A ruin in progress

I am moving

Jaded — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 16:49:10 +0000

Or rather, I moved. My new blog is on dreamwidth, with its clean and less clunky interface. I’ve shifted the last ten or so posts, the rest will remain here in the archives. Leaving this blog as is. I am the user oncejadedtwicesnarked there. RSS feed for dreamwidth is here. If you want to quote and/or credit me, send me a message.

Hopefully, I’ll see you there.

Filed under: Postcolonial feminism Tagged: housekeeping post

Intimate Outsider

Jaded — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:34:11 +0000

Note: This is a dialogue that has taken months to articulate, Numa and I have been talking about allyhood, groups and new modes of organising — important to remember this dialogue has no end — we are just certain about one thing, if any speculation around solidarity is not a dialogue, a mutual engagement then it holds no value.

—

Numa: When you suggested that we start discussing Islam, I wasn’t entirely sure where you wanted to go with this discussion/talk. Talking about Islam certainly hasn’t figured much in our conversations, so I was like, huh?, where did that suggestion come from? But thinking about it now, I recall what you said when you first introduced this idea of this series to me. The assumption made by many is that because we are South Asian women, we will be natural allies.

Well, to be fair, I think because of our melanin count we DO have some shared experiences/ similar experiences that made it possible as individuals to identify with each other. Of course, that’s just on an individual level and it wouldn’t necessarily be the same for myself and another person who looks like me (my mother for example).

Yes, there are differences, like religion. I was going to say, it is interesting that this is clearly a big signifier of difference in your geo-political location, where everyone is more or less the same race, but for me, it wasn’t the first difference that occurred to me. Growing up in a majority white space, and having been raised in a family that while Muslim, is not outwardly read as Muslim by most white people (I don’t wear a headscarf, my father doesn’t have a massive beard etc.), our main signifier is our clearly South Asian looks.

The other day, my father approached a traffic warden to ask about parking in the neighbourhood we were in and the traffic warden put his hands together in greeting (Namaskar), and asked my father whether he knew Shah Rukh Khan. Anyway, my point is that I think this kind of lumping all South Asians into one homogeneous mass, kind of rubbed off on me.

When I meet South Asian people here, we are kind of immediately connected by this bond of shared racism that we face, and intra-group tensions due to religious/regional differences, at least to me, are not something that I think about actively. It’s not like when I meet somebody white, and I immediately think, how will the fact that I am different to them influence the way they behave towards me.

In fact, I kind of feel like, whenever I meet anyone who is foreign/POC, there is this immediate connection that is forged because when you live somewhere where everyone else is nothing like you, anyone who is a little bit like you becomes a friend/ally.

Me: Yes don’t you know? We brown women are all alike! We have the same needs and if you squint really hard, we’ll look the same from a distance too! As you suggested one time, maybe we all come from the secret clone factories. But I digress. It’s fascinating you said “people of the same race” — while it is true — what is strange is, we don’t see ourselves as “races” rather as castes and communities, most of which are almost always on opposite ends. When I think back about my childhood ideas around caste and communities, they are so strongly influenced with the dominant Hindu nationalism, even though I don’t remember ever really believing in God or a religion. Hindu nationalism learnt firsthand from my immediate family who’d wish Pakistan would lose every time there was an India vs Pakistan match, watching the whole neighbourhood taking immense amount of pride when we’d hear the Pakistani soldiers shot during the Kargil war, seeing most people I know fly into a rage whenever Kashmir’s “integrity” into the Indian nation-state was mentioned, having people I looked up to in my family believe that the Godhra riots were “provoked”, having teachers constantly talk about “dignity in all labour” but saying that certain jobs like scavenging and garbage collecting are not for “people like us” in the same breath, being punished for playing with children from slums, being punished for publicly declaring my family as casteist — these are memories that I carry with my body. So while you may feel some sort of connection based on “shared oppression” — however you and the other person define that — or you may start organising, forming alliances based on some similar marginalisations, here, more often than not, even the people we’d categorise under “WOC” or “third world women” have such diverse ideologies, needs, histories and geographies of exclusion (which go both ways), that sometimes I see people allying themselves with [x] community in some far off country, rather than the person sitting next to them in the bus*.

Going to the example you gave, whenever I meet anyone who I think I can potentially work or associate with, usually I have to make sure our ideas of feminism(s), communalism and casteism are somewhat similar — otherwise I’d get stuck in the rut of Hindu nationalist feminism(s), where the imagined community and emancipation is only for the select few. As is customary, I have no answers, I’m just wondering how can we translate our friendship beyond just an individual level, when and if we want to organise around lines of race, nationality and/or ethnicity?

*Whether this alliance is problematic or not, isn’t my place to judge.

Numa: Oh answers, why so elusive? I wish I had answers, but I think there is probably no hard and fast rule regarding how the translation process works.

I remember having a conversation with my father about Hell once. It’s commonly believed in Islam that non-believers will go to Hell (I don’t know the theological details, there may be nuance I am missing…anyway). So I asked my father whether he really believed all the people in this world who were not Muslim would go to Hell. My father came to Germany in the 1970s, at a time where there weren’t all that many POCs, and many of his dearest friends were non-Muslims. Some of the best people he’d ever met, people he had the utmost respect for, were non-Muslims.

He took some time to answer my question and I could see him thinking about those people, and it was clear that when he answered, knowing them had influenced his answer. He said he didn’t believe that good people, irrespective of their religion, would go to Hell.

I don’t know, maybe that’s a bad example, but in this instance his attitude towards an entire group of people was defined by the relationships he’d forged with individuals in that group. And I guess that’s often the first step when alliances are formed? Whether that’s enough, and what the next step is, I’m not sure, but dehumanization is key to fostering oppression. So constant reinforcement of humanization is important when you do the alliances thing?

When I think about my attitude towards -isms that don’t affect me directly, it’s the thought of hurting people I care for, who are affected by these -isms, that makes me pause the most. I don’t want to hurt them, so I have to check myself. But then, doing that isn’t enough because there’s an entire system out there that hurts them. If I want to stop hurting them, I need to dismantle that system. But is that enough? What comes next? Do you need more to form stronger alliances?

When I think about the rise of Islamophobia, sometimes I think that it would be easy to distance myself. I’m not particularly religious, and my family is quite private about how they practice their faith.. We fit into the model minority mold, we could probably survive unscathed. But then, I think about my brother whose age, whose skin colour, whose name, mean that he’ll have to try much harder to remain unscathed.

If I’m tempted to abandon my own group, what makes people not in my group stick around? How do you feel about Islamophobia, having grown up in upper-caste Hindu nationalist environment? Do you think of yourself as an ally to Muslims in the fight against anti-Muslim sentiments?

—

It’s important to note that it was at this point that Numa and I were having various technological, semiotic and semantic barriers and we didn’t write for a while in the middle, there were some personal barriers between us, where we went days without communicating with each other . While the post in its entirety looks like a seamless text, it certainly wasn’t un-fissured when we were writing.

—

Me: I love how you said humanisation is important for solidarity and forming alliances, you’d think that would be Step One of being any one’s ally. But too often, we’re just boxing people as “causes” we support — so being the nice liberal conservative I was raised to be, I learnt early on to say how I think all communities across India are all “equal”, so just like the national anthem I’d say that I talk to Hindu Muslim Sikh Bangala people, people reduced to labels I must use to show how progressive I was; in a similar way, almost every Governmental institution will have photos of all gods to symbolise their secularity — we don’t realise how much objectification and Othering happens in the enterprise of making ourselves seem progressive. I find people stick around just to protect their biases or as long as the cause is cool. We like to protest for the dislocated labourers every time a basti or a slum-dwelling is torn down to make a new road or a flyover, but how many people really *engage* with them, ask them if the protest will even help them, will put them in trouble with the State? As M* from the uni says daily, “fish don’t need to theorise the water they swim in” — which isn’t to say any marginalised group people like to “support” don’t have any qualms about being oppressed and marginalised, rather it’s us on the outside who need a discourse of manifestation to prove to ourselves the “causes” we are fighting for deserve our time. Colour me cynical, but I find that this con-struction of the discourse of despair actually keeps people around in a movement, even though the people affected by your cause/protest will most probably indifferent. Being familiar with feminism here, I can tell you about what happens in our progressive, Left movements. So, conversationally, I can wax on poetically about how much I identify with the goals of Muslim feminists in India — a diverse group, by no means containable in an umbrella term outside of this dialogue — or how their problems with Hindu feminisms are mine and then go on to dispel the myths about the Sharia law, when in fact, I have again just reduced these movements to symbolic pictures on my wall, which signify what I want them to, nothing more or less. As an intimate outsider, my history as an upper caste Hindu feminist is tied with the various acts of communal violence(s) that the movement as a whole has foisted on Muslim feminists here, on the Muslim community individually and structurally. Till date, many Indian feminism(s) like to configure themselves via Hindu imagery, and center themselves in and around claims and “issues” of Hindu women only — for instance, we still talk about child marriage, female feticide as “Indian feminist issues!” and things such as citizenship — which “progressive” feminists in positions such as mine don’t even consider as “feminist issues” — are confined only to theoretical debates, and are not seen as daily contentions non-Hindu people have to live with. Are living with, as we talk.

It’s on such feminised bodies, each community traces it’s limits on — like the age-old custom, women become the repositories of tradition once again, and the Muslim feminist is reduced to one “cause”, of the “veil”, of the “honour killing” or [enter cause of the week]. In this lobbying for “issues”, we tend to see communities as flat wholes, so abuse and oppression within the Muslim community (as no community is inherently unoppressive) for instance, gets written over — we are too busy being progressive to say we are allies of [x] community, but that it is not without its problems — and in the end, being an “activist for the Anti-Communalist Stance in India!11!!” I cache more than I contest, I help put one more layer of marginalisation on people who we systematically render wordless. While, it is most definitely problematic that I as an outsider talk about the conflicts within that community, what I generally do is talk to and with feminists of the community, make my voice as another in the plethora of voices from the group pointing out the cracks in your movement. Humanisation is the key, as you said earlier; and this means taking down pictures of [x] community from my wall, seeing them as wholes within and of themselves, as people aware of their oppression, as people who I cannot ally myself with, without examining where and how I’ve been complicit in their marginalisation, to ensure that my words don’t rob them of a voice. The question that plagues me today is, after this acknowledgement that I had a hand in keeping you down, will you still see me as your ally? Not that I will stop working with your movement if you don’t, I’m just interested in seeing if even after such fractures can alliances work? Will you also examine how you’ve kept me and mine at bay all this time? Will we ever talk about how we’ve both made walls we don’t want to tear down?

Filed under: Body, Guest Blogger, Postcolonial feminism, Postcolonialism Tagged: Activism, Colonialism, Feminist theory, Islam, Postcolonial feminism, Religious Manipulation

So Over It

Jaded — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:40:30 +0000

The following post is by Numa and I as a response to Eve Ensler’s post Over It. There are some things you don’t get to be over, Eve Ensler. But if we’re going to play this game, here are some of ours.

—-

We are over cis white feminists claiming to speak for the rest of us and then shutting us up when we try to fit a word in edgewise. We are over being told that we are splintering a (separatist) movement whenever we bring up things that go just beyond their immediate focus.

We are over feeling left out whenever the talk goes to rape culture, because our rape culture is never addressed, maybe because it would hold you accountable too.

We are over rape being framed as an act done only by men on women, or that it requires a penis to forcibly penetrate a vagina or an anus and all other acts of coercion on other body parts by other bodies don’t matter as much.

We are over cis white feminists using experiences of POC to prove their own humanity. We are over experiences of scores of people in Congo, in Somalia, or any place with poverty tourism becoming a footnote to white feminists’ tales of enlightenment.

We are over cis white feminists using stories from “war torn” areas to woo audiences without addressing or holding their own Governments responsible for the said war. We are over people making money by writing about the “horrifying” experiences they saw in the [third world nation], narrating stories that are not theirs to tell.

We are over countless (one-sided) dialogues with cis white feminists when they do want to talk about the difference in our rape cultures who simply retort to, “your men are irresponsible and patriarchal! We are just here to help! We can talk about murky consent issues between us some other time”.

We are over white cis women feminists essentialising the experiences of all women everywhere when it suits them but then having no trouble with using an “us” vs. “them” dichotomy against those who don’t agree with them.

We are over being told that we’re too angry and divisive when we direct criticism at the mainstream feminist movement but it’s okay for violent imagery and words to be used to threaten non-white cis women.

And what the fuck is “occupyrape” meant to mean anyway?! We are over people using the terminology of violence and colonisation to sound relevant and cool. How can you occupy an act of violence? How can you reclaim it? We don’t understand.

We are over the assumption that there is a “global paradigm of rape” but there is no recognition that this global paradigm, if there is something so all encompassing, is probably the result of political and socio-economic violation of the racial Other.

To be honest, we’re just over of this type of rallying cry for unity where it’s believed that self-reflexiveness will do harm more than it will do good. Apparently we can’t be critical of issues without also destroying our effectiveness.

We are over people simply drawing back saying “this is not my culture and therefore I will stay silent and complicit” without engaging with us at all.

We are over thousand Eve Enslers who spew shit like this over and over again and then a few others who’ll pretend this is the first time they’ve heard us speak up.

We are over seeing movements perpetuate the same acts of violence we’re meant to be addressing.

Filed under: Body, Colonialism, Postcolonial feminism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Feminist theory, Ivory Tower, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

A response to #mencallmethings

Jaded — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:01:59 +0000

A little background — this week Renee, Numa and I ranted a bit on tumblr, a P.S. to #mencallmethings if you can call it as #otherpeoplecallusthingstoo and by the time we finished, we realised we had so much more to say. The following post is a collaborative post by Renee and I. Post contains mentions of rape, rape threats, trans*misogyny and many other –isms. Tread carefully.

—

Renee: I was talking to a friend tonight about #otherpeoplecallmethingstoo. Now this friend…well, I’m unsure how much or how little to say about other peoples’ intersections, but I think it’s safe to say he has a real depth of experience with race, gender identity, sexuality, and so on. He’s also a bit my senior, which means he was old enough to actively identify as a feminist when second wave feminism was a happening thing, and still has many friends and acquaintances for whom THAT feminism is still THE feminism. And he’s a creative person who has sometimes channeled his energy into critiquing the sins of the feminist past…and felt the sting for doing so. Point being, he’s savvy to this sort of stuff, and it’s something we commiserate around often.

And he was with me while I bemoaned my frustration with the mainstream feminist community. He gets my anger about how abortion and reproductive health are framed as “women’s issues”. He recognizes my pain when the Amanda Marcotte’s of the world reduce misogyny and sexism to the existence of “gonads hang[ing] on the outside” of certain people. But, of course, it’s easy to empathize with my position on that stuff…it’s not shocking, because it happened and we know who these people are and it wasn’t personal, even if I take it personally.

But when I told him about some of the other stuff - the personal attacks ,especially the ones Jaded wrote about, which I quoted some of verbatim – he drew back a bit. I’m not really sure why, because he’s certainly seen a lot of vitriol and hate, much of it from within the feminist community. But for whatever reason, he offered an explanation.

“Well keep in mind, it’s the internet. Those are the worst of the worst,” he said.

When Sady Doyle creates #mencallmethings, feminists (which I often consider myself) don’t question it. It means something! It’s representative of what women have to deal with. It reveals the depths to which misogyny is ingrained in our culture. But when we do #otherpeoplecallmethings, at best we’ve revealed an anomaly…a few outlying pieces of data. “Oh, they’re not real feminists” or “that’s just the radical fringe” or “ignore the trolls” or whatever. You know, handwaving.

And I’m not bashing my friend – not at all – because I’ve done the same thing. For me, it was the radfems…”angry out-of-touch asshats who no one pays any attention to anymore,” I’d say. Except then there’s Cathy Brennan and Elizabeth Hungerford, bending the ears of the United Nations. And the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival attendees who thought it was a good idea to post pictures of and out trans women on the internet (and received the tacit support of WordPress in doing so). And those are just two from this year alone.

Look at the posts we’ve done about this already. These are people who self-identify as feminists, with enough pride in their convictions to attach their names to their comments (which they wrote knowing full well they could be made public). These are people who know enough to drop the Hudood Ordinance into conversation (even if they somehow don’t know the difference between India and Pakistan). Perhaps not these individuals in particular (although maybe!), but these are the people enrolled in Women’s Studies courses in big universities, organizing Slutwalks, and traveling abroad for “humanitarian efforts”. Who is going to be the next academician presenting their findings to the UN? Or the founder of the next big women’s solidarity event? Meeghan? Janice? Jenny? Point being, #otherpeoplecallmethings is not an anomaly or an outlier at all. And from the merely flawed to the truly foul, from the personal to the impersonal, the only real question is when do #otherpeople start giving a shit?

Me: When Renee first showed this draft to me, I was stunned into silence — mainly because I identified the same handwaving too, with my latest hatemail even! I told my partner about these e-mails and comments, she likes to play the devil’s advocate and said, maybe these people are just fucking around, they don’t really *mean* it, or that not all were white (who had seen them, right?) and at worst they could be people who wanted entertainment and not “legit feminists who really believe it” to quote her. It was just what I wanted to hear, placated I went to bed, thinking these were reactions from gits who wanted to piss people off.

