the object of knowledge is an entity produced in detachment, which is then disseminated through a top-down method. In this frame, questions of context are to be factored in only as empirical criteria, and not as constitutive of the object of knowledge. Of course, this model ignores the contexts that moor its own knowledge frames.[2] An essentialist understanding of “woman” is what feminism seeks to debunk here, when using this critique against western medical texts, for instance.
In the case of culture, critiques of western knowledge frames arising from such a vantage point have often been an accessing of a notion of pre-existing, anterior knowledge system – one that might be called Indian, for instance. Although cultural critiques have also, like feminism, attempted to challenge the Orientalist notions of other locales that infect western knowledge of the same, the critiques themselves fall back, through various means, on such an anterior, timeless context that must needs resist universalist knowledge.
Possible exercise –
1. Bring to the classroom any instances of your consultations with an allopathic doctor at a clinic.
Discussion based on the same.
2. Bring to the classroom 2 instances of consultations with a practitioner of any health system other than allopathy.
Discussion based on the same.
Five – relevance of feminism as an ideology to counter universal knowledge?
Having charted the workings of the knowledge-experience binary in feminist critiques in the last section, we come to the question of a certain disaggregation that now takes up the space of critique. Such a disaggregation not only concentrates on the local, the micro, it actually challenges the relevance of a coherent set of interests that may resist a dominant scheme. In other words, does feminism as a coherent ideology make sense any more? This section will discuss ways in which feminism – the naturally political space – began to be countered as the critique of universalist knowledge, being replaced by more ‘micro’, on-the-ground understandings of the political, and of power in general. The third approach brought up in section three – that of global gender work – to women’s experience as critique of universalist knowledge exemplifies this shift, and will be discussed in more detail.
Six - feminism as knowledge – a possible world.
This section takes up three questions. One, if feminist knowledge is a possibility, does that entail a move away from experience? Two, if feminist knowledge is a possibility, and if it is intimately related to the question of critique as well, is it enough to identify “who knows”? What could be more valid criteria for situatedness? Three, if feminist knowledge is a possibility, would such knowledge be liberating or empowering in the ways in which knowledge has traditionally known to be?
The old ideological model of critique was also tied to a model of knowledge, a model that said – I know, you do. For a feminism having drawn from Marxist legacies of politics, this was the model to be adopted, and the politics around women’s lives that gave birth to this entity, feminism, and has nurtured it ever since, definitionally became that benevolent umbrella, that liberatory tool, that protects those lives and inserts itself into them (suggesting that the personal must be politicized). This model called for a feminism that needed only to champion the entry of the empirically excluded – hence the innumerable women-in-science enclaves, the talk of the glass ceiling, the push toward inclusion. Having identified the problems of vanguardism during the post-nationalist, subaltern turn, however, a portion of the rethinking Left and a global, universalist feminism may consider that what remains for us to do or think is a turn to experience. The slogan changed; it became – we all know, together. Nussbaum’s global approach to the local, discussed in section three, takes this position. Both these moves were, however, hyphenated in the premise of ‘one knowledge’. There was another move – critical of ‘one knowledge’, and carrying a different slogan – I know mine, you know yours, there can be no dialogue. For this school, exemplified in ecofeminism discussed in section three, the experience of oppression was necessary, and sufficient, to make this claim. The consciousness of oppression, which was the ex-officio result of belonging to the community, offered knowledge. The community of knowers here was a closed community. Asserting that the ‘one knowledge’ claim rested on the active exclusion of other knowledges, it suggested a remaking of ‘low knowledge’ through the experience of oppression. This is the impulse that starts, and ends, with the embodied insider, speaking with[in] and for itself, a complete closed community. This impulse we have seen with respect to sexual minorities, caste, women, the subaltern – an impulse also tied to the organic or pastoral as opposed to the technological, an impulse sometimes tracing direct connections with a cultural past, and often offering a choice between systems of knowledge.
In the complex of phenomena often referred to by the short-hand ‘globalisation’, a reaction to the ideological has meant a shift from politics to self-help, sometimes from the ideological to the intuitive, where the intuitive is taken as a flat description of immediate reality as experience. While most feminist turns to experience have described this immediate everyday reality as whole, pristine, feminine, and not overdetermined by patriarchal norms, forgetting that this everyday is actually the most powerful site for the operations of the patriarchal, the new gender work does not necessarily rely on organicity, wholeness, or purity. Rather, politics, or the politics of representation, have shifted, as Haraway notes with deadly precision, to a game of simulation in what she calls the “informatics of domination”, and the new gender work is as much part of it as any other (recall Van Hollen’s terms – culture-in-the-making, “processural”, etc). While none of this new critical work addressing development or technology actually denies domination or power, it has contributed to making power so increasingly difficult to define or identify, as to make counter-hegemonic attempts appear very nearly anachronistic.
What, then, of alternatives? After a rejection of those feminist strands that seek to build a common, sometimes homogenous narrative of feminine experience, and of gender work that thrives on the heterogeneity of women’s experiences, but yet agreeing with the need to “speak from somewhere” – through some form of attachment, as against older models of one knowledge that offered a “view from nowhere” – a completely detached view, what could be the nature of this critique?
We could suggest that it will have to be a re-turn to experience, rather than a turn. That we pay attention not only, or not even so much, to the fractured narrative offered by the wide variety or heterogeneity of experience, as to its aporeticity,[3] so as to enact such a re-turn from the perspective of the excluded, aporetic experience as momentary resource – not authentic or originary, but appropriate. This would mean, most importantly for a revised notion of the political, a shift from a politics of marginality to a politics of aporeticity.
Perspective, here, would take on the connotations of the fantastic spur within the dominant, not as equal to individual taste or possession of an identity, but as a moment of seeing, of ‘possession’, that may be lost in the looking. Here we might find useful, as a beginning, the model of the excluded available within feminist standpoint theory, of the woman as ‘outsider within’ (Collins 2004).[4] While this formulation evokes a degree of unease about whether this social location can be enough as a starting point (whether women then always have to be the outsiders within to be able to speak from this space), it offers, perhaps, valuable clues to work toward a possible model of feminist critique. To understand this, we need to understand, also, that the point here is not only of pointing to hierarchies of power, nor is it a stand-alone system of knowledge that may be called feminist. Perspective would be that moment of possession that not only gives a completely different picture of things, it also gives a picture not available from anywhere else – that makes visible the dominant as that which had rendered invalid other possibilities.
The notion of standpoint would be then the act of interpretation, not a place already defined; this process involves the production of an attached model of knowledge that begins from perspective, one that requires a speaking from somewhere.
Such a speaking from somewhere obviously requires a conceptualization of this ‘somewhere’; in other words, a fidelity to context. Here context is not (only) about date-time-place, such that a concept of ‘one knowledge’ can be critiqued from a situation. It is most importantly about relationality, the space between you and me, both intra-community and inter-community. Once we take cognizance of this, we realize that that space does many things – it induces a porosity of boundaries (body, community), it creates attachment, it also creates separation. With this in mind, we then have to talk of building a story from perspective, where it is the turning from within outward (from attachment to separation) that does the work of building the story. Such a standpoint ‘is’ only in the constant interrogation of both dominant discourse – masculinist Marxist discourse - and of the category of resistance – feminism – within which it may be named. If this has a mutually constitutive rather than a representative relationship with perspective, it will also mean a separation from both old vanguardist methodologies and newer calls to experience.
What may be most important here is the recognition of the fantastic perspective as a visual tool. Perspectives are made fantastic by their positioning in an imbrication of power and meaning; and unless the position is required to be static through any counter-hegemonic exercise, they cannot be the source of a permanent identity, nor an alternative system. We may present women’s experiences, then, in a different detail and from a different perspective than as a lesson to be learnt from different women, or indeed from an essentially feminine perspective. What we might call the allegory of women’s lived experience serves more as a test case, an example of the fantastic perspective that both helps provide a different picture of the dominant, and a glimpse of other possible worlds.