I wake up, I have to leave to get some tests done and leave my computer at her house. When I come back after eight hours, she’s crying, she has been unable to finish any work she wanted to do and she called in sick at work — there was an extremely graphic rape threat in my inbox from another white feminist that triggered her so. If I hadn’t left my account when I gave the computer, this could have very well been me — the person it was intended for. She has no defenses today, she doesn’t want to believe any of my rationalisations, just that these people are not joking, they are not making light — and I reassure her I will never put my name out there. Half a year ago, travelling by the Mumbai local trains, someone in the general compartment recognised me as “Jaded” and for a minute I froze, convinced something bad would happen. When she told me she loved my column in Stone Telling and that she liked my blog, I felt a little relieved, but I only felt safe when she got off at her destination. This person is a good friend now, we often e-mail and chat and I feel safe around her *now*. That moment I remember clearly, I was convinced she was the person who liked to send me long e-mails about how she’d like to cut me up. I promised my partner earlier today that my name would never go “out there”, but I don’t believe that’s necessarily true. These things happen all the time online, no?

Rape threats from self-identified feminists? Just yesterday thenakedsamba and I were discussing the shambles that is the third season of Veronica Mars, where a bunch of feminists FAKE a rape to get some frat boys arrested — that *which* feminist could do such a thing and the writers of Veronica Mars just twisted that around so Veronica could, in no way, be confused as a feminist. Today, I would not make such a statement. There are feminists who think rape should be used to subdue, teach a lesson to people they don’t agree with — I have met a few feminists like this last year and I waved them off, as Renee did the trans*misogynist feminists, that these were silly white women from their Ivy League women’s studies programs, their opinions don’t hold much value, they just wanted to ooh and aah over the Dalit women we volunteered with, in return for a little funding and publicity within academia, a decision that we at the center are responsible for.

Since I’ve moved to [city], I am no longer actively engaged with the Centre, but I am still in touch with my supervisors and some volunteers, last month we were dealing with some funding problem again — we’d like to be as autonomous as possible but none of us can fund the centre without these donors, so we were deciding on the “least harmful” donor, laughing (to keep from crying and giving up) at their definitions of femininity, hygiene and of course, feminism. With S*’s phone credit dwindling out, she said, “I hope in the long run none of these people ever do something with their feminism” and we laughed it off again.

Why talk of some esoteric feminists I can’t name — the women’s movement of the 80’s in West India supported the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka, they did not take responsibility for the rapes of Tamil and Sinhala people at the hands of IPKF. Or the feminists today who are not actively against the wars on “terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan — what do you think US troops are doing there? Are they not endorsing rape as a weapon of subordination too?

Feminism as a legacy has violence, exclusion, erasure, blood, handwaving, why are we — you and I — so surprised and ready to rationalise when it shows up in our inboxes, in our lives? #Otherpeoplecallusthingstoo is just the tip of that iceberg.

Why Are You In Such A Bad Mood? #MenCallMeThings Responds!
More of #otherpeoplecallusthingstoo Part 1 & Part 2.

Filed under: Body, Colonialism, My Writing, Postcolonial feminism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, assault, body, Books I Read, Feminist theory, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

Re-Claiming Subversion

Jaded — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:41:38 +0000

I haven’t written here for more than a month, because honestly I didn’t trust myself to write without exploding into particles of dust, or if I did manage to write somehow it would only be selective expletives repeated over and over — I’ve been more than just a little angry. Warning to readers, I’m not writing this to cater to your sensibilities, nor is this the moment to profess how you belong to [x] group but don’t do any [abc] I talk about. I am exhausted with keeping my anger inside, and it’s coming out in all insidious ways today.

—

When I repeat out of frustration to western feminists — yes western feminists get clubbed in the same indistinguishable a bubble as “South Asian feminist” feels to me — that abortion wars here are different, we face different demons, we use different strategies, all they seem to hear is “India doesn’t consider abortion is illegal! They don’t have anything to complain about!”. Yes, factually, the Indian nation-state hasn’t outlawed abortion, that can hardly be cited as evidence to prove that there aren’t any problems. Or on the flip-side, almost every feminist (or not) publication from the Global North talks about the problem of female feticide India – additionally India and China are used interchangeably for some reason, as if any place that is Not the Global North must be a homogeneous mass of cultures – to the extent that “feminism in India” means “sex-selective abortion”. There is a problem with using and perpetuating such a model, where you start equating a region’s “gender problems” to its feminism is probably the preliminary layer of fail; I’ve talked about it long enough. What you leave out when you stick to the primitive equation of “Indian feminism = sex-selective abortion” are the many methods that the State designs to keep contraception from people who want to access it, to forcibly sterilise groups which the State thinks need to be curbed and even erased. It infuriates me that whenever one speaks of “sex-selective abortions” and its evils — yes fetuses are being aborted because they’re perceived to be ‘useless’ as they’re female, and it is evil, it needs to end, no disputing this fact. But there’s more to just a “culture thinking females are unworthy” that people don’t want to engage with — what western feminists don’t even consider is the way discourse around contraception figures here; mainly because they’re too busy presuming that it’s the same as it is in their native countries, but I digress.

Contraception, as introduced by the State was started in the light of the UN deciding “India’s problem” was “over-population”, and it’s ~~not~~ surprising that a ~~neo-liberal capitalist~~ socialist state that India supposedly was then didn’t contest this accusation, or didn’t argue that the real problem was unequal resource-allocation. Contraception, for a long time didn’t mean sexual autonomy of bodies, instead it was (and is), “we must control the numbers”, as if these “numbers” cannot ever be wanted bodies. Forced sterilsations of men and (mostly) women during Emergency years are no secret, nor are the sterilisations of some “backward” castes and tribes that are carried out regularly. More recently, the State has changed its face when it comes to contraception, now it’s under the Right To Information, the citizen — or at least people who are read as citizens — that we get “a choice” in what form of contraception we can avail of; there are enough ads everywhere that address this nice married Hindi and English speaking Hindu lady who has two (or three) children and is thinking of contraception. Even within this incredibly narrow range of ~~people~~ nice Hindu ladies addressed, they don’t get access to contraception — there are abortion practitioners who will look at your financial and social status and decide that you can raise a baby and refuse to give you an abortion, or not give you information about UID’s even if you can afford it, the concern to protect your Right To Conceive one day is apparently more important than your informed choice — and people who are not women, who are not Hindu, not English (or Hindi) speaking, according to the State don’t need to avail of contraception, going by the demographic they address in their ads and propaganda.

When contraception is constantly lapsed into “population control” you’re basically actively re-imagining a feminine body, a body with a uterus that needs to be contained within certain standards, so when the State introduces any new reproductive technology, where poor people are usually the first to “try” the technology, we don’t think it’s appalling — the way we view this reproductive body itself needs to be challenged. Many feminists here have (and are) campaigning to revert the Prohibition of Sex-Selective Abortion Act, not because they would love more female fetuses dead, but because this Act hasn’t reduced sex-selective abortions, in fact increased infections and forced sterilisations as people still continue to go have abortions even when there are hygiene and health hazards and/or violations. Some senior feminists have formed collectives in a few places in South India where they stand in as the relative who supports the [person] who wants an abortion, so practitioners cannot bully or threaten them (as it does happen to most unwed, non-feminine identifying people). Some feminists enlist the help of the CPI(M) to reach wives and daughters of Worker’s Unions, aiding them to be fully aware of their sexual rights and options, many tribal feminists argue (and reasonably so) that this skirmish around “killing a life” only makes sense if the State goes by the Hindu doctrine that every “life” or “cell” has a right, for in many tribes, “conception” means very different things, especially considering some don’t have terms¹ for “orphan”, “fetus” as children are brought up communally and as full individuals since their birth, some feminists are campaigning against female feticide by travelling across and within states, sensitising the public to ideas that female fetuses deserve dignity and life, some go around (or ally with existing women’s movements in the region) performing illegal abortions to militarised areas of North and North-East India, aiding people who live under direct military rule and are raped by the armed forces there.

There are many more strategies that we use, while I don’t necessarily agree with all practices mentioned here — and it’s unimportant what I feel in the larger structure of things — but most routes lead us to autonomy over reproductive and sexual decisions. Of course, most western feminists can’t see this side as it doesn’t need saving by their standards and terms. There is a rich history of subversion and resistance² — isn’t there always? — when it comes to the many types of feminist movement(s), next time you think of viewing the rest of the world from your particular lens, remember that. We have always been here, mediating agency in any form we can, the best we can, the fact you don’t see it isn’t our problem, not in the very least.

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1. Mahashveta Devi’s ‘Imaginary Maps’ talks much more in detail about these terms than I ever could.

2. This isn’t to say feminism(s) in India are a big happy family without tensions — which is a whole new post on its own — rather to say subversion exists even if you don’t see it.

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Postcolonialism, Religious Commentary Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Feminist theory, Postcolonial feminism, Rants, western! feminist fail

Making Our Bodies Matter

Jaded — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:04:56 +0000

A friend and I started talking about communities, alliances and feminism(s) a few months ago — this conversation is a brief culmination of our identities and ideologies.

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Me: Writing about bodies isn’t too difficult for me, that was until I realised “writing about bodies” meant writing of bodies other than mine, or even if I were to write about myself, the language automatically becomes clinical, my gaze objective and the talk goes to whatever is ailing me — it’s never about how I feel about my body, my relationship with my scars or what I see when I look in the mirror. As I am now living in a new city and adjusting to the weather patterns here, I have to take more care of my skin here than in I did in Mumbai, I have to leave myself notes to apply [x] cream before my heels crack and bleed — it’s such a jarring experience to see that my body has carried on without me (in a sense), has already started cracking, started healing in some parts while I have gone on and done something else. It all came to a head when I was thinking of Suheir Hammad‘s words — when she says “What am I saying when I say I sit in this body, dream in this body, expel in this body, inherit in this body” — where she posits the body as a start to all experiences, and here I was forgetting to take care of my body altogether, even in the most routine and seemingly trivial ways. I’ve often complained to friends that I feel ‘bound’ in this city — as public transport systems are irregular and auto rickshaws are a luxury I cannot always afford — so most of my ‘movement’ is between my apartment, the massive Uni campus and its libraries. Now that I re-think what I mean when I say ‘bound’, I mean more than just physical limits to where I can go or am kept from, I find limits in my syllables and expressions — precisely because my body feels those limits more intimately and primarily, as if my body translates these borders in the silences that creep up everywhere, from my thoughts to my academic writing. It’s only when I completely stopped producing words and syllables a week ago, went for a three-hour long walk, felt my words come back to me as I described to my guardian just why were my heels bleeding this time I realised how closely my body felt limited here*

*This isn’t to say there weren’t other barriers in Mumbai, just that navigating these particular changes is an entirely new experience for me.

Renee: It’s equally jarring to see your body stopped in time, unable to keep up with you, and trying to formulate contingencies for when it starts to slide backwards in time. This has been my experience since losing my job just more than a year ago.

My teeth hurt all the time now; one has eroded almost to the gum line, and I touch them constantly with my tongue and my fingers to make sure none are loose. I waited out a UTI two months ago, but an ear infection still lingers (and makes my teeth ache even more). There is no money for a doctor or dentist to attend to current ills, never mind the dreams I once had for my body. Most upsetting, when my current stash of hormone pills runs out, in perhaps a month or so, I may not be able to afford more, and at that point the person I know as me officially begins to disintegrate. I never really knew myself before starting hormones, and the threat of losing that is terrifying beyond what I can describe. Already I find myself glancing in the mirror more often, touching my face, to make sure I still exist.

But it’s not just the physical degradation I feel. For now, I’m staying in a friend’s spare room, sleeping upon a mattress on the floor, with all my worldly possessions piled in boxes around me. My days are lived largely in the space between my bed and the downstairs basement, where the household television is. I have few reasons to go anywhere else, and fewer resources to do so. I wear the same clothes most days, because to do anything else means doing more laundry, which inevitably costs someone money, even if that someone isn’t me. I don’t shower every day, or moisturize, or shave, or wear makeup, because all of those things are an expense too…and so again my body suffers.

It’s apropos that my body gets neglected first and most, as it’s the rejection of my body by others that led me here. Slowly it decays, out of sight and forgotten.

Me: Right, we’ve discussed this before. It’s not so strange, when you connect this ‘disappearance’ of any marginalised body (or in our specific contexts: a trans body and a third world woman’s body) to the larger theoretical hyper-visibility in academia, where you have theories on our bodies but empirical absence of our bodies. We’re still people who need “welfare”, we are still debating whether “woman” as a category can be made inclusive — basically, we don’t go beyond the boundaries our bodies set for us in academia, these ‘bodies’ (the way we see and live them) are wholly absent within mainstream feminist discourse. At the same time, there are people voicing us, fixing who we are and who we should be like, either they’re making theory for us or about us. Your bit about ghosts makes me think of our theoretical ghosts in academia. Sometimes I just don’t understand how to counter most theory I find about “third world” people(s) in any field. Recently I came across a study that talks about the dire condition of transgender people in Bangalore done by [x] European academic institution, where the entire focus was to show how pitiful and “unlivable” their lives are — the lives they’re leading sitting in their third worldly bodies as we talk and will continue to do so long after we’re done talking too — and for a week and a half, I kept on going over their words, unable to respond in any manner at all. There is no denying that people here need help, specifically speaking, I would love help in [x] areas of my life too. But only if you see how much help you need too, how we can both help build each other’s identities. I’m not that interested in “self-sufficiency” as much I’d like to build alliances and common ground where there is little to go by, you know? Especially within theory, [as I’ve often ranted to you] I feel like a lot of my work, or the work the organisations put in, comes to signify very little change, if perceivable at all. There is, often a literal and a metaphorical wall when it comes to the subjects of development policies, between us and the people we are allied with, between my different selves (of different racial and gendered molds), that quite honestly I wonder if my body and voice exist, if anyone is listening at all.

And it’s not just recently I’ve started feeling invisible within academia — I remember reading things like “India is a backward and orthodox third world country” as a child in my geography text books and I’d mouth the words in my mouth, to see if the iteration of the word would somehow make them more believable — where in our daily lives we’re constructing “national pride” (at the cost of someone else’s border, always) and in school I was taught a different tale of India — but it’s now that I am beginning to learn the terms with which this exclusion in academia is accessible to me. Feeling isolated but not having the terms to legitimise your experiences — there’s something to be said about that, no?

Renee: *nods* And to go off on a tangent a bit, you and I feel much the same about the myth of self-sufficiency. The idea that all people need to do to be “successful” (whatever that means) is to work hard is a lie. The idea of individual exceptionalism and potency sounds nice on the surface, but in truth almost no one succeeds without help. None of us are really *that* awesome. And so “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” becomes the refrain of a class of people who, through circumstance or luck, are already where they want to be and have no fear of being in the muck. It’s so much easier to just blame us for our own lot in life rather than take stock of one’s own privileges and extend a hand. It even becomes a way to punish those who do try to help, that somehow you’re a bad person for being charitable because you are doing the disenfranchised a disservice (we may just forget that we’re disenfranchised, you know, and that would be a bad). An even more cynical interpretation of that same idea would be that people in power know the falsity of it, but propagate it anyway, because if we can be shamed into believing we are somehow to blame for our disenfranchisement, that we’ll sit here quietly and suffer our penance without making too many demands of precious time or resources. It’s an infectious mindset; I know I’ve internalized a lot of what’s happened to me as my failure. For example, even though I know objectively that the destruction of my fourteen year career wasn’t my fault, it’s difficult for me not to think I did something wrong to cause this, and that my inability to find work means there is something empirically “wrong” with me.

(And this all goes back to bodies because really, the only wrongdoing I’ve ever been accused of is having the wrong body. How does one “bootstrap” their body, when that body is considered contemptible by the ruling class?)

Anyway, the key thing for me isn’t that being self-sufficient is bad, which it isn’t, but rather how that it’s an unrealistic expectation that’s nonetheless metamorphosed into a mandate that’s philosophically antagonistic towards how alliances are formed, and even affects how people regard each other more generally. It defines roles simply as “giver” and “taker”, and these are essentially fixed without much in the way of power exchange. Also yes, defined by pity (like with the Bangalore trans story), as if pity is necessarily both the cost and wage of engaging in such relationships. Like you say, actual allies are defined by the understanding that we both have something to contribute…it’s not just that I need you, but also that you need me, and we both understand that and aren’t afraid to talk about it. And it’s perhaps a tenuous segue way into theory and academia, but I can’t help but feel like this failure of alliance is reflected in the way marginalized people are leered at, hypothesized around, and spoken about in classrooms and conferences and blogs and what have you, without actually being able to represent themselves. We are reduced to ideas and talking points that a group of people – whether they be politicians or theoreticians – can debate and discuss and eventually come to consensus about, without our participation. And any attempt to insert ourselves into the conversation after the fact is met with overwhelming resistance, as now we have to first position ourselves in relation to what already exists.