Such a fantastic perspective, moreover, would change radically our cognition of feminism itself. Feminism as that liberatory, shade-giving mother, that warm place of refuge, is not a workable thesis in this frame, and the question then is – was it ever? Or is feminism that monster, that unhappy moment of possession (not of an identity but by a vision) that grows larger and larger, demands more and more, not simply of the dominant but of the interrogator of the dominant? Does this not render unstable each time what had seemed the ultimately radical, interrupt each time a consolidation of identity under its own name, so that in response to the rhetorical question – “Who’s afraid of feminism?” the feminist’s answer would be – “I am”? Such a re-cognition of feminism is where we are at today, and that might begin to inform what we call feminist knowledge.
[this section will require more delineation, can actually be done only in the teaching perhaps …]
Possible exercise –
A writing up of experiences in the class where use of alternative systems of medicine have come up in their families, the conversations around those, and the status accorded to them.
[1] I would suggest that the ‘then’ and ‘now’ are both in the present; put differently, there are heterogenous time frames at work in any particular space.
[2] The “female body”, for instance, is the site for the understandings of as well as operations of Science (with its invisible qualifier western). In its project of defining the form and delineating the workings of the female body, this form of knowledge has approached the status of a value-neutral, objective method that purportedly bases itself on solid empirical evidence to produce impartial knowledge. In the case of the female body, it would then appear that Science has found it exclusively and powerfully fashioned by nature to bear and nourish children; in the event, all it is doing is putting the facts before us.[2]
[3] The aporia is the logically insoluble theoretical difficulty, i.e. the seemingly fantastic perspective.
[4] FST talks of the possibility of a situated, perspectival form of knowing, of such a knowing as necessarily a communal project, and of this knowing as one where the community of knowers is necessarily shifting and overlapping with other communities. While Haraway would speak of ‘situated knowledges’ as against the ‘God trick’, as she calls it, of seeing from nowhere – a neutral perspective (Haraway 1992), Sandra Harding would go on, however, to propose a version of strong objectivity – a less false rather than a more true view; this, Harding would suggest, can come only from the viewpoint of particular communities, sometimes the marginalized, sometimes women. This is where Harding’s version of standpoint epistemology is still grappling with the question of whether the experience of oppression is a necessary route to knowledge. (Harding deals with this with this by treating women’s lives as resource to maximise objectivity, Haraway by treating these women as ironic subjects, and seeing from below as only a visual tool) A related question is whether the very notion of standpoint epistemology requires a version, albeit a more robust one than in place now, of systems of domination, and it is here that a productive dialogue could be begun between Haraway’s more experimental version of “seeing from below” and Harding’s notion of strong objectivity.
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I. INTRODUCTION
Gender and Culture
Framing question: What is the specific relationship between these concepts, gender and culture, and why is it relevant to the history of women and of women’s movements in India?
The module will deal with the following ideas:
- How ideas on men and women get fixed and become part of patriarchal structures of oppression
- How feminism has pointed to a nature-culture opposition; and women in the non-west are relegated to the domain of culture (unlike in the west)
- The emergence of the ‘culture question’ in India and feminist approaches to national identity
- How formations of the notion of culture in the Indian context are premised on woman
Sections:
1. The Problem of Gender
When we think of “men” or “women”, we tend to assume that the reference is to biological beings who are “naturally” inclined to behave in certain ways. Popular culture is full of images of typical behaviour patterns of those who come from either Mars or Venus. Television soaps, popular films, stories and cartoons in weekly magazines all tell stories filled with tragedy and comedy, pathos and humour. These emotions often derive from fixed ideas of male and female attitude, activity and appearance.
The ideas tend to get fixed and re-fixed through various cultural forms, and circulated in a range of media. Cultural forms include all kinds of texts and practices that contribute to and change the ways in which we identify with a certain identity (for eg Indian). For instance, the idea that women are nurturing and men are aggressive is a cultural idea, not a natural one. It is an idea that gets naturalised and we assume that women are like that, when it is actually a notion that is born out of a certain fixed way of understanding men and women (perhaps through educational texts, media representations, scientific research that claims it as fact, or religious views). The key problems with these fixed ideas are that (a) they give little scope for understanding change in how real men and women live, and (b) they tend to create a hierarchy, placing women in an inferior position. The consequences are serious, and have led to the operation of what has been called patriarchal [explain this term] structures of oppression.
Activity:
List some stereotypes about men and women that you are familiar with, whether in films, or in opinions that circulate around you. It would be useful to list views on activity, appearance and attitude. Discuss these in relation to whether or not you think they are ‘true’, and where these stereotypes generally circulate (where they are promoted, what groups they are attached to, how they are linked to politics).
Both men and women over the centuries have tried in different ways and in different societies to question some of these stereotypes [explain this term] Early critical writing about this problem can be seen in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Structures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792) [citation] which was written after the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft argued that the declaration of human rights sweeping across the world at that time did not include half the human race because it focussed only on the rights of “man”. She also criticised women for succumbing to fixed ideas of femininity and wasting their time in reading romantic novels instead of becoming aware of their true potential.
2. The Nature-Culture binary
Other critical writers talked about how Western civilization was seen as being born out of the activity of great men, and how the struggle of the civilizers was always against the women who kept pulling them back to a state of nature. The wilderness being tamed by the men was a metaphor for the female nature that had to be conquered. Feminist [feminist: speaks from the perspective of one who is interested in dismantling the ideas and institutions that are based on the subjugation of women] scholars in the West suggested that nature and culture formed a binary [explain term]. “[In western feminist history] the most common pair of terms to be evoked and fought over are nature and culture.” [Mary John, “Feminism in India and the West”, Cultural Dynamics 10 (2), 197-209]. By analyzing the nature-culture binary, western feminists produced important critiques of organization of knowledge as well as institutions like family. However, in non-Western societies, women were historically seen as part of Culture.
Feminist approaches to national identity: Feminist historical scholarship in India has been able to show that the formulation of notions of culture in India were crucially related to women. This draws our attention to the significance of the culture question under colonial rule. With culture understood here as a mark of distinctiveness and distinction in relation to the colonizing West, we also gain insights into how a historically specific way of thinking about Indian women came to be naturalised or made obvious.
The discussions about culture in gender theory in India are based on critiques of the nationalist project in both pre- and post-Independence phases. Feminists have looked at the time of the anti-colonial struggles and how a self-constructed Indian identity was born in opposition to the view the colonisers had of the natives. They have also gone on to theorise the post-independence time, when it was important to decide how India would imagine itself, as an independent nation that was no longer subject to British rule. This imagination of India gave rise to a range of representations within various fields. In a range of writings spanning a variety of disciplinary locations (history, sociology, literary studies, art history, film studies) feminist scholars have engaged with and analysed the formation of normative femininity [explain term] as it takes shape in the context of discussions about Indianness. Approaching the problem from a different direction, some writers have looked at the formation of the normative citizen-subject [explain term] in India, arguing that it is informed by debates on the woman question as well as by new embodiments of masculinity and femininity. This has been a way of understanding and critiquing political forms from the standpoint of gender, saying that the citizen is not a neutral category in the way in which it functions. Certain bodies do not ‘fit’ the idea of the citizen (in how they are ‘wrongly’ masculine or feminine); and the idea of the citizen rests on specific ways in which women are positioned. CROSS-REFERENCE WITH MASCULINITY-FEMININITY MODULE.
3. Emergence of the culture question:
How are ‘we’ different from ‘them’? This question is posed in the third world or more broadly non-Western societies as part of a colonial contestation. By this we mean a contest between colonizer and colonized on the relative merits of their cultures. With the onslaught of the colonizing West in India in the late 18th to early 19th century, some of the colonized Indians responded by asserting the superiority of their own culture. If we look at how the term for “culture” emerged in modern Indian languages, we notice that the most commonly used term, sanskriti, is actually a translation of the English word “culture”.