Me: It’s really interesting that you said entry to academia means having people acknowledge and legitimise your subject-position — on someone else’s terms of course, the very categories that bind us further. This week as we’re writing this, my classmates and I are also scattered all over [city] in various lower caste and class communities — where we’re working on transformative masculinities to see if we can work with (mostly) men of these communities, to see if we can shift some definitions of dominant masculinities, if some we can help each other conceptualise different ways of “being masculine” that will directly effect the women of these communities*. We’re working with men as most government-sanctioned plans focus on men when it comes to awareness of sexual health (and we don’t have adequate resources to work with women too within this time-frame). Usually, some [American] NGO in collaboration with the State government talk about wearing condoms, personal hygiene, some programs teach men to take responsibility in household chores — and as it turns out, some men from these communities do start wearing condoms, helping out in the kitchen but don’t stop abusing their families. It seems ridiculous, that why would you start helping out in the household, but not stop violating people in your family? It seems, they do [x] as the NGO and State tells them because there are either laws, some amount of compensation given or fear is drilled into their psyches that they will ALL die of AIDS (when it comes to wearing condoms). So people who are more-or-less on the ‘outside’ — either geographically as the NGO is or structurally as the State is, where most people divising these policies don’t take their whole realities in focus, and still mandate things to do that will bring about “welfare” — which is why the people in these families aren’t seen as victims/survivors/perpetrators (for there are no fixed categories ever, but this doesn’t negate or rationalise the violence) of abuse, because academia (here the people from the NGO’s and the State officials) don’t see the manifold structures that are perpetuated, legitimised, forged over and over again, to make this abuse invisible and an aspect of [community’s] daily reality.

What happens when such invisibility looms over you? When this invisibility comes to define you? And is the job done only when some structures are “made visible” (again, by whom? for whom?). I won’t even insinuate my personal contexts are identical to this community’s; however similarly, many times my contexts are made invisible in academia and elsewhere as again, it’s someone else gauging my “needs”. Given this, how can you and I ally each with each other when the lives and hierarchies of power that we mediate are so different? As always, I have no clear answers, or even perceptible “solutions”, I just know that if an alliance has to be made, these differences we’re constantly talking about, they have to be brought to the fore, and from there on can we start building any community whatsoever (whether virtual or otherwise). Talking about us specifically, I have to be routinely and perpetually invested in writing or in praxis about *my* contexts, the multiple spaces I navigate as well as remember (an act done out of choice and love) your voice, your contexts, especially in the way you choose to identify yourself. So whether I choose to re-member you within my academic writing, talk about trans issues while working on transformative masculinities or to interrupt a classmate who equates gender with a person’s sex function and/or organ — what I do want to highlight that it’s a process, an unending one at that. This isn’t to say that you or I will never make mistakes, that we can appropriate each other’s identities or dislocate anger, rather we’re invested in listening to each other. Building alliances can be non-coercive only when we acknowledge and are responsible for each other’s complicity within the community. Non-coercive alliances have to be navigated, every moment — like we’re doing now.

*The idea that “transformative masculinities” are only something the ‘lower’ castes and classes need is a whole another rant on development altogether.

Renee: The idea of coercive alliances – alliances defined by a one-way power exchange, and/or by what one party is willing to give as opposed to what the other party says they need – gives me pause. It doesn’t seem like an alliance at all, but something else entirely. Alliances, in my mind, are formed through consent – “Hi there! You have a problem? I have a problem too! Perhaps we can help each other, yes?” – and yet I meet so many people who claim to be my ally who have never talked to me or any other trans person about what it means to be an ally to us (and not just trans people, of course, that’s just me drawing from personal experience). It is complicated, of course, because certainly not every person has the same resources, the same tongues, the same ability to assert…we build (not “built”, because like you say, it is ongoing) ours through shared language and Internet technology, but those are privileges not everyone has. And it’s not that such obstacles are always insurmountable but at the same time, doing it without creating power imbalances is something humans have historically been pretty bad at.

Interestingly, if I recall correctly, it was our frustration with so-called “allies” and our relative invisibility that was our connecting point. The ubiquitous blogs, media outlets, activist organizations, and theoreticians with their abled white western cis het opinions, assumption-laden perspectives, universalizing tones, and frequently hostile demeanours were our shared nemeses. I still wonder how much of it was a need to vent and how much of it was a deliberate desire to show how alliances could be done, and I suppose it doesn’t matter, but something got us talking. And I remember those first tentative talks, how every little thing was predicated with ‘Is this [topic] okay?” or “Can we talk about this?”, and how we punctuated our conversations every few minutes with “Are you okay?” or “Is there anything I can do to help?” (and how sometimes we just sat in silence, supporting each other wordlessly in our chatroom). We started with the things we knew we had in common, and we talked about ourselves in the ways we wanted to, without provocation or prompting for more than we were willing to give. Although we often asked questions, we never felt entitled to an answer…we weren’t each other’s encyclopedias. Ultimately, we knew that no space was ever totally safe, but chose to occupy the one between us anyway, and endeavoured (and continue to endeavour) to make it as safe a space as possible. Yes, we still hurt, we still bleed, and we remain unseen and unheard in so many ways, but somehow, a white middle-aged unemployed trans woman from Michigan and a graduate student in [city in India] came together to create a model of the way they wished things were. And it worked. Is working.

Filed under: Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Random things Tagged: Activism, Code-switching, Feminist theory, Gender identity, Ivory Tower, Postcolonial feminism, Rants, Transgender

Privilege, Power, Colonialism, and International Development – Part 2

Jaded — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:12:43 +0000

This is a guest post by Numa. She identifies as Bangladeshi-Austrian for the sake of convenience, and works in the field of International Development for which she sometimes gets paid a living wage. She has the ambition of engaging and encouraging wider dialogue on development from a dusty perspective and hopes that she can contribute to making the world less fail in one way or another. She is trying to blog regularly on awkwardatbest.wordpress.com but mostly has a very short attention span.

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Initially the first post of this series was a standalone one that I had written to provide context for my thoughts on the field of international development and the theories underpinning it. It was only once I submitted the entry as a guest post for Jaded that I figured that there was more I wanted to say on the matters that I had touched on. Namely, I wanted to discuss how the example I gave of my classmates behaviour towards children in Uganda, was not isolated instance of ignorance, but was the result of wider cultural/societal attitudes that are reflected in both development theory and institutions.

To me, the way privilege and power relations manifest themselves within international development is rooted in the colonial past. Despite the trend of embracing a human rights approach, we still operate on colonial assumptions at the most basic level. The main thrust of development interventions is still to progress, to ‘move forward’, to essentially become more like the West.

“The West,” in this instance does not refer to any actual geographic location, but refers to an identity or a set of socio-economic/cultural values born out of centuries of European imaginings of themselves and the “Orient.” In the 19^th century this image of Self took a particular form based around colonialism that is still prevalent today. Whiteness, wealth, and wisdom, became key to the European identity and this identity transcended beyond Europe to the white colonies of North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

Eurocentric ideas of economic and social development became regarded as objective ideals that were credited for the self-determined success of European advancement. A linear model of progress towards an ideal civilization based on these ideas was adopted, one that places the countries closest to Western ideals at the most “civilized” end of the scale.

Countries that haven’t reached this ideal state of civilization are considered to be “developing,” and their failure to reach this state is pathologized. While it is perhaps no longer as explicitly stated, “developing” countries are still read as helpless, lazy, or incompetent, and this imagery is repeatedly reinforced through media, literature, and art.

One way that ideas about the West and Third World are perpetuated is through development organisations themselves. At an individual level, the imagery of the Western self as helpful, industrious, and competent is constantly used to attract support and donations for development organisations/charities. Third World plight is commodified. Brown bodies are presented for consumption.

Let me give you an example.

It was the day after an event and my colleague and I were reviewing what had happened over lunch. At the event he had the opportunity to hold a presentation about our charity and wanted to know what I thought. I told him quite honestly that I was a bit concerned about what had been an informative presentation on our charity’s work had ended up as, “Look at these poor African children, they are so cute! Let’s collectively ‘aww’ at the cuteness!”

I said that it made me uncomfortable having so many privileged white people cooing over these children and he agreed. But then he pointed out something that’s stuck with me. He told me that even if he had tried to explain our work and the issues children living in townships face, ultimately it’s the pictures of the kids that have the greatest impact. Brown children sell, apparently.

And that’s what gets me. Because it’s not just small charities catering to wealthy patrons. All charities I know use images of their ‘beneficiaries’ in promotional/fundraising material and often provide little context for how the people depicted benefited exactly. This is particularly true for websites, where there are always images, but rarely captions that contextualise them.

Regardless. Even with context given, most of the time it’s still just povertyporn. While few charities peddle the starving, helpless, sadface looking pictures of yore (think of the imagery popular in ’80s and ’90s), the current stock of happy smiling brown people photos is meant to elicit the same response. The wealthy Western audience consumes these images and is meant to feel responsible, not for contributing to the fucked up system that has led to gross global inequality, but for saving these brown people from their misery. The agency is always placed in the hands of the West, or global North.

It’s uncanny that so many people fail to see how depictions of agency-less brown folks continue to echo the rhetoric of colonialism. The ‘natives’ were always too childlike, simple, brutish, sexually depraved, and basically incapable of governing themselves so the British had to set up camp and govern for them. Not much seems to have changed. We ‘natives’ continue to remain too simple to deal with our own shit. The global South still needs help.

However, the kind of help the global South needs is not the kind they’re being offered. There is no doubt about the fact that there are millions of people in developing countries that could use help, but that’s not because they and their governments are incompetent (OK, governments are often incompetent, but that’s for another discussion). It’s because they’re operating in a global system that revolves around fucking the majority of people in this world over to benefit the few.

But the measures needed to redress global inequality don’t sell. Instead we have charities, NGOs, and CBOs in Western countries that continue to rely on simplified saviour messages, positioning brown bodies as helpless victims. I often feel bad for obsessing about imagery used by NGOs in the West instead of, you know, finding a cheap, pro-poor, sustainable solution to the energy crisis, but am I wrong for thinking that it’s kind of important?

In many, if not all countries in the global North, people’s views on the global South and its inhabitants is still mostly shaped by information they receive from NGOs or on rare occasions, the news. The images they see on the Oxfam or Save the Children posters/websites/TV ads, are usually the only images of X nationality they will ever see. When I say “Bangladesh,” in response to being asked “where I’m really from” many people recall floods and swathes of poor brown people looking sadly at the camera, if they know where the country is at all.

Perhaps I am naïve, but when you are raised to believe that you can help to save the dirty, brown Other, won’t that feed into your world view, and doesn’t that ultimately ensure the continuation of the colonial imagery of the simple ‘native’?

Addendum:

When I showed the first draft of this post to Jaded, one of the suggestions she made was that I talk about what the image of the colonial native does to both parties, how the imagery strips personhood away from them. However, I wasn’t entirely sure if that was the case, because it certainly didn’t feel like it had the same kind of impact on those who we think of as Westerners, compared to those of the Third World.

I’m not sure about the personhood issue, so I’d like to know what others think about it. What I’m sure about though, is that these stereotypes, are like a smokescreen. As long as the same old arguments about the failure of countries to develop are trotted out, the power dynamic along geo-political, economic, and racial lines will continue unchecked and global economic-social justice will remain an unachievable.

Filed under: Colonialism, Guest Blogger, Postcolonialism Tagged: Activism, Colonialism, Ivory Tower, Postcolonialism, Third World

On Signs And Signifiers

Jaded — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 20:03:25 +0000

I’ve been pretty busy moving and settling in a new city these past three weeks, I couldn’t keep up with people, let alone the internet — thus thankfully missing debates around whether Mumbai should have slutwalks or not. One of the organisers asked me whether I’d be willing to help organise as we’ve worked on a few things together before. She was quite taken aback when I declined her offer (given that Slutwalk Mumbai ends up taking place) as we usually agree on most things when it comes to activism and organising. She asked, “But don’t you love your freedom? How can you pass up an opportunity such as this to see and know how far we can push boundaries?” and then I didn’t have any answers for her as I was, and am still caught up in thinking how for her, and a lot of people Slutwalk™ has come to symbolise the sum of all feminist rioting considering Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad and Mumbai (from time to time) have had walks and pickets by feminists and people involved in gender justice, for causes ranging from more college seats for women to raising awareness about sex-selective abortions — each issue that emerges from our specific caste, gender, class conflicts in each specific city long before Slutwalk™ became an enterprise. Since this exchange, the rhetoric behind supporting slutwalks has become intertwined with “respecting and loving oneself” — where love¹ (of the self, of the ‘community’) is continuously intertwined to the extent that any opposition to slutwalk today is to “hate” freedom — and peculiarly, this ‘freedom’ that SW represents has to move away from anything “recognisably” Indian — whatever that means to people individually and collectively.

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In other parts of the country — especially Delhi — newspapers and news channels are all fixed on Anna Hazare’s impending fast tomorrow, that has been a part of national rhetoric and vocabulary since late April. On the whole, Hazare demands for a new anti-corruption bill, asks people to fully and directly engage with the government and hold them accountable. When it comes to the news coverage of his speeches and his entire fast, the comparisons drawn to Gandhi are more than co-incidental – tomorrow being Independence Day for India, the analogy becomes even thicker, Hazare is viewed as the “one man army” who is going to drive away corruption, going by Gandhi’s views of freedom. While I don’t necessarily agree that this protest is “peaceful” at all, that by specifically re-membering India’s history of independence as one without critically admitting to ourselves and others that it meant freedom for only ‘some’ people, I do find such a ‘nation-wide’ movement fascinating — as from time to time we see women also supporting Hazare’s fast², it’s been a while since women have been featured under the “national gaze” as more than just agency-less subjects. However, coming to the actual protest due on 15th August at Delhi, it seems women may not have a harassment-free space to march and protest. Can’t say I’m particularly shocked if tomorrow there are mostly men broadcasted over the news — as Hazare (like Gandhi) still see women’s roles under traditional patriarchy of wifedom and motherdom. For instance, the Alcohol Prohibition Act reads like one that empowers women, to talk about their abusive alcoholic spouses – it supposes that only men can be alcoholics, that one has to be an alcoholic to abuse people; there are many loopholes to this and quite a few of his other arguments too, one of the most troubling being — does an anti-corruption movement erase/will attempt to smooth over India’s history and geography of communal violence and casteism?

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Last week, a few reporters were asking questions to the ‘working-class’ women in my University building about this Hazare movement. One reporter translated to hindi asking, “Do you believe you’ll finally be free of corruption?”, “Do you support Hazare, do you think he is doing some good for women?” and I am still parsing and thinking over what M* told the journalists. As amused as she was, she looked serious enough for the camera and said, “I don’t know about free. I don’t know about Hazare. I know I have to work to support myself and my family whether tomorrow there is “free”, or a hundred Hazares or not”. For me, most of these protests, marches and walks have come to symbolise a great disparity between what the protest starts off as, and what it becomes, who it takes along the way and who is ultimately allowed to participate. It doesn’t particularly matter that M* would be a good candidate for SlutWalk (as she is a widow who is battling sexually abusive parents in-law) or for the Hazare fast tomorrow (as she is read and treated as ‘working class’, ‘rural poor’ etc.), it doesn’t matter that her body, the space she occupies in the university, in her family, other spaces a few weeks of conversation has not shown me, another few spaces I will never gain access to³(whether she or I ever want to broach *that* space is a different question altogether) — all of these spaces, [in her words] could do with some help to not always get in her way. What matters is, she survives in the best way she can, that I can do whatever little in my control to be of any form of assistance, should she demand it.

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While there is no doubt that ‘freedom’ means different things to different people, that there is never a single history, geography or solution to a problem, that there are people who genuinely view SlutWalks, the Hazare protest as achieving some amount of ‘freedom’, I would just like to ask, at what cost? Who is left bound for you to be free?

***

1. People citing love as a motivation to do anything that isn’t sanctioned by the state-community-family is definitely noteworthy, however this doesn’t change the power dynamics behind SlutWalk being a movement based on people’s desirability.

2. Not that presence necessarily mandates representation and agency, have to admit such footage sometimes even makes me hopeful.

3. Mutual respect for each other doesn’t mean she or I still aren’t bound with society’s hierarchies — especially when it’s more than just a private discussion.

Filed under: Body, Postcolonial feminism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, body, Postcolonial feminism, Protest, Silences

Fostering Hospitable Silences

Jaded — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 20:05:59 +0000

[Trigger Warning for mention of sexual abuse].

As a person who works with survivors/victims sexual and domestic abuse, I’m quite used to getting calls from people all over the city, most times it’s when I’m at the center — I talk to them and we assess the situation, whether the caller is in immediate danger or not – generally they want someone to listen to them. Very rarely do I get requests to meet up with people — which can be dangerous for both of us — but every time I’ve met someone, it’s only to have them rushing back in a maximum of twenty minutes, for the time-window their abusers leave them, where they have some amount of unaccounted time-slot is often very less. Last week I got a call from a woman living in South Bombay, in one of the most reputed neighbourhoods and she wanted to meet me to discuss long-term solutions (which the group I work with occasionally handles as well). She called me after midnight and I was set to meet her the next day, and she wanted to change the location for she wanted to remove all possible run-ins with anyone who may report back to her family — and every place I came up with her was unacceptable for her. “Barista?” “It’s too public”, “[x] book store?” “that’s hardly the place for polite conversation”, “[x] place?” “We aren’t supposed to talk about these things there” and both of us eventually burst out laughing at how absurd this conversation was — both knew what we were going to discuss and there wasn’t even a single space we could discuss those things — and then we both fell silent. We need silence now. Right? To keep peace? To keep the surface calm?