The point being made here is not that there was no concept of culture before the English introduced it, but that after the 19th century we invest different meanings in culture. It becomes the location of everything that is uniquely ours, and therefore different from anything that can be found in the world of the colonizer. As we become modern Indians, and then go on to become citizens of an independent nation, we hold on to the idea of “our culture” as setting us apart from others.
Here the culture question is an intimate part of the formation of our modern identity, but culture in modernity tends to be seen as something that remains outside of modernity [needs explanation]. This mean that in discussions on/descriptions of what is ‘modern’, culture is made to stand as that which is not-modern, that which is traditional and is outside the processes of westernisation that then come to be seen as modern. Something like the Internet is then seen as part of ‘modernity’, while Ayurveda comes to be seen as inherently part of an ‘Indian’ culture. This curious relationship between culture and modernity, a relationship that has its roots in the colonial context, may give us some indication as to why women occupy the place they do in discussions about culture.
This issue is not specific only to India. There are many similarities between the Indian context and other societies across Asia.
4. The woman question in Asia:
Kumari Jayawardena’s classic work Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986) had argued that in the non-West these two movements share an intimate relationship. Parallelly, the ‘culture question’ also becomes a ‘national culture question’, with significant implications for women. Although nationalist movements fighting against the colonizer enable women’s political participation, they also create for them a fixed position in the symbolism of national culture. [Give eg. We can see examples of this in the production of the New Woman in Japan or Korea or India].
A criticism routinely faced by feminists across Asia is that they are deracinated or alienated from ‘our culture’, that feminism comes from the West and is therefore an alien set of ideas. Interestingly, this is not a charge levelled against any of our other political frameworks (eg. Marxism, liberalism) which may also be far from having a clearly identifiable local or indigenous source. Why then does feminism come under fire for being alien? Feminist demands are allegedly demands arising from ‘modernization’, which is seen to erase ‘our’ culture and replace it with western values and ways of life. This criticism is easily made, but it does not take into account how the notion of culture itself has been put together in our context.
One of our starting points would be to understand (a) how the creation of the national essence was based on the assertion of cultural difference from the West (how ‘we’ are different from ‘them’), and (b) how women were frequently represented as the embodiment of that difference (that it is in women, their bodies and lives, that this difference lives). When nationalists in the non-Western world produce a relationship of conflict between modernity and culture, what is being implied is that women are part of that which is cultural and therefore authentic. They cannot be part of the modern. So when women behave in ways associated with modernity (read assertive, individualistic, ambitious…) they are seen as challenging their place in Indian culture and therefore undermining that culture itself. These inter-related ideas have presented a serious problem for feminists in India who are trying to question the place ascribed to women. So it is through feminist efforts that we gained insights into how a historically specific way of thinking about Indian women came to be naturalised. Feminist historians have been able to show that the formulation of notions of culture in India were premised on woman,
Read the following quotation:
From Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question”:
[In struggling against colonial domination, nationalists looked for a resolution to the contradictions involved in being simultaneously attracted to and repelled by Western ideas]
“…[T]his resolution was built around a separation of the domain of culture into two spheres – the material and the spiritual. It was in the material sphere that the claims of western civilization were the most powerful. Science, technology, rational forms of economic organisation, modern methods of statecraft, these had given the European countries the strength to subjugate non-European peoples and to impose their dominance over the whole world. To overcome this domination, the colonized people must learn these superior techniques… But this could not mean the imitation of the West in every aspect of life… What was necessary was to cultivate the material techniques of modern western civilization while retaining and strengthening the distinctive spiritual essence of the national culture”.
[Chatterjee goes on to argue that the material/spiritual distinction was condensed into a powerful distinction between inner and outer, home and world, private and public. The distinctions were mapped onto gendered social roles, as the new middle class men went out to work and mingle with Europeans and women were entrusted with the burden of maintaining the purity of the inner world. In reconciling modernity with nationalism, a new patriarchy was assembled, with new roles for women. In other words, in order to make the drive towards technology, science and rationality acceptable, in order to make modernity acceptable to and in the Indian context, a spiritual inner domain was imagined, and this was to be occupied by women, who by doing this would uphold Indian culture as superior to that in the West. The idea of the middle class woman took shape: cultural refinement, formal education, appropriate spiritual forms of femininity.]