I want to talk about this silence, this polite hospitable silence — often used as a conscious or otherwise decision to mask, hide, distract or forget altogether about the rough friction, of intersecting differences, that de-stabilise us, that move together to move any ‘safe’ or ‘home’ space. This silence shows up everywhere we construct spaces to be “homelike” — in classrooms, in actual homes, in well-loved literature texts – and we learn to nurture them. Last month a student came out to me as queer and she waited till our last “official” class was over and then did she decide to tell me — and when I asked her why did she have to wait till it got over considering we’ve talked about just about everything, she explained that she didn’t want to “upset” the rhythm of the class. Alternatively, I should have asked her why was “keeping” the rhythm so important to her, but that time I was quiet, parsing what she’d just told me. In home spaces¹, it seems the general reaction is to secure and perpetuate a sense of a border or a territory, a line we must learn to never cross. Many times, between friends, in classes, whenever the talk goes to any “taboo” topic, immediately and inadvertently my voice softens itself and then I have to remember to revert back to my general tone and loudness — and these are spaces I generally feel comfortable in, a performed home of sorts, and yet this silence is always around.

When it comes to my other performed “homes” — of the Nation, of the community, of the secured public sphere — within these spaces, there is often a perpetuated (false) sense of security, that some invisible thread of “Indianness”, “Hinduness” “[Insert label here]” is supposed to bond people across communities — more often than not it fails to do just that², which by extension codifies the performance of security, of a distinguishable “sameness”. Whenever a challenge is aimed at these hospitable silences, not only are we, the Others on various margins supposed to keep silent — for “We’re at home. Please have these conversations somewhere else” or “These aren’t appropriate conversations for the dinner table, coffee shops or anywhere actually” are reasons good enough to keep most people in spaces like mine silent — but we’re thanked for being silent. For some being “thanked” means not being victim-blamed, for others it means not being kicked out of “home” — in all physical and metaphorical senses of the word — the reward with silence is often enough to keep marginalised bodies to the side streets and certain realities are constructed to be “more real” than others, some narratives are “more credible” than others — this toxic hospitable silence enables such marginalisation with ease and subtlety. As Thurs mentioned earlier “Silence is not consent”, the conversation that is affected by the sound-stopper, by a certain fostered sense of silence that takes root in the ‘transgressor’s’ body as a story that needs to remain untold, to maintain the “rhythm”, to make sure the surface always reflects a perfect, unperturbed picture. My student is twelve and somehow, she knows quite clearly of boundaries she is not allowed to step over — perceived borders are kept secure and by extension everyone who fits within these borders, and Others “outside” of “home”, searching for alternate modes to access, to “home”.

Within these performances of “home” within feminist theory, queer theory (all distinct “homes” for different people, for instance), or any constructed homespace, what I find is an evasion of any “conflict” — the surface must only ever gleam, of course! — and little to no desire to commune. While volunteering we use the words “compromise” and “commune” a lot – each word that has now re-formed to mean a negotiation of words, bodies and spaces; for “compromise” or “communing” doesn’t always have to mean a total lack of interrogation or resistance. To compromise, to commune can also mean to stop making sounds, in order to listen, to stop to re-frame silences to hear, to listen to spaces, if we let it.

—-

1. I’m working with Chandra Talapade Mohanty’s re-framed question of home to mean a space where one locates “community”. It doesn’t always have to only mean a geographical, historical and/or sensory space.

2. Colloquially speaking, “Indian” is synonymous with “Hindu”, “Hindu” is synonymous with “Intolerance of other religions and communities” and so on — often these performed homes cache more than they link spaces, people(s) and communities.

Filed under: Body, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism Tagged: Feminist theory, Gender identity, Language, Postcolonial feminism, Teaching

Privilege, Power, Colonialism, and International Development – Part 1

Jaded — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:19:55 +0000

Numa identifies as Bangladeshi-Austrian for the sake of convenience, and works in the field of International Development for which she sometimes gets paid a living wage. She has the ambition of engaging and encouraging wider dialogue on development from a dusty perspective and hopes that she can contribute to making the world less fail in one way or another. She is trying to blog regularly on awkwardatbest.wordpress.com but mostly has a very short attention span.

—

I grew up in a multicultural bubble where the idea of discrimination because of race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality was never discussed openly. It wasn’t until 2006-7, at university, where I started reading about privilege and oppression, that I discovered the tools to process my own experiences as a WOC. I realized that it wasn’t so much that my environment growing up had been free of racism or sexism, but that I had just never been primed to recognize any -isms as such.

My immigrant parents were not equipped to help me deal with my experiences as an ethnic minority. They had grown up in a country where they were not the Other, and so subtle racism, or institutional racism didn’t really register with them. The only type of racism that they had learned to recognize, was the blatant “Get the fuck out of my country, you dirty brown foreigner” type of racism.

So I what I internalized was that discrimination was always blatant and happened out of ignorance, out of a lack of education. “Ignorance” was also code for “poor”, and for the longest time I genuinely believed this incredibly classist explanation. I really thought the only people who could be racist were uneducated, and thus, poor.

I realize now that this was a badly thought out, almost instinctive, coping mechanism where my class privilege was used as a form of protection against the forms of oppression I faced, namely racism. It was a bit like “Ha, I may be brown, but at least I’m not poor!” sort of thing, where oppressions are pitted against each other.

This kind of attitude also helped insulate me against the racism of my peers and immediate environment. As long as racism was only perpetuated by a group I never had to deal with, then the things that felt like racism invoked by my peers, were a different kind of creature. I was able to maintain the illusion of safety and lead a relatively untroubled existence.

Unfortunately for me, this meant that I once realized the actual pervasiveness of racism and other kinds of -isms, I found myself surrounded by people who had never had to think about any of these issues either. If it hadn’t been for the internet, I would have never have found the resources to help me make sense of my experiences with oppression and privilege.

By the time I started my postgraduate studies at the end of 2008, I was already well-versed in issues of discrimination. However, I had not yet thought about how oppression and privilege manifests itself within international development. When I started my degree, I was still naïvely under the impression that since the very concept of international development was about ensuring global economic and social justice, development theory and practice would be critical of all kinds of oppression. Like some kind of -ism free utopia…

But I was quite mistaken. At first, I thought that this omission was because this degree was very praxis focused so there was very little space for an exploration of privilege and oppression. However, even for a praxis focused course, it lacked any form of self-reflexiveness whatsoever. In none of my courses, did we ever explicitly question our own privileges as development practitioners and how that influences the work we do.

The assumptions we made about ourselves and the people we worked with were left unchecked. There are many examples that I can think of, but the one that struck me the most is the following:

When we were in Uganda on our field trip, some of my fellow students treated the children they met there like exotic accessories, taking pictures of them, cooing over how cute they were, and frankly being really creepy. And their behaviour wasn’t called out by our tutors as problematic.

Not only was their behaviour disturbing because of the blatant exotification of brown bodies, but also because of the treatment of these children as objects for my classmates’ consumption. I’m pretty sure that none of my fellow students would have dared to behave as freely with unknown children in Western countries. Imagine being a tourist wandering around in Paris and picking up random toddlers on the street to take pictures of them! You’d definitely get into trouble, especially if the roles were reversed and a POC took pictures of white children.

I have pointed this out to some of my white friends, and while many were also horrified at this kind of behaviour, others offered some explanations. One close friend said that perhaps it was a matter of culture, since in Africa, people were just less proprietary over their children. Also, many children like having their pictures taken, they ask to have their picture taken, so what’s the problem! At the time I was unsure of how to respond, because maybe my friend had a point, but now I know better.

While perhaps the culture argument has some validity in the sense that in many non-white cultures, raising children does not fall under the sole purview of the parents and thus parents may be more relaxed about “adult other than parent”-child interaction, that doesn’t actually matter much because in this context parents were never asked about their views and that is the crux of the matter.

In many instances, consent to take pictures of young children was not sought from parents. Even if it is culturally acceptable to behave this way with kids you don’t know, you should definitely ask to make sure that the parents of those children actually do think it’s OK. And even if consent is given, there are still power dynamics at play that make consent very problematic.

In this specific context, my tutors, classmates, and I were economically and socially privileged in contrast to many of the Ugandans we met. While we had very little actual power over these people (as in, we weren’t in positions of authority), our privilege did give us a certain amount of power. For example, we were more closely linked to figures of authority and could potentially have wielded those connections to get what we wanted. This meant that, even though the chance was remote, not obliging to our wishes did come with a potential risk.

So I can easily imagine that there may have been times when the adults we interacted with found it easier to consent to something they may not necessarily have wanted to do but figured that the risk of not doing it outweighed their hesitation. That said, I don’t know how the children and their parents really felt, and I don’t want to speculate about their feelings, because that is their story to tell.

I know it’s a relatively small thing, and ultimately the children that had their pictures taken probably don’t care about it (because, surprise, surprise; foreigners with cameras are not the centre of their universe), but to me it’s an example of why international development is really messed up. The attitudes of my classmates regarding taking photos of Ugandan children are not unique to them, but rather, an example of a wider underlying attitude towards the Other (where the West is the Self) that has its roots in colonial history and the rhetoric used to subjugate the “Native”.

What I find particularly worrying, is that development practitioners and organisations often hide under the emblem of economic and social justice, to avoid self reflexiveness. It’s like, “Oh, but we’re helping people, how could we possibly have issues with racism, sexism or any other kind of -ism.” As if working towards social justice makes you impervious to issues of privilege.

That is not to say that there is no self-reflexiveness whatsoever. I’m not the first to voice these concerns, and over the past 2 years or so, I’ve read a lot of papers and books that do engage in these issues. I’ve found postcolonial discourse to be particularly useful in addressing how othering works in development and am currently trying to work these concepts into my own understanding of international development and my role in it.

—–

This is a guest post by Numa. Write to me here if you’re interested in guest blogging here.

Filed under: Colonialism, Guest Blogger, Musings From The Empire, Radicalism Tagged: Activism, Colonialism, Guest Blogger, Racism, Western culture

Between The Lines

Jaded — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:35:31 +0000

Recently I came across Sara Ahmed’s fantastic essay ‘Feminist Killjoys (And other Willful Subjects)’ and have been re-reading several sections of the essay since. I identify with more parts of the essay than I can count, but one line that never leaves me is “[As a feminist killjoy] you become the problem you create” –- a single sentence that probably embodies the essence of my grandmum’s journals. Part of why I wanted to learn to read and think in my native tongue is because I want to read my grandmum’s journals, written in a pidgin many Gujurati’s. Apart from accounts of food items, daily expenditure and some chants dedicated to Krishna, there are extensive notes on translation and literary criticism of Oriya, Telugu and Bengali women’s literatures — in a different tongue altogether¹ — and her research of many texts banned in the British Empire. Most of the texts that are listed in her journals were banned because of “obscenity” under Section 292 of the Penal Code — not that big a surprise that most of these banned and censored texts were written by women and especially by women of the “lower sections of the society”. I couldn’t find most texts she talks of, but luckily I found Radhika Santwanam written by the Telugu poet Muddupalani in a great aunt’s attic — sadly, the text is in English but there were translator’s notes along with it, explaining their choice of words and consonants. Loosely translated, the text can be called “Enticing or Appeasing Radhika”, an epic erotic poem that talks of Radha and Krishna’s love affair — a text that inverses the male literary tradition of supposing the “male” as a locale of power when speaking of sexual agency.

I spent most of the last month reading this poem, in its many parts and verses, simultaneously shocked and in awe of Muddupalani’s audacity to speak so explicitly about female sexuality, of Radha’s encouragement of Krishna and her niece’s love affair, of the various ways Krishna has to woo and appease to Radha, a text quite “queer” by today’s “re-readings”. While the text is beyond beautiful, with its many deviances and silences, sadly this text has always faced heavy censorship at the hands of the Raj — interestingly when Muddupalani wrote it originally two centuries ago, her autobiographical prologue mentions no objections to the content or her context as a distinguished courtesan of the Thanjavur court². The Empire banned it for “obscenity” and “shamelessly filling poems with crude descriptions of sex” — cannot thank K. Lalita and Susie Tharu enough for keeping a neat account of all the charges levied against Muddupalani, ranging from ridiculous to incinerating and everything else in between — and for about 150 years after the ban Indian scholars maintained the same views about Muddupalani. In many instances, grandmum calls Muddupalani “adulteress” as this is the name she was known by. The more time I spend with grandmum’s journals, her accounts of the Raj’s censorship, read this exquisite poem, the more angry and fascinated — where fascination is the new disgust — I get.

While I understand on some level that when J. S. Mill urged women to find a “literature of their own” or when Virginia Woolf speaks of “submerged literatures”, they both positively don’t mean anyone but White and Western, to expect otherwise of them would be being willfully ignorant, it doesn’t make reading western feminist literary criticism any easier, especially not the reverential tone most Indian universities take while discussing them. While Woolf was tracing the “female tradition”, in parts of Bengal Radhika Santwanam was on its nth plea for being released out of further banning and censorship. While Annie Besant was busy re-defining Bharat Natyam as a dance that upper caste Indian ladies could perform without being confused as prostitutes³ — and being confused as prostitutes was a fate more terrible than upper-caste men sexually exploiting said prostitutes, of course! – Muddupalani’s text was being reviewed by renowned Hindu male Telugu scholars as one “unfit to be seen by Indian women” as my grandmum’s notes detail. Throughout her journals, between parentheses she keeps on asking “Why did no one stop these bans?” and never once is the question answered by either her explicitly or her notes. I can assume today, that no one thought the text was worth “saving” because it doesn’t fit the Orientalist view of India, it doesn’t posit India as a land of “past glory and knowledge” — in fact there is a healthy cultural paranoia of the “Other” in some verses — so while patriarchal versions of the Ramayan and Mahabharat were “revived” (rather allowed to remain in circulation), such subversive texts were censored and almost disappeared from our collective memories for a century and a half.

As Sara Ahmed explains in ‘Feminist Killjoys’ later, the narrative of immigrant’s discourse of happiness is such, that when they “move on” from their memories of colonialism and racism, do they gain entry into the text of “happiness” — similarly for Muddupalani and god knows how many other such writers coercively made marginal by joint forces of colonialism and the patriarchy, they’re “allowed” to exist as memories from marginalia. Anyone who challenges this assumption starts embodying the “problem” they’re questioning — as my grandmum felt, going by her journals and all the questions she could never answer for herself, as I feel digging into her thoughts and by extension create a host of my own questions. If anything, one day I hope, I can help produce feminist literary criticism that probes between these words that get lost between lines, between cultural semantics and semiotics, between what is mine and what the world expects of me based solely on my hue and geo-political location.

——

1. There is substantial code-switching between many tongues. Simplistically speaking, her notes on Oriya, Bengali and Telugu literatures are written in a mix of a rural and urban colloquial dialect of Gujurati, as these were the tongues she thought and spoke in, while her formal education was in Oriya and Bengali — Telugu she learnt as a pastime — so while I rely heavily on her sources, bear in mind that most of these are translations and re-copies, I haven’t been able to find many original texts.

2. “Chaste” upper-caste ladies probably wouldn’t be allowed to write as explicitly as Muddupalani was, because of her situation as a court courtesan — as a courtesan owning to sexual agency meant less consequences than women of upper-castes. This isn’t to romanticise her later days of forced prostitution once the British took over the Thanjavur court, rather because of her unique context, she could write a text very few women in her time would be allowed.

3. The age-old Hindu antidote! Add Hindu god’s name in front of said obscene act and suddenly it is rid of its sins. Bharat Natyam before this re-definition was called “natyam” or “nautch” (word used by British anthropologists for the Urdu term “naach”) which was the same “nautch” prostitutes would perform. Foolproof formula, I must say.

Filed under: Body, Colonialism, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism Tagged: Activism, Code-switching, Colonialism, Gender identity, Language, Postcolonial feminism, Postcolonialism

Thinking In Tongues

Jaded — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 21:12:19 +0000

Lately I’ve been very busy translating things — French things to English, diluting some literary Gujarati with the help of my grandma and strangely, also my thoughts from English to my native tongue(s) as this summer break she helps me read in a few tongues that have been rusting inside me since the past few years. For a long time, English has been my go-to language and my native tongues occupy a secondary position, of horrid pidgins that mix many tongues and dialects – which are hilarious at best and painful at worst — and a language I must use with family, with people who aren’t fluent enough in English, a language that is substituted for English and even then I barrel this tongue with English words — I don’t see this as a necessarily bad thing, just illustrating how no matter how hard I try, my native tongues come to me as an after-thought. Sometimes, my grandma will ask me to read પાની and instead I read “water” in my head, and to save face say the Gujarati word out loud — but she knows anyway that it doesn’t come to me ‘naturally’. Generally we smile at each other when this happens, she asks me to try again and I instruct myself to think in my mother tongue, and it works for a while. Then in about two minutes, she asks me to read a whole sentence and I am again judging it by English syntax and grammar forms. I don’t need to learn to speak read write in these tongues, those I did as a child either in school — where the State you belonged to dictated the tongues you’d learn – or at home where we speak our mother tongue. It’s thinking in different tongues that I am working on and so far, miserably failing.

For years, my English and the ‘talent’ to say things well have been indistinguishable from my identity as an upper-caste Hindu lady, “who will one day go to the U.S. also and write big-thick books for people to read” to borrow my cook’s words as she describes who I am and what I will do — according to her — to her neighbours. She says fondly, “Look at her English, I want my daughter also to speak like her! How fast-fast she goes, sometimes talking liddat on the phone and marking something in study books also” as her neighbours smile politely at us. I’ve gone to this neighbourhood since at least the past decade or so, I used to play with many children who now don’t speak with me at all, and if they do only in English — They say, “How you do” and I used to say, “ठीक हूँ” — and they’d get embarrassed and I’d get angry that no matter what I did ‘those people’ don’t want to speak in their native languages — it’s taken me a lot of time to see how them addressing me in English was their way of leveling ground between us and me stomping all over it and patronising them and replying in Hindi was nothing but my privilege raising its head. English still remains for us a class and a cultural marker, a certain kind of English that you speak marks you from which part of the city you come from — if you code-switch and say, “I don’t know, ask ajoba no” for instance, pegs you from North Mumbai — and the more ‘unadulterated’¹ your English is, the better education and class background you are assumed to have. It didn’t help that I am ‘convent educated’ — a phrase we treat as a synonym for ‘Good English And Decorum’ — and was taught by British and Indian nuns who’d both tell us that “Your native languages can stay at home. Here we speak English — like people“. So we’d speak at lunch in our native tongues, but even that stopped as we grew older and English was just more convenient; plus by then, speaking in English meant Serious Business².

Today, I can re-learn to think in my native tongues because I have the privilege to, because I’ve been code-switching for years at home, because I know English considerably well and can have the luxury of enjoying my native tongue. Language is where we locate our power dynamics in, from these lenses we view and read rest of the world — and me writing in મારી ભાષા will be viewed as ‘reactionary’ or me trying to ‘smash the Empire’ or maybe I have an ‘agenda’ instead of it seen as one of my tongues, my Englishes as I weave both tongues into one. Things only get more complicated when I am read out of contexts — ones I can control and especially ones I can’t — and we’re still talking and parsing each other in English. If I could, I wouldn’t still be able to write in my native tongues, because I wouldn’t be ‘understood’ — mainly because the internet may hypothetically be a ‘global platform’, in reality the digital dollar lays the rules down. To keep the ‘intersectionality’ badge shiny many western feminists love to theorise ‘race’ matters from the omnipresent douchecolonial gaze — where all the third world feminist issues are child marriage foot binding dowries FGM female feticide corrective rapes ‘sex-slave’ industry bounded labour and nothing else — where the western feminist can ‘interpret’ our cultures as ze sees fit — usually as metonymic for all our hybrid realities, to the extent that “Africa” becomes FGM, “India” becomes “child marriage and female feticide” and nothing else, all this is done in the culture of ‘solidarity’ and to extend sistersong.

It’s not that big a surprise that when regional and local feminism(s) are “translated”, almost always it’s an Orientalist view of the third world, where the western feminist can be a shocked and horrified of the lives we live daily in the third world — and the most common reason I’ve heard is, “Well we are all women, we can understand each other”³ — and for ‘understanding’ each other, my life has to be translated in English, in contexts and terms it doesn’t belong in. Two weeks ago at a transnational feminist conference, a western feminist asked me what is the ‘safe’ way to promote solidarity — and I’ll still stick by my answer: Learn my language, it’s only fair because I learnt yours.

Maybe then, in the gaps and silences a translation leaves western feminists will understand learning our tongues won’t do much — as learning a tongue and thinking in one are two entirely different things and that one is a skill and another a re-clamation of the marginalised; I hope I’ll reach there someday.

—–

1. Read ‘unadulterated’ as not ‘tainted’ by our devilish heathen native tongues, of course.

2. It is even More Serious Business when parents use English out in public to scold us. That’s when hell freezes over.

3. Direct quote.

Filed under: Books I have read, Colonialism, Postcolonial feminism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Code-switching, Colonialism, Ivory Tower, Language, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

Things People Need To Stop Believing

Jaded — Thu, 26 May 2011 20:11:13 +0000

As a dusty third worldling, one of the things I learnt first was to see if there were other dusty people in the room whenever I go to any transnational feminist conferences. Something else I also learnt is to not expect ‘solidarity’ from anyone unless expressly proven otherwise — and these views are a result of the way people view me and my body in notIndia, what people assume of me in most internet spaces and fandoms. My friend and I compiled this list comprising of a few of the most repetitive and inane stereotypes that we’ve encountered of Third World Women. By no means is this list exhaustive, feel free to add your experiences in the comments — and tread carefully, the list is full of racial slurs and epithets.

1. We’re not disposable objects or your fetish or ‘flavour’ of the month. Not all Third World Women are ‘women’, but we don’t have the choice to identify the way we want, because exotification gets in the way of our special plans.

2. Not all Third World Women live in lands that are in a state of constant war. We exist in cities, between towns and villages — many in the West. There is no fixity of geo-political location, we don’t need to be in the Third World to be marginalised.

3. Not all of us live in tin shacks or mud houses, like every other group we too are scattered across classes and communities across the planet.

4. In popular culture and media, if Third World Women characters don’t wear shiny and bright colours, reality will not crack I assure you.

5. Hospitals exist in the third world too. So not all Third World Women need to squat in bushes to give birth.

6. Third World Women aren’t all ‘irresponsible mothers’ or ‘birthing cows’ because they have children at [x] age instead of the more socially ‘forward’ and ‘acceptable’ [y] age. I can vouch that the world will not come to an end if you don’t see Third World Women as ‘bad people’ for ‘not knowing better’ and ‘not having careers’.

7. We’re not your ‘Eternal She’, Earth Mother, Infinite Vessel, [Insert Inappropriate Phrase That focuses And Equates Sex Organ With Gender Here].

8. We are capable of doing more than care-taking children, cleaning houses and sewing immaculate quilts. We exist in all fields of work, equating every Third World Woman as a sweatshop worker is not necessary.

9. There is no situation where phrases like ‘exotic princess’ can be considered a compliment, even more so if this ‘compliment’ is based solely on skin hue.

10. We’re not always natural cooks or nurturing ‘goddesses’. We can do said jobs if need be, doesn’t mean we’re ‘more’ adept at menial jobs than anyone else.

11. We’re not ‘eager’ to dispense dusty wisdom and folktales on demand — especially about breastfeeding or childbirth. Take a close look at the Not All Third World Women Are ‘Women’ bit here.

12. No, we cannot be ‘purchased’ outright — definitely not if the sole ‘value’ that decides the ‘purchase’ are our hues.

13. When we say ‘no’ we mean ‘NO’ too. So saying ‘we can’t decipher your tongues’ is not an excuse.

14. Third World Women aren’t always looking to ‘entice’ White Men. Shocking, I know!

15. We’re more than just ‘enticing eyes’, or ‘gorgeous hair’ — we’re people and not body parts.

16. Most of us don’t have names like ‘Kali’, ‘Sarasvati’, [Insert Name Of Exotic Goddess], generally because we know the magnitude behind adopting such names and the cultural significance they carry.

17. If Third World Women have voice parts in popular media, the world will not turn upside down. Especially not if the said voice parts don’t involve being in the hotel industry.

18. Representation of Third World Women that doesn’t posit the hijab synonymous to oppression will not mess with Global Time.

19. We don’t like to be compared to food — ‘exotic’ or not.

20. When we’re involved with White people — sexually and otherwise — saying, “You’re a beautiful hue of Brown” isn’t helping anyone get laid.

21. Not all Third World Women roam shoe-less. (Sidenote: how come we can be shoe-less, but can afford to buy dresses? Curious minds want to know).

22. We’re not ‘sexually unrestrained’ — our cultures do not ‘encourage’ “godless unions and perpetual orgies”.

23. Not all of us have British accents, we don’t speak in archaic prose when addressed. And we do speak even when no one addresses us — apparently this is very shocking for people.

24. In the rare instance we do have voice-parts in popular media, and we’re speaking out against the dominant culture, our hair is ‘natural’ and ‘loose’ and ‘wild’.

25. In other rare instances where we do get screen time and space in popular media, we’re freedom fighters, UN refugees, sometimes nurses to Big Important White doctors, almost never as fully developed characters.

26. We’re not ‘natural hard-workers’. Back-breaking straining physical labour isn’t ‘easy’ for us either.

27. As Third World Women, we’re not ‘in tune’ with our ‘natural femininity’. Subservience isn’t coded into our genes.

28. Third World Women are queer too! And still people! Who knew?

29. Contrary to popular opinion, I have on good authority that not all Third World Women despise sex. And we need consensual sex as much as everyone else — even the supposed ‘desperate hookers’ from Pan Asia — and yes, they’re all in one monolithic identity like the rest of us.

30. Some of us speak multiple languages, some don’t. Some have the privilege of speaking in our native tongues and not get shamed for it, some don’t. Don’t expect ALL Third World Women to start ‘shrieking hysterically’ in ‘devilish tongues’ over canned soup.

—-

P.S. Thank you Roshan for your help and company while writing this.

Filed under: Body, Life Just Sucks, Postcolonial feminism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, body, Ivory Tower, List Making Jaded16 Style, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

The Rest Is Not Silence But Belongs To Me

Jaded — Sat, 14 May 2011 20:41:48 +0000

This is a guest post by Thursday of Weekday Blues. I refer to Thurs as my Token Moozlum Friend when around my radically conservative Hindu family (but no one else gets to call Thurs a token for ungodly things will befall on you; and for all you know, we could definitely curse you with our third worldy exotic magic). Thurs is currently residing in a first world country and plotting to help us third worlder’s infiltrate. Be nice, people of the interwebes!

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Someone once said I could never truly be invisible.

I offer my lived experience as proof I can never be truly visible. At least, not in my lifetime. My revolution is a long way from now.

Because while we are supposedly taking down the master’s house, the master is laughing at us.

Bugger the master. I’m building my own house.

I am wary of groups. Groups mean labels. Yes, St. Thomas says if we have words for things it helps us deal with what they are. But groups — consciously or unconsciously — create and Us and a Them. There is rarely anything comfortable about having an identity built on such a base, for your comfort is someone else’s marginalisation.

& I have always been a Them.

I do not have the luxury of relying on a community to take care of my needs, to affirm my value as a member, because they continuously erase me, despite claiming to be in my interests. I feel as though there are bits and pieces of me that exist in some strange limbo that detach at will whenever I am with others, so that I am never whole. So excuse me for not conforming, because I don’t buy your assimilation bullshit.

I am everyone’s Them. & I will always be an Other.

We didn’t intend to.

Speaking as a Muslim, intent does matter. Especially when you intend to sin. But could you imagine walking into a shop, knocking over a vase, and then getting out of it by claiming you didn’t intend to? Of course not. You pay for the vase and leave quickly.

The difference is that human beings aren’t vases.

Words have power. I bear their weight, and the weight of my own truth. Because silence is hardly useful, or innocent.

Silence is not consent.

Voice is justice tearing through the nerve cells, reaching for one more dawn. & Voice is a terrible, beautiful thing. But even as it is claimed, it can be taken away, or coerced. Eroded, bit by bit.

Silence kills voice.

Silence is not consent.

The same people who tell you that you are cowardly to hide behind words are the ones whose worlds shatter when you speak. For criticism is nothing — nothing — compared to the unbearable weight of the system upon our shoulders, and the trials a voice goes through to be heard cannot, and should not, ever be trivialised.

I do not claim to represent a community. I speak for myself because no-one will speak for me. I do not believe in “solidarity” as-is, for I have experienced for myself the insidious nature of this very top-down relationship. I am not in solidarity with people who demand that I let go of my baggage, for if their ideal was so noble, they would not erase us.

& I do not believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, because with friends like these, I don’t need enemies.

Must we react? What are we reacting to? Can we never do things for ourselves, of our own volition, to explore the chasms inside ourselves that we have to cross, & cannot cross alone?

I struggle to know the worth of me and mine even if it has been trampled, glossed over, erased, and obscured in old books, in single sentences that leap at me on pages. I’m not interested in telling you how your world was built on the backs of me and mine. But every time you say I am angry, every time you shove your Oh So Privileged Voice in my face and expect me to be silent, to be complicit, my voice will be thunder and typhoon spilling from my lips. The clouds swelling in the sky over your head will make you tremble. I will shout until I have no voice left, and even then, even if you have crushed me until I am a speck of dust to the eyes of you and yours, you will still hear me roar.

I once wrote that kyriarchy had much in common with fruits. I never saw myself in that analogy, because being me is like being trapped in a small room where everyone is throwing things and they don’t ~mean to~ but the bulk of it hits you. Maybe an orange, being eaten while the others ignore it.

So I will try to be a durian. I don’t expect it to be easy, or less tiring. Weighed against what others suffer, what others have paid and are paying — their blood, their freedom, their lives — mine seem insignificant. Dusty skin does an excellent job of hiding the scars, and words never leave scars, do they?

But a price — no matter how small or how large — would have been exacted from me anyway.

For daring to exist.

What I would remind you is that durians grow on trees. With several others, that may grow at different speeds and from different heights, but all of them will eventually ripen. & break free.

I am not alone.

There are more of us than you think.

Filed under: Guest Blogger, Musings From The Empire, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism Tagged: Activism, Colonialism, Guest Blogger, Ivory Tower, kyriarchy, Postcolonial feminism

Learning Relevance Through Erasure

Jaded — Fri, 06 May 2011 17:46:54 +0000

One of the few things people connect with India besides Slumdog Millionaire and hub of cheap Third World labour are the epics Ramayan and Mahabharat — which are of course, anglicised to Ramayana and Mahabharata. Almost always, these epics are seen as the narrativisation of ‘the great oral tradition of storytelling’, basing this tradition in the past, which not only increases the net worth of such a text but also binds the epic with ‘history’; it’s seen as a ‘pre-colonial’ Indian¹utopia and as the ‘pure’ culture, while neatly obliterating the existence of more than a few hundred narrativisations of these epics — which are subjective to the caste and class of the community they come from — and they’re seen synonymously with Hinduism and our religions — meanwhile western epics like the Iliad and Odyssey are seen as Great Literature and not the representative of a population. Thanks to this pact with ‘history’, these texts are seen as — forcibly — situated texts that describe how Things Were Back Then and almost always read when mirrored with Christianity or the western gaze. So when the text turns out to have any contemporary beliefs or depict any ‘modern’ behaviour, it is hailed as a new ‘discovery’, when in reality these ‘discoveries’ have always existed in the texts. Insert quip about colonisation here.

Lately, there is a new surge of reading ‘religious’ texts through a queer perspective, which perplexes me to no end — for these particular texts, Mahabharat especially, have always been queer texts. I grew up with stories from the Mahabharat and have known tales of Krishna and Radha role-playing and switching genders, Arjun living as a woman for a year with a man’s mind, Draupadi as the daughter born of a man’s body — and these are a few instances I can remember without even looking at the texts my grandmum used to read. Agreeably, in most re-tellings of this epic, even these gender transgressions are somehow inserted into patriarchy — Krishna becomes a ‘womaniser’ who doesn’t mind ‘playing around’, Arjun is written and seen as a character who ‘just dresses as a woman’ while retaining his identity and physical form, Draupadi’s birth is naturalised — however what these studies do is anthropologically ‘carve out’ queer instances and characters, instead of just rescuing the regional-dialectical re-telling from the mainstream one. Not to mention, even these queer characters are seen through the Western lens and then we have debates and papers arguing just why Arjun isn’t a trans* character, without taking into account that being trans* across different cultures or that even ‘queer’ manifests in different forms here. Because of such ritual and continuous exotification, books like Devdutt Pattaniak’s ‘The Pregnant King‘ are a cause for wonder and amazement in the Western world — more like a mild case of, “I used to be Brown but now I Think!”.