“The need to adjust to the new conditions outside the home had forced upon men a whole series of changes in their dress, food habits, religious observances and social relations. Each of these capitulations now had to be compensated by an assertion of spiritual purity on the part of women. They must not eat, drink or smoke in the same way as men; they must continue the observance of religious rituals which men were finding it difficult to carry out; they must maintain the cohesiveness of family life and solidarity with the kin to which men could not now devote much attention”.
Questions about the reading:
Activity: Put together photographs from family albums or from other sources that show women and men’s dress from the 19th century to the present. Explain what the similarities and differences between the pictures are.
As Chatterjee shows in the quotation above, the assigning of new roles to women also had to do with the formation of the new urban middle class in colonial times.
Read the following quotation:
Sumanta Banerjee, “Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal” from Recasting Women [Sangari and Vaid 1989]:
“Englishmen, like [Augustus] Willard, who came to Bengal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, carried two burdens: the ‘white man’s burden’ of educating the unenlightened natives, and the ‘man’s burden’ of emancipating native women from what they considered to be a socio-cultural milieu of utter ignorance and impurity. The latter burden came to be shared by the English-educated Bengali bhadralok of the nineteenth century (sons of absentee landlords, East India Company agents and traders who made fortunes in the eighteenth century, various professionals and government servants) all of whom, in spite of differences in economic and social status, were moving towards the development of certain common standards of behaviour and cultural norms….There were subtle differences among members of the nineteenth century Bengali urban elite over the extent to which women should be educated and allowed free movement in society. However, they all agreed on the need to eradicate what they were trained to believe was the pernicious influence of certain prevailing literary and cultural forms on Bengali women, particularly on the women belonging to their own homes. [Popular culture – doggerel, poetry, songs, theatrical performances – had wide appeal for a female audience, but because it was produced by those who were not part of the bhadralok’s official culture, there were systematic attempts to get rid of it]
Questions about the reading:
[ABOUT CLASS FORMATION IN RELATION TO WOMEN]
Activity: Observe women from different social backgrounds in a public place like a market or a railway station. Focus on how they speak, how they walk and sit, and how they are perceived by others, especially men (from different classes).
Part of the colonial contestation was carried out in the domain of law and governance. One of the most significant debates related to the abolition of the practice of sati [Explain term]. The debate shows vividly how the women’s question became the ground for the discussion about Indian culture.
Read the following quotation:
From Lata Mani’s “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India”:
“…[T]radition is reconstituted under colonial rule and, in different ways, women and brahmanic scripture become interlocking grounds for this rearticulation. Women become emblematic of tradition, and the reworking of tradition is largely conducted through debating the rights and status of women in society. Despite this intimate connection between women and tradition, or perhaps because of it, these debates are in some sense not primarily about women but about what constitutes authentic cultural tradition.”
Questions about the reading:
Activity:
Feminist writing on more contemporary issues may not have directly addressed the culture question as such, but it is possible to look at some of the 1990s discussions, say around religious community, or around caste, as referring implicitly to the culture question. (Possible Activity: List two or three debates or controversies In the 90s and how the culture question enters the picture vis a vis these). If religious identity and caste identity came to be seen as non-modern in the political controversies of the 1990s, women were also implicated in this naming process. Modern women, like upper caste men from the dominant religion, in claiming their rights as women ended up claiming them against women and men from less-privileged backgrounds.
Quotations from UCC debate and from Tharu-Niranjana essay (The contemporary theory of gender) to foreground the religion and caste question
Quotes: Beauty contest material, UCC debate, Devika anthology
Activities: To see and analyse – movie clips (Fire, Dostana), photographs, calendar art (from Patricia Uberoi collection),
Art (Surekha, Vasudha Thozhur, Pushpamala, Anju Dodiya)
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