The Pregnant King is a text that narrativises and fictionalises the tale of a childless king who was a contemporary of the Pandavs, thus we know the setting is around the Kuru-kshtera war, but it moves on to its obscure characters — some of the most fascinating are Somvat a Brahmin boy who transforms to a woman to be with his lover, a queen who cannot rule because she is a woman, a woman who is raised and eventually identifies as a man and the protagonist who drinks a magical potion that makes him father a child and is then uncertain about his identity — written in English to either get a wider (Western) audience or to cache it under the genre of ‘fantasy’ considering the author is on risky ground for ‘questioning the sanctity of the epics!’. It goes without saying, writing such a novel does take courage, keeping in mind the religious-state-sanctioned communal identity most of the politicians thrive on, how most people view these texts as religious dictats and not just tales, how most of the Hindu-cultural identity is coded into these texts and the fact that the author takes great pains to illustrate gender and caste biases wherever possible. So on some cognitive level, I can appreciate the efforts of the author, but there are too many silences and silenced voices in this text to go un-noticed. As the text is written in English, names are anglicised², alienating me in the process — every time I said the anglicised names out loud, they’d seem foreign and harsh as they don’t roll off like the Sanskrit names do — but I’m used to such translations. What really unsettled me is how culture is diluted and broken down into actions — for instance the puja is described as an “appeasement of Gods with flowers, food and waving of lamps” — is if to make sure the Omnipresent Western Reader would understand every ‘exotic’ word used. Much like footnotes used by the British to ‘comprehend the Hindoo animal’ this text too explains each cultural practice. An apsara is called a ‘nymph’, a bhrama-rakshas is called a ‘demon-spirit’, a yaksh is called a ‘goblin’, each time reminding me that the culture I grew up in is legitimate only when tied to a western-marker. I can already see people protesting, “What is your problem if a text is made relevant? This way more people can read and appreciate it” — this is only half-true. More people will read it because it’s a ‘queer’ perspective to a ‘sacred’ text, an aura of taboo mixes with the erotic thus making it more consumable and irresistible. We don’t always need these western-markers to ‘understand’ a text — I grew up reading words, terms, cultural practices like “Chaise”, “Halloween” etc without anyone explaining what they exactly meant, read Wordsworth’s infamous poems on Nature and Daffodils without ever smelling the flower for instance – and turned out quite okay. Reading Dickens was a nightmare — besides his countless race and genderfails — because of so many cultural practices he’d mention that I’d never heard of, so it was Dickens Plus Dictionary in my household. Somehow, just somehow I ‘understood’ it all — no one had to tell me ‘English tea’ was nothing like the chai women in my house would drink in the afternoon — I knew our cultures were different and this difference was used to map supposed inferiority in our skins and authority in theirs.

In addition to dilution of culture and specific practices, the climax of the novel is the fact that most gods are male, female, both, neither all at once and then Yuvanashv comes to terms with his identity that presents as a male and yet he gives birth to his son — by the time I got to this bit, reading had become a chore. Anyone familiar with Hindu mythology knows that Gods are not separate from their feminine forms — Shiv is Parvati is Kali is Krishna is Radha is Indra and so on — but because we read these texts as one does Christian (Western) ‘religious texts’ which are more or less gendered, these characters are also confined to the gender binary. Then of course, liberal universities and humanities departments host fests that ‘uncover’ the ‘queer’ elements in the texts — once again re-enforcing a half-swallowed truth: We Don’t Exist, Till They Say We Do. Growing up too, I learnt that to ‘gain’ relevance I must be ‘understood’ — and if you ‘understand’ the Other, you can possess and chart the Other — and this ‘understanding’ comes when I erase myself, a culture I was raised in, markers that tie me to my current geopolitical location, become a tabula rasa and wait for the Nice Imperial Person to write over me, for only then I am given existence. And people still don’t believe that colonisation exists, or that we live such fissured lives because of our colonial past.

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1. This is factually incorrect considering the fact one of the first colonisers were the Iranians, dating back to 1800 BCE and invaded the land of the Dravidians — which is why most of us today aren’t entirely neither Aryan nor Dravidian in complexion.

2. It’s not about what ‘sounds’ better entirely — Sanskrit names are derived from that of one’s father to chart a character’s lineage — by anglicising them, these names and tradition are distorted.

Filed under: Books I have read, Colonialism, Postcolonial feminism, Religious Commentary Tagged: body, Books I Read, Colonialism, Culture of India, Literature, Postcolonial feminism

The Body (In)Visible

Jaded — Sun, 01 May 2011 21:05:30 +0000

This post is written for Blogging Against Disabilism Day. It is a wonderful space for conversations around disability across the world, do check out other entries on the blog.

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There is a word in my native language called ‘laaj’ which loosely translates to ‘shame’ or ‘honour’. This word gets used a lot in daily routine conversations – it’s not solely about ‘shame’ or ‘honour’ rather how the two interplay with each other. As the eldest daughter in a Hindu family, a lot of this ‘laaj’ depends on me — I don’t know what else is more intimidating, people expecting this of me, or my ready acceptance of this ‘responsibility’ — and while cognitively I recognise how this device of ‘laaj’ that seems to haunt only women is used to control, police, codify (deviant) feminine behaviour within boundaries of patriarchy, I know that somehow I must not slip up, disappoint my family in any way possible. So while interacting with strangers ‘laaj’ says Curl Your Tongue Inwards and I do, interacting in white spaces ‘laaj’ says Don’t Draw Attention To Yourself so I pretend to not hear, at home ‘laaj’ says Be Strong And Do Your Parents Proud and so I show no weaknesses. I have OCD, PTSD among other things that mesh in my headspace but I mask them all. OCD is filtered through ‘being bossy’ and ‘quirky’, PTSD is chalked to being ‘oversensitive’ and being aware of gender, race, sexual marginsalations and privileges. What I do is, swathe terms over words, justifications over rationalisations and make sure no one knows, because if they did, this ever-elusive ‘laaj’ would go away and that would be my fault.

I can write long posts and papers over the state of our ‘ex’ empires, how ‘we’ as postcolonial subjects see life but when it comes to talking of ‘my’ body, ‘my’ invisible disabilities, I don’t. Not even in ‘virtual’ situations — which are deemed ‘less’ real because they happen online, in the ‘absence’ of bodies so to speak — knowing full well talking of my body isn’t something I am ‘allowed’ to do. I don’t think my family would be outraged to see me writing of my body and invisible disabilities — I am definitely more privileged than many people in my geopolitical location who would be punished or reprieved for transgressing this boundary — but they would be disappointed and probably hurt as they don’t know about my history of being a survivor of sexual assault(s) — from which majority of my PTSD stems from — and maybe they won’t believe me when I say I have OCD mainly because of the way it’s constructed. The narrative most of us know of OCD is situated around bodies in the Western world, words that ‘belong’ in a sense, to native speakers of English. I am an Anglophone — but all of my family isn’t. What is the term equivalent to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in other tongues? What about PTSD? How do you explain to someone that you get triggered if you can’t explain even why? How do you explain that thinking exhausts you on most days? Or that you’re out of spoons. The onus — as always — is on this Othered (In)Visible Body to find terms to explain to people just why they aren’t like others — because I haven’t witnessed a single conversation around disability rights outside the mainstream western bent, with the focus on healthcare and accessibility etc and am not too optimistic about that either. Living is exhausting enough, now I have to find ways to explain why too — in different tongues?

Even if, options for people who are Othered by English — such as my family — did exist, how do I explain to the western narrative about this ‘laaj’ I shouldn’t transgress? I live in two worlds, one is ‘virtual’ where I have the privileges – steady internet connection, fluent Anglophone etc — to access information and forums, to find my support system, people whose thoughts and thought patterns are similar to mine, who reassure me simply by existing that I am not alone. Another world is where I ‘physically’ inhabit space in a way I don’t in virtual spaces, but I don’t talk what ‘makes’ me ‘different’. There are physical manifestations of my Other-ness but they are disguised as I mentioned earlier so that I can get from day-to-day without having shamed the people I care about — because having a ‘crazy’ daughter is no parents’ bargain, especially not around here — and things are relatively ‘easier’ for me. But it never fails to amuse me how in both of these spaces my body is (In)Visible, as it were.

I don’t think I have the privilege to proclaim my Visibility, to suddenly melt the Western semantic and semiotic barriers I encounter. So I won’t even try to confront or control them. Instead, I exist in parts, in cracked spaces, within fissured identities — and I will speak about me, my body, my loopy thoughts if, where and when I can. This is best I can do. Today.

Filed under: Body, Postcolonial feminism, Random things Tagged: ableism, body, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, Posttraumatic stress disorder

Borrowed Memories And Half-Sounded Syllables

Jaded — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:22:05 +0000

Last week, I saw ‘A Passage To India‘ with my parents and grandma, it started out as a hilarious exercise in pointing out just how many racist elements could one mesh in a movie — turns out more than we can ever count! — and making cynical notes in my head like, “Not all Indians are always smiling all the time, okay?” and “Not all brown women keep their gaze centered on their feet, no not even always in colonial times!” to the part where my grandma started laughing at the “Silly white women trying to speak Hindi!” and then she started telling us about her school days — some 65 years ago when she was roughly about 12 years old¹ — where she and her friends would race to the Colonial Bungalow near their school in Pune, about running right home whenever they’d hear the horses hooves — for almost always it was the British in their town on horses — and trying to touch the fence of the Bungalow but being too scared to physically try it out, to the time when she and her older sister got caught and were lashed for ‘something’ which she doesn’t tell us. She was laughing at how uneven and rough their Hindi sounded, but didn’t know what the movie was about as her English isn’t as good – partly because of the time she was born in and in part because of her own decision to never ‘learn that tongue’ as an adolescent – and for a bit there, mum was transcribing what was happening on-screen and stripping the dialogue, settings from its inherent racism — pretty ironic for a woman who once protested against the ‘White Imperial Capitalist Hegemony’ in the mid 80′s I thought — and by the time my grandma fully understood why were the White women speaking to the sari-clad-purdah-observing women, it wasn’t funny anymore to her. It took her a couple of days and a few sleeping pills to ‘become’ herself again.

Something like this isn’t a routine occurrence in my household — contrary to popular belief I don’t crumble and break down every time I pass a colonial structure or when I watch English movies or while reading English books — but a movie as specifically racist to Indians as ‘A Passage To India’ or going to the museum, looking at weapons that may have been used on some of my student’s great-grandparent’s are times when I want to re-write history or break away all ties with ‘my’ colonial past — whichever comes first. When faced with historical markers in specific situations, it becomes a tad difficult to view things objectively², to take the position dad took while viewing the film that, “This was an anti-racist book written in the colonial times! Pretty courageous on Forster’s part, no?”, to concede it under the label of This Is How Things Were Back Then. On some level I do understand that Forster like Joseph Conrad was ‘trying to do the right thing’, critiquing colonialism while it was going on — not a terribly popular opinion at that — but I find it very hard to applaud individuals who were more ‘humane’ than others — seeing how both perpetuated harmful and lingering stereotypes of the ‘native’ they were both writing of — to give Shiny Activist Medals™ to Dead White Dudes — a formidable camp on its own — that in no way produced any nuanced critiques of the Empire, not even ‘back then’. While Forster was writing ‘A Passage To India’, talking about Memsahibs and the ‘fascination’ all Brown men must inherently have with White women, we had writers like Premchand³ and Pandey Becan Sharma Ugra writing decidedly postcolonial literature — and many, many Dalit and tribal writers whose accounts live primarily in their specific community’s oral traditions considering they ‘lacked’ Premchand or any other upper-caste Hindu writer of the time’s privilege to education and position in the caste-hierarchy.

This isn’t to say Forster’s work holds no value, rather that teaching Forster without critically engaging with all of the narrative’s faults would be wrong, especially to ‘us’ as subjects of the ‘ex’ Empire; it’s’ interesting’ — where interesting stands for the fact Guari Vishwanathan was right all along – that we as postcolonial subjects are still made to learn many such works and that generally any mentions to ‘postcoloniality’ are kept confined in the upper echelons of academia – as if ‘theory’ and ‘lived reality’ are two different boxes and clear demarcations exist between them at all times. The fact we still go on learning such texts without feeling the need to explain the gaps and silences ‘our bodies’ re-present with absences (in the text) or the fact that when we suggest popular genres such as steampunk should be interrogated via postcolonialism as Jha does in her wonderful post is enough to cause fury and all the whitesplainers to come out of cracks and caves — also in Dusty Land, you need not always be White to be a whitesplainer, it’s that special gift we still have from the neato colonisation thing — is because the easy and popular narrative of history is ‘an event that happened, a long time ago’ and cannot have any possible lingering effects, that ‘somehow filter’ down to our bodies. That we see and face neocolonial attitudes that are loosely disguised as ‘globalisation’ and ‘multicultural exchange’ — when each time it’s the dominant culture that dictates the ‘exchange’, if it takes place at all — and that even in ‘brownspace’ we are still grappling with colonial attitudes and mindsets.

One way to look at history is to see it as a way of narrativising time — maps in turn codify space — but what happens to memories? Or experiences that ‘trickle-down’, we set up hierarchies to which experience — or oppression — is ‘more’ legitimate or ‘deserving’ of ‘attention’, what about second-hand memories that live through generations? Seeing mum leave out racism in her narration of the movie to my grandma — initially — altered her memories of her childhood for her, mum’s intervention at the time was out of kindness I assume, but after a point even this intervention is impossible to make after a point. How do you codify such a situation where words are futile and syllables don’t even fully form — as they didn’t form either for mum or my grandma — what happens then? I’m not suggesting wipe out all traces of the Empire — if it were even possible — rather we have to learn to contextualise our bodies in this mix — if and when we can — intervene when we can and not invalidate one another with claims of Whose Oppression Isn’t Real Enough™ to support and view each other through differences and not as a quest to homogenise and smooth over.

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1. India got ‘independence’ in 1947 technically, but it wasn’t until the mid-1950′s that the officers left. Many had settlements and stayed on here — their ranks may have been stripped off or resigned, there still existed an uneven power dichotomy when they lived as residents as per my grandma’s accounts as well as many other oral accounts.

2. Don’t particularly agree with Brecht there, the dichotomy between ‘critical thinking, feeling and objectivity’ doesn’t exist for me. Who said we can’t think, feel and reflect at the same time — if and when we can — does ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ always have to exist in two separate spheres?

3. This is a good paper on Premchand’s experimental depiction of the Subaltern (the wife) in his short story the Shroud – though I disagree with the way the paper posits Ghisu as a ‘subaltern’ when his character fits more with Gramsci’s ‘Organic Intellectual‘.

Filed under: Body, Colonialism, Postcolonial feminism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Books I Read, Ivory Tower, neocolonialism, Postcolonialism, Rants

Writing Over Bodies

Jaded — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:22:38 +0000

My book obsession is quite well known, in most circles I move and am allowed in; there is a long-standing joke that I don’t need food but just a fresh page to live. So when my student asked me rhetorically whether I ‘ever tire of theory’, he was rather surprised to know I did — can’t entirely blame him for holding this view, after all I did spend the last seven months talking solely in theories and of texts — in fact, I agree with Spivak¹ when she accuses prose of ‘cheating’. We are taught theory in a manner that we will be able to ‘frame our realities intelligibly’ – pretty problematic on its own already — but when it comes to translating words to practice, somewhere we break and falter. I teach English to children of lower caste and socio-economic backgrounds — technically speaking — this is the space I should be unleashing my postcolonialism in, making sure the harmful ideas that say, “Only a person speaking Good English will ever get a job anywhere”, but I can’t. The truth is, they do need a functional level of English to be employed anywhere and if I start saying, “Forget the Empire’s tongue! Let’s subvert it and smash the system”, I will confuse them and even humiliate them — for subversion happens once you’ve mastered the tongue — and as first-generation learners of English, learning this tongue is hard enough as it is. On most days, the best I can do is not scold them — as the institution ‘requires’ me to — and not shame them when they code switch² to their native tongues.

(Un)Ironically, what I do end up doing is teaching postcolonialism, Said, Spivak and others to my IB students who are at times even more caste and class privileged than I am. We talk of the Subaltern, while when talking to the Subaltern — my code-switching students in this case — we still re-enforce the most heinous ideas concerning them, their languages and perhaps most importantly, routinely erase their Englishes. When this broken pattern of relating to people above and below us in the hierarchy of being is brought to light, the best we do is, “acknowledge privilege” and then hit a dead-end. The only difference is that now we have Shiny Good Activist Medal™. This isn’t to imply that my students — or even the Subaltern itself — don’t know about the neato colonisation thing, or the reason why certain texts are canonised and others weren’t, we’ve talked of those things — but that’s what it really is: rhetoric, words and talk. These words swirl out of my tongue, out in class, they nod and ask questions and we study on. When they see exam questions using standard forms of English — one they haven’t mastered particularly well — and their ‘intelligence’ is rated on how they fare in these exams, that are designed in an Othering tongue, so to speak. Then we hear stereotypes like,” Those damn Dalit buggers! We educate them, but what use? They still fail exams and waste our time and money. They are basically a waste of space and seats, I tell you!”, when we’re making sure they remain in the same position — one step under us.

Three weeks ago, I went to an international conference on Queer And Transgendered Bodies* and somehow I was one of the few ‘visibly dusty’ people there — whatever that is supposed to mean. The person I went with was Indian too, but she has light-skinned privilege; so when we were talking about some Western Feminist Fail, I got relatively more hostile reactions than my light-skinned friend, who in this ‘temporary’ white space merged in with many speakers and was ‘read’ as white, more than once. When we brought this up in the consequent discussion, it was waved away with, “But we understand why this happens. As a white person, I sympathise with your position and you are right! There are uneven dichotomies present in the world…”, which led the whole discussion to an end as the Shiny Good Activist Medal™ was passed around when people acknowledged that they were, in fact, a privileged group. This isn’t to intone that accepting and acknowledging privilege is easy, or as Jamie explains it, “The more privilege one has, the harder it is to conceive the gap between livable life and mere existence and thus the harder it is to perceive the need to act positively to bridge that gap”, rather that when it comes to not being able to bring my postcolonialism in a class of underprivileged students or about spending days in an air-conditioned classrooms debating the politics of poverty or being accountable to voicing marginalised people, it all boils down to privilege — and just listing or acknowledging it simply cannot do as a ‘solution’. By placing importance on the idea of ‘debunking privilege’ or ‘taking theories down’, what we’re doing is swathing words with more rhetoric — and this is framed as the only way to ‘deal’ with privilege — and thus effectively avoiding doing anything with our said privileges.

What we routinely do in theory — for instance — is separate the ‘object of race’ and ‘subject of racism’, forgetting that any marginalisation happens on bodies, living-breathing-tired-raging bodies. Within feminist circles, ‘intersectionality’ is a term that gets thrown around a lot without realising its magnitude. We frame oppression in neat, tidy terms and columns while this codified oppression leaves physical, psychological and systemic wounds on our bodies³. Acknowledging one’s position in kyriarchy is a start and not the end to ‘owning up to privilege’. We need to contextualise our bodies — if and when we can — see marginalisation outside of words we theorise in, see our unique intersecting identities, how complicit each and everyone is in each other’s oppression and work for a way forward; these bodies of flesh, colour and hues, with history and agency, bodies that are naturalised and silenced. It’s not enough to cite Donna Haraway — for instance — when speaking of a cyborgian reality and using her example of the ‘radical cyborg’ who “makes chips in Santa Rita or India by day” and transforms into a cyborg by night, merging technological and biological boundaries to write (her)self into history, those bodies from Santa Rita and India need to inject themselves into reality and history, by their own will. As marginalised people, accepting and owning our bodies is one of the most radical acts we can do, by locating it in a hierarchy, in theory, in action we can claim support, love, respect and care.

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1. She says, “Plain prose cheats” when asked why she chooses to write terms like “subject-position”, “chromatic-heteronormativity” as opposed to ‘understandable’ terms.

2. Magda has a wonderful post — a phonetic delight to be honest — on code-switching and postcolonial English. The code-switching that happens in my classrooms is a tad different though, here the lack of privilege that ties itself with ‘knowing’ English performs the code switch.

3. Descartes may be dead, but we do love his legacy of dichotomies, no?

*Of course, saying ‘Transgendered’ but meaning ‘perhaps not straight’ and coming nowhere close to any trans* representation at all.

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Colonialism, Postcolonial feminism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Books I Read, Code-switching, Colonialism, Feminist theory, Ivory Tower, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Postcolonial feminism, Postcolonialism

On Taking The Bus

Jaded — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:33:46 +0000

This is a guest post by Deepti. She just finished her Masters in communication. A connoisseur of good and meaningful writing, she spends half her day glued to the thousand feeds on her Google Reader. She spends the other half, nurturing an unhealthy obsession for American crime procedurals, cinema, and dissing popular culture. She researches telecom policy and accessibility for an NGO in Bangalore and waits for Fall, when she can go to Grad School and get her PhD.

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It’s never a random decision. Oh I think I’ll take the bus… nope can’t do. Not dressed like that anyhow.

Being a girl in India means many things.

It means you’re valued less, you’re harassed more.

It also means that you have to be very very careful about how you choose to cloth yourself when you go out. Am I going to a conservative neighbourhood- definitely not the skinny jeans then? Can I walk around in boxers in my home? Sure but always be ready to pull the fastest trick change into pajamas if a guest comes calling.You’d be amazed how many times I have changed from perfectly okay clothing to go somewhere because; well… it’s just not okay to go there.

I know all about, I have the right to dress how I want and not get raped.

But I also know something else- I most definitely don’t want random men to stare at my legs when I walk down the road in a skirt. I don’t want to be whistled at by random teenage boys on bikes. I don’t want to be standing in a bus and have to bear uncomfortable staring from the men at the back because my shirt is clingy.

Does that mean I have to always dowdy up? No not really, because you see my upper middle class privilege lets me do all kinds of things. It lets me have a car that I can drive around in wearing whatever the hell I please. It lets me go to malls and restaurants and coffee shops and plays in revealing clothes where I can walk in confidently with the expectation that no one will look at me threateningly. Because that’s not what ‘people like us’ do now is it?

But yes, I police myself. I don’t wear skirts to work even though I want to because I have to take the public bus. And even if this is Bangalore where its quite okay to dress how you like because this is where the cool people live, And even if the bus I take is a nice red Volvo with air conditioning and padded seats and really helpful drivers and conductors and ‘a better class of people’ who can afford the Rs 30-40 fare and who don’t ‘ostensibly’ engage in leching (It’s called ‘checking out’ if it’s done by software techies instead of day labourers, I believe), I don’t because I still have to stand everyday at a bus stop for five minutes waiting, when I all I want to do is be swallowed up by the earth because I can feel every single man staring at me.

This constant mortification, even for five minutes, is not a price I am ready to pay for the joy of baring my legs. Call me a coward, call me a bad poster example for liberation, but I won’t do it.

The skirts meanwhile, lie unworn…

P.S. Any comments which hint at malice or scorn over the fact Deepti doesn’t wear the clothes she likes, and is bringing down the name of Feminism by extension will be promptly deleted. Before you think of commenting, keep in mind the geo-political location of the writer, that will curb a little privilege showing too. I’d also like to remind you about this wonderful page that is still open for guest posts.

Filed under: Body, Guest Blogger, Postcolonial feminism Tagged: body policing, Guest Blogger, India, Postcolonial feminism, Sexism

A Conspiracy Of Silences

Jaded — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 02:01:02 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, the lady I buy my bi-weekly magazines from near the railway station started talking to me. The caste system is so pervasive¹ that all we’d ever exchanged over the past three years is, “Has [x] magazine come yet?” — from me — and she’d say, “No Madam, no one reads this one, so I have to send out a special order for you” and we’d smile at that gesture, but that would be all. So two weeks ago, when I went to the stall after a few weeks of absence, somehow, she asked me about my plans after graduation and I mentioned something about going out of Mumbai and before I knew it she was telling me about her daughter; how she wants to study further but doesn’t have the means. I’d seen her daughter a few times, helping out around the stall, I’d thought she was around my age, but it turned out she had two years to graduation. That day, I put this newspaper lady in touch with a couple of activists who worked specifically with underprivileged Hindu girls — the newspaper lady’s family came from a challenged economic background, but as Hindu Brahmins, they occupy higher shelves of the caste system. I don’t particularly like these activists and their goals but knew they’d help these two women out. Yesterday, I come to know the daughter rounded up about nine more girls from similar economic backgrounds but from varying castes which of course, the activists couldn’t stand for and helped only the Hindu girls. As people, we are constantly choosing and prioritising one over another, even if we don’t want to; build-ing and break-ing communities and spaces, they always carry with them little parts of us we show and hide. I didn’t want to approach these activists at all for their restricted goals, but by reaching out to them six more girls benefitted. However, the three that get left behind, their silences roar the loudest.

When I heard this yesterday, the first thing I did was look for financial aid that would suit these three girls, and as it turns out being caste, religious and a gender minority means you enter How Oppressed Are You Really Game™ which is almost always designed to leave you out, and two of them didn’t ‘fulfill’ the criteria for receiving the aid; though the one who did get aid brought forth two more girls. Next week, these girls are seeing another educational reform activist — this one is specifically for Dalit women — and hopefully some solution will emerge. In social justice too, we are constantly con-structing similar communities — not speaking of individual acts, rather the ones that are cultural context based — whether these communities have origins online or in physical geographical borders, they are shaped by production process — read dominance of the digital dollar — and actual histories. What troubles me is, we start with logical and factual fallacies or the Need To Help As Many As Possible, like this small group of girls sometimes we too look at solutions only in singular steps and spaces. In the case of safe spaces, there is an overwhelming urge to create a space where silence isn’t an act of violence but a choice, maybe even a protective gauze that will save us from the omnipotent presence of the DoucheColonial Empire. I confess, this is a tempting and beautiful fantasy to even consider, the possibility of a space where marginalised bodies and voices can express themselves without being attacked and cracked open is too tempting– the myth of ‘reverse-racism’ would be the first one to go if I had my way — and then we’d be human equivalents of unicorns. But even in ‘safe spaces’ — virtual and otherwise — a dichotomy slips through that dictates who remains inside, who eventually speaks, who has the authority to be believed; virtually speaking in most spaces that I’ve interacted in, all we do ‘see’ are absences, ‘hear’ only absences. It gets even trickier when the body you’re interacting with has a face and a name to go along with², this voicelessness is ‘harder’ to ignore — of course we can quantify pain, humiliation and violence! Like this for instance – and the desire to make an insular community deepens.

Given the differences in languages, dialects, caste and class statuses re-aligning margins and commonalities — within our unique marginality — is not only impossible, but an extremely dangerous concept to even consider. Providing one marginality and slipping into someone’s space is step one to obscuring someone else’s struggles, which flies into the face of the ‘safe space’ goal, not to mention how it serves to homogenise people and their specific intersecting locations. So instead of the Revolution™ or that Perfect Safe Space, can we just interrupt — if and when we have the ability — the bigger mainstream ideal, be it in feminism or elsewhere? I’m not insinuating that communities that have been proven unsafe over and again for marginalised bodies need to be contested and constantly challenged – I’d rather talk to you of time travel instead — just pointing out how the onus is always on the marginalised body to carve out that ‘space’, ‘community’ or ‘origin’. Instead of ‘building communities’, what if we focus on shifting locales of power and loosening borders? Whether we like it or not, most of us are points of access to others — for instance, while teaching I am the point of access for children between theoretical knowledge and practical use when learning and re-forming syllables — I have little to no control over being ‘this’ via medium. What I can do, is ask access at whose cost and context? There are times when I absolutely loathe this position of access — being a cable wire for the ‘global’ to objectify the ‘local’ isn’t fun! Who knew! – but what if we negotiate this ‘position’ of access? Instead of challenging the militant Hindu activists — and not receiving any help at all — what these girls chose to do is seek aid elsewhere, while bringing forth more people in the chain. Similarly, instead of fighting in harmful and unsafe spaces, if we leave our absences behind, we can re-orient ourselves to providing access to marginalised bodies, to local producer communities so that they can re-insert themselves as actors within the global arena and prevent re-appropriation of their identities.

To paraphrase my friend’s words, “As a Third World Woman, don’t expect me to build anything, ever. What I will do is express myself with break and silences as I disrupt the hegemony. Don’t expect me to smash and tear anything down, I have enough people doing that to me as it is”. Ultimately, what I hope to do is give and receive access that will enable Othered bodies and me the position of strength to negotiate within hierarchies and hegemonies. Meanwhile, my silences conspire and leave marks, re-present to us absences. Today, this minor disruption is more than enough.

———

1. I couldn’t ask about her ‘problems’ as it would definitely be me squandering my caste-privilege about considering I didn’t know a thing about her then; she couldn’t ask me because of the invisible — but firm — class dichotomy me being a customer created.

2. Many virtual interactions are considered ‘unreal’ because ‘bodies don’t matter online’, or in an essence ‘get left behind’.

Filed under: Books I have read, Colonialism, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, Feminist theory, Ivory Tower, Postcolonial feminism

Re-Membering Ties; Re-Forming Bonds

Jaded — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:06:49 +0000

Last week, I read Houria Bouteldja’s essay on Decolonial Feminism And The Privilege Of Solidarity and came away with agreeing with most of it, though there are some big problematic themes hazed over — like the ‘question’ of Islam and feminism co-existing (hint: this shouldn’t take consideration) or even the notion of ‘decolonisation’ mentioned many times in the essay, making it seem as if a ‘decolonial’ state of being is indeed possible (without using time-bubbles that too!) that there will be a time when colonisation will be washed clean from under our skin or given the radical left Maoist thrust of the website, the essay doesn’t mention ‘rescuing’ Marxism from Marx’s colonialism — but all of this disappeared as I read the speaker subverting the concept of ‘solidarity’ — physically and viscerally – by standing in solidarity with White women, which was her way of disrobing White feminists of extending ‘sistersong’. I read, “Solidarity with [insert nationality here]” and impulsively liked how ‘solidarity’ as a privilege was reverted, like Caliban cursing at his master¹, the act of reversing roles was more important than focusing on what she actually implied. Considering the speaker is an activist, her goal was to level the uneven power dichotomy of ‘solidarity’ when practiced by White (Imperial) feminists and possibly for her solidarity ‘ends’ there, and not in likening herself to any White feminists. All of this I knew and acknowledged as I read the essay for the first time; I’ll admit that the Calibanian instinct didn’t die away even after days. So for a while, I started believing that solidarity is a desirable concept when disrobed of imperial and neo-colonial intent and action, even prioritised theory over action so to speak, forgot that my dusty skin cannot be cataloged either way quite this easily.

Co-incidentally two days after reading the essay I ended up taking my students to the Prince Of Wales museum for a ‘field visit’ — calling the museum by a glorified Maratha hero’s name doesn’t change where it originates from or that it attests our colonial past — and somehow while constantly saying “no you can’t touch it” and “yes, that’s a naked body, that’s nothing to laugh about!” we were standing in front of the Ratan Tata wing — yes those Tata’s – and all the artefacts that came directly from their family heirlooms. One minute I’m telling them to stop giggling at the nude paintings and next moment we come to the section where weapons ‘of the Empire’ are displayed. Rows of guns, whips, knives, pistols — some from the Maratha period, some from the Empire — which were used on ‘natives’; seeing the old Grandfather Clock which still works by London time and finally the cutlery and silverware exposed our (in)visible history. If I were to re-trace ‘that history’, I’d have to look at the gaps and spaces between these narratives and presentations of history, as ‘my’ past is infinitely linked with ‘theirs’. If I were to imagine ‘Indian history’ has a voice, then for the better part of last two centuries it is silenced² judging solely by the artifacts present in the museum, you’d think there were no Indians who lived in India for the time British people hung out here. Had I gone alone to the museum, this would have been the time for me to leave and give in to the crying fit, but my students were around and still wanted to know if those weapons were ever used on us. I must have nodded ‘yes’ as suddenly everyone was quiet for a while. Finally, standing around the creepy, stuffed animals of the Natural History section, one student tells me that his abbujan’s father — great-grandfather that is — used to be a footman to a British naval officer; we don’t look at each other as he wonders out loud if the weapons we saw upstairs were ever used on his abbujan’s father. At that moment — and even today — my first instinct is to cut away all my ties with such a history or a collective past.

‘Solidarity’ as a term and an implied action has too much responsibility for me to simply use it, even while subverting it like Bouteledja’s essay suggests. If I could, I’d certainly like to have no links or connections of colonisation but that is neither my space nor privilege to ‘re-claim’. As strongly I want to play around with the dynamics of ‘solidarity’ — considering how more often than not, it’s Western chains of knowledge and looking at the world that defines the Third World Woman — to say I ‘stand with European women’ — for instance — I’d have to forget and artificially re-member events around me in a manner that will foster ‘kinship’. Like my students too, I roll the word in my mouth as they do every time a new English word is introduced to them and it doesn’t ‘fit’, so to speak. I don’t feel an ‘innate’ bond with Western feminists, I don’t want to extend my arms ‘globally’ and ‘form bonds across borders’. If anything at all, because of my encounters online and otherwise, I’ve become extremely vary of Western feminists who constantly talk about ‘stretching edges’ and ‘re-defining’ the ‘global standard’ as most of these come down to exploitation of the dusty subaltern³. Even if this ‘solidarity’ were to be free of neo-colonial and imperial zeal, I’d probably still be wary, because this ‘kinship’ can quite easily ‘allow’ us to dislocate each other’s experience and well-intentioned rage and end up appropriating cultures — for instance, I care about Islamic and Dalit feminism but have to be very careful about not appropriating their experience in my ‘outrage’, as I’d be prioritising my feelings over theirs; which in interwebes lingo is aptly a ‘FAIL’.

Re-membering history, like they’re pieces of a puzzle is impossible; re-membering past memories where I was in a decidedly vulnerable position — TW for rape threat — is a luxury I don’t have; ‘solidarity’ feels like a poem I must rote learn to properly exercise my ‘feminist card’. I will never know what a Dalit or a Black feminist experiences, ‘sistersong’ allows me an escape-route to believing I do. Instead of chanting ‘sisterhood’, can’t we listen and support? I don’t particularly care if I’m ‘reaching’ a ‘sister’ in Peru, ‘understanding’ her struggle if I can acknowledge that our struggles are different, and I may not always be able to ‘help’ everyone I may want to. Why do we need bonds or ‘kinship’ to understand that All Are Different, All Are Equal?

—-

1. “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you,/For learning me your language!” is possibly my favourite Shakespeare quote.

2. Madhubani art co-existed with the Mughal Empire, for instance. But when we look at the British Empire and the display in the museum all we find is their art and traces of their ‘culture’.

3. This isn’t to intone I have an Agenda Against Western Feminists™ and will destroy them with my third worldly powers if I were to meet them, rather repeated negative experience has taught me to keep my guard up.

Speech Through Silences (jaded16.wordpress.com)
The (Othered) Woman In The Veranda (jaded16.wordpress.com)
DeTonguing The Subaltern (jaded16.wordpress.com)

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Random things, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Gender identity, Ivory Tower, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

White Privilege: The Stockholm Syndrome Edition

sexgenderbody — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 18:19:14 +0000

We recently posted a video on our tumblr feed, which demonstrates the pervasive and nauseating totality of White Privilege. The subject was addressed on DailyKos this morning, with the author dealing with the defensiveness, denial and disbelief from whites about whether such a thing exists.

White Privilege not only exists – it is the law of the land. From the onset, this country has been built on the sweat, blood & tears of non-whites. The First Nations were systematically slaughtered and culturally obliterated. Africans were brought here as slaves. We have sent people to every continent to kill non-whites. It was only after uber-white Germany attacked us directly, that we engaged in war with whites. The French & Indian wars were two white empires fighting for control of the right to steal the land from the First Nations.

Since our Declaration of Independence, we have been fighting for white privilege. The racism of the South / GOP / Bible Belt is proof that we have not shed this desire.

The most vile and disturbing aspect to me is the deliberate efforts of most of the white US to pretend that this racism is not there. We gladly turn to our TV show, movies, iPods, flat-screen TV’s, double-latte’s, 401k’s, wallpaper for the living room, SUV purchases and any of the myriad distractions / ego-strokes that are provided for us by the very people and system that profit in dollars from the price paid in blood by non-whites across the planet.

But, we’re stroking the hand of our own executioner. This system is not designed for some white utopia for us all to live in. It is a very small, gated community – designed to drive 95% of the planet into labor and poverty, 4% to be jailers and 1% to bathe in the glorious light of a Maxfield Parrish dreamland exclusively populated by the owners of this planet: a few greedy, amoral men who will sell us to slaughter.

The grease of this entire system is every “oscillating Richard” white person who goes along thinking “I’m not racist” / “I’m not the problem” / “What me worry?” and any other excuse that will allow them to proceed with their “American Dream” pursuit to join the very smart, very special, very responsible “good people”. We turn our eyes to our future home, our children’s schools, that new electronic device, the esteem of our peers and making smart choices with our careers.

We don’t see racism because we don’t want to see it and we can get away with not seeing it.

Our success, our joy, our prosperity, our delight, our social standing, the heat in our house, the food on our table, the health of our children – all paid for in the blood of non-whites.

To this day.

“If you’re not part of the solution – you’re part of the problem”

—-

This is a post by Arvan. As always, a reminder that the wonderful guest posting page is still open to all non-bigoted peeps.

Filed under: Ranting & Raving, Religious Commentary Tagged: Colonialism, Guest Blogger, Ivory Tower, Rants, White Privilege

DeTonguing The Subaltern

Jaded — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 19:51:38 +0000

This week all that seems to happen in India is the World Cup and How Incredibly Important It Is, for it is a game that involves super-important dudes with super-important dudes of other countries, and almost every newspaper is discussing the economics, sport tactics, strategics and politics — I don’t even know what this means when it comes to ‘politics’ of cricket. I counted about eight to nine unevenly shaped blurbs about crimes against women today as the Sports section has taken over the front page news in Times Of India¹; I still can’t believe this is a ‘national’ newspaper. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court initiated an inane bill about ‘rehabilitating’ sex-workers, there are 52 reported deaths of female-identified Maoists in Arunachal Pradesh and there is another case of possible gendered-violence in Kashmir where two girls were shot in the streets of Sopore, in Kashmir for being ‘promiscuous‘ as cited by the military resources. All of this gendered violence in the last two weeks alone and ‘national’ newspapers such as Times Of India and DNA have hardly mentioned any news that do not include the World Cup. I’d like to believe this erasure isn’t conscious; that the stories got mixed up or maybe there was too much corporate pressure to ‘sell’ the World Cup as much as they can. For a while this trick works and I visualise extremely busy and frazzled editors who just had to edit these stories out, out of pressure and not out of choice². And then, TEHELKA covers the mediated-forced sterilisation of Wayanad tribal women and the bubble pops as silences roar.

Women of this tribe are sterilised to ‘control’ the population, most times they don’t know the surgery they are consenting to. As the article mentions, other women — possibly sterilised too — to recruit women for a price, so that more women can get these procedures done; all in the name of the Religious-Capitalist-Oligarchal State Controlled Reproduction loosely translated as, “Your men have no control, so we will curb your reproductive ability! It’s a win-win for both!”; except when it’s not as most patients don’t get sufficient post-op care — one can’t think of ‘recovery’ and ‘healing’ when there are mouths to feed — further deteriorating the health of these women. One would think this makes for Important News, especially since this is State-sanctioned violence, but then this LadyBrain will remind you that no news that really happens to uteruses is newsworthy; not when we can report the state of cricket, global sports and predict performances of teams. Meanwhile the thousands displaced to make space for the stadiums, the cuts in the budget to ‘accommodate’ expenses for the World Cup are ignored. Theoretically speaking of the Third World Woman (or Feminine-Identified Body) is relatively easier, I can go on creative bents but when it comes to actual and physical erasure, words fail me yet again. When encountered by this gendered detongued subaltern, all that remains is forked tongues and silences, yet again as mainstream Hindu feminism remains quite as narrow as it was 20 years ago. Today perhaps multi-lingualism has entered Hindu feminist theory and practice, but when it comes to going beyond the frame of the privileged, upper-caste Hindu body, we draw blanks.

Erasure of bodies that cannot be classified under ‘upper caste’, ‘Hindu’, ‘able-bodied’ and ‘Woman’ are predictably excluded, it’s really not a co-incidence no matter what I keep telling myself. Ironically, these Othered women’s — and feminine identifying people — bodies become the starting point for capitalism to build empires — where else can you find the dreadful combination of Poor, Woman, Caste-Social-Religious minority? Their homes and fields are ideal campsites for testing drugs and fairness creams, they’re also hotbeds of toxic dumps and this isn’t a co-incidence again that the most amount of gendered and sexual violence (at the hands of Upper Caste Men) happens in these neighbourhoods. Everything adds up to one equation — DeTongue The Subaltern, Disrobe Her Voice. And the ‘solution’ isn’t adequate healthcare like many Western-Leaning-Hindu feminists suggest, as again the healthcare that comes in is thoroughly western and still riddled with colonial whips — these patients can’t sign their names, so male relatives have to sign for them and subsequently ‘choose’ the healthcare, sometimes treatment papers are disguised as drug-trial consent forms — and repeatedly all we do is further violate this fissured Subaltern Woman’s body. Even interventions of privatised philanthropy fail sometimes as the zeal to define the colonial and corporate power through the Western gaze takes over, or on other occasions it is the reliance on capitalist-prescribed values of private medicine — which again work to exclude more bodies than it does to include them — that results in yet another system of oppression. Culturally, these communities are rich in what First World Feminists (read tourists in exotic places) like to call “indigenous knowledges”, this knowledge is communally shared among the tribal and peasant women for domestic, local and public use are then subject to Western ideologies of intellectual property rights which are only functional and understood in a controlled, possessive and privatised form. Thus this idea of an intellectual commons among tribal and peasant women actually excludes them from ownership and facilitates corporate biopiracy. Not only do they lose medical care and support, but even their knowledge is fetishised and tokenised by us, by western feminist theory and privatised philanthropy.

This is the space that mainstream Marxist axioms get engulfed in, as these women and feminine-identified bodies are violated in every imaginable way, under a religious-capitalist-oligarchal state controlled patriarchal system. This is a community of women made invisible and written out of national and international economic calculations mainly because it’s convinent and besides, no one notices such discrepancies. We have sports people to please and fret over. This is an open letter to mainstream Hindu feminists to pay more attention to the everyday localised experiences of tribal women and the micropolitics of their — ultimately — anticapitalist struggles. We need to start seeing the embedded of their local and particular lives with the ‘global’ and ‘universal’ norms that we’re so fond of; justice and equality has to be re-membered in transborder, trans-communal terms.

– From an Ex-Hindu.

—–

1. Continuously referring to rape survivors as ‘rape victims’ and stating ‘allegedly’ before any woman-related crime are a few of the many reasons TOI does wrong, on an alarmingly regular basis.

2. I can be quite the willfully ignorant unicorn when I want.

Speech Through Silences (jaded16.wordpress.com)

Filed under: Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Random things, Ranting & Raving, Religious Commentary Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Gender identity, Ivory Tower, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

David Cameron, What A Racist

Jaded — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:27:23 +0000

David Cameron, our benevolent and democratically-leader, here in the U.K, recently made a speech about the widespread problem of terrorism which the world currently faces, and the causes there of. You might be surprised to discover that this speech is almost entirely devoid of racism! Cameron instead focuses on actual and true facts, that just happen to be about the Muslim community. He kindly agreed, in his benevolent and democratic manner, to answer a few of my foolishly naïve questions about this incredibly unracist topic¹.

That Fucking Hippy: Thank you Mr Cameron, for joining us here today to talk about the problem of terrorism. Can you tell us something of where the problem stems from?

David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Conservative Party: Thank you. Well, the new and various threats that we face which are certainly not linked exclusively to any one religion or ethnic group.

TFH: Rrright.

DC, PM: Though, we should acknowledge that this threat comes in Europe overwhelmingly from young men who follow a completely perverse, warped interpretation of Islam, and who are prepared to blow themselves up and kill their fellow citizens.

TFH: How, Prime Minister, do you get from not blaming any one particular ethnic group or religion, to, well, focusing specifically upon one gender in a certain sector of a very specific religion?

DC, PM: W need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of where these terrorist attacks lie. That is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism.

TFH: That isn’t…that just isn’t what I asked, Sir. I…how do you come to these conclusions? That it is Islam which encourages terrorism?

DC, PM: No, you misunderstand me! Islam is a religion observed peacefully and devoutly by over a billion people. We need to be clear: Islamist extremism and Islam are not the same thing.

TFH: But you are still blaming terrorism solely on Islam, no?

DC, PM: ….

TFH: Surely an extreme version of this peaceful and devout religion would be a super peaceful person?

DC, PM: ….

TFH: I suppose that if you wished to make an analogy, you could use Christianity? You know, that peaceful carpenter dude who encouraged people to love their neighbours as they loved themselves, and then the USA, claiming to be a Christian nation, went and laid waste to some countries, killing its citizens and ravaging the infrastructure? And that would be Christian extremism? Taking the peaceful doctrine to a conclusion which has very little to do with its progenitor? Is that what you think has happened in Islam, Prime Minister?

DC, PM: ….

TFH: In that case, how do you propose to prevent further terrorist action?

DC, PM: Europe needs to wake up to what is happening in our own countries. Of course, that means strengthening the security aspects of our response, on tracing plots, on stopping them, on counter-surveillance and intelligence gathering.

TFH: Sounds a bit like you want to follow around young, male Muslims and check their bags.

DC, PM: But not in a racist way.

TFH: Of course not, Prime Minister. What, then, do you think the reasons are for these young, male Muslims becoming terrorists?

DC, PM: Well, some people point to grievances about Western foreign policy and say, ‘Stop riding roughshod over Muslim countries and the terrorism will end.’ But there are many people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who are angry about Western foreign policy, but who don’t resort to acts of terrorism.

TFH: Pardon me, Prime Minister, are you suggesting that if there were more terrorists you would take the claims of colonialism in Muslim countries more seriously? How many terrorists is enough for you? I myself do not identify as a terrorist, and am angry…if not critical! of Western foreign policy, which I believe to be ridiculously harmful to the rest of the world, but if I was, would you take more vote more seriously? I’m not, I’m just not sure what you’re suggesting here.

DC, PM: Now, I’m not saying that these issues of grievance about foreign policy are not important.

TFH: But you are suggesting that they’re not relevant…

DC, PM: Yes, we must resolve the sources of tension, not least in Palestine , and yes, we should be on the side of openness and political reform in the Middle East .

TFH: Is that what we’re calling the illegal invasion of Iraq?

DC, PM ….They also point to the profusion of unelected leaders across the Middle East and say, ‘Stop propping these people up and you will stop creating the conditions for extremism to flourish.’ But this raises the question: if it’s the lack of democracy that is the problem, why are there so many extremists in free and open societies?

TFH: Smooooooth. If these extremists are, as you say, young Muslims, living in the U.K which is, ostensibly, a democracy, and perhaps you could remind me later exactly how it was that you came to power, Sir, but you question why these young Muslims might want to cause trouble within the ‘free and open’ societies in which they live now…the same free and open societies in which the leaders are calling for the policing of their social lives, their religious practices, their families…while these same Muslims may feel a great, shall we say, kinship? for the oppressed Muslims of these other countries in which unelected leaders are being kept propped up by, um, equally unelected leaders of these free and open democracies and may even be related! To people in, well, you mentioned Palestine? Do you know what is actually happening in Palestine, Sir? And if you do, if that was your brother over there, being suppressed by Israel, and you knew that the U.S.A, of which you were a citizen and in which the white majority were being taught to fear you and the Government of which supported Israel and the media of which misrepresented the plight of the Palestinian peoples, do you think that maybe you would want to call attention to all of those problems?

DC, PM: Even if we sorted out all the problems that I have mentioned, there would still be this terrorism. I believe the root lies in the existence of this extremist ideology. I would argue an important reason so many young Muslims are drawn to it comes down to a question of identity.

TFH: I believe that you might have nailed this whole question on the head, Sir! I don’t suppose that you, yourself, have ever suffered from any kind of oppression? Being the able-bodied, upper class, well-educated white man who you are? I hesitate to make any assumptions about your mental health.

DC, PM: In the UK , some young men find it hard to identify with the traditional Islam practiced at home by their parents, whose customs can seem staid when transplanted to modern Western countries. But these young men also find it hard to identify with Britain too, because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity.

TFH: Our collective identity? What…is that? I…barely share a collective identity with my family, at the moment, so I’m not really sure how the entire country, coming as we do from a multitude of backgrounds, might share a collective identity…Could you explain further, Sir, for the equally confused readers at home?

DC, PM: Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.

TFH: What is this ‘our values’? I…am a white genderqueer FAAB non-binary individual, well-educated, middle class, well off…privileged, some might say. Just like you…but I doubt, very much, that we share similar values. Firstly, I try not to be racist! You’ve made an entire speech around policing Muslim lives. If our collective identity is fucking racist, then I choose not to be a part of that. My values are also, attempted anti-racism. There is an analogy that I would like to share with you here. Society is like a moving walkway, heading towards racism. Some people are walking along it, quite fast. These people are actively racist. These people, are you. Some people are just standing on it. They have multi-racial friends, they don’t use racist slurs, but they still benefit, if they are white, from white privilege. In order to NOT BE RACIST you must be walking fast in the opposite direction to the walkway. You must actively take part in anti-racist actions. I am trying to walk in that direction. These are my values. I don’t think they line up with your values, Mr Cameron. And yet, I am white! I have lived in the U.K my entire life! My parents vote Tory! I am not a Muslim! Neither am I a terrorist! And yet, we do not share the same values! HOW CAN THIS BE?!?!?! Also, I believe this ‘mainstream’ to be one of those strange, illusory beasts which you believe in and many others have never seen. What is it that you believe the ‘mainstream’ to which Muslims ought belong actually is? If Muslims live in Muslim communities, then Islam is the mainstream, in that area. Or is culture only valid if it’s suitably white?

DC, PM: When a white person holds objectionable views, racist views for instance, we rightly condemn them.

TFH: I might have to take a minute, Sir, to get stark raving drunk in order to be able to finish this conversation of magical folding logic. Can you hang on a minute? [A few minutes pass] OKAY! Let’s get this racism back on the road! What, exactly, do you think is the problem here? How is such a peaceable religion becoming a HOTBED OF TERRORISM? Sorry, sorry, I get loud when I’m drunk and people aren’t making any logic.

DC, PM: The problem comes when Muslims meet together and talk to each other. Internet chatrooms are virtual meeting places where attitudes are shared, strengthened and validated. In some mosques, preachers of hate can sow misinformation about the plight of Muslims elsewhere. In our communities, groups and organisations led by young, dynamic leaders promote separatism by encouraging Muslims to define themselves solely in terms of their religion. All these interactions can engender a sense of community, a substitute for what the wider society has failed to supply. Now, you might say, as long as they’re not hurting anyone, what is the problem with all this?

TFH: YES! That is exactly what I was going to say next. Although, I also planned to inform you that the Muslim community is not a ‘substitute’ for anything, it is a community. Or would you also say that the people I play badminton with are a substitute for what the wider society has failed to supply me. Should we be going on picnics with our entire neighbourhoods? Do you want to come down to Bristol for a cup of tea, Prime Minister? You haven’t met my Grandma and I feel as though her only seeing her family, her carer and her cleaner is a mere substitute for what the wider society has failed to supply.

DC, PM: Well, I’ll tell you why.

TFH: I was hoping you’d say that.

DC, PM: As evidence emerges about the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were initially influenced by what some have called ‘non-violent extremists’, and they then took those radical beliefs to the next level by embracing violence.

Whether they are violent in their means or not, we must make it impossible for the extremists to succeed. Now, for governments, there are some obvious ways we can do this. We must ban preachers of hate from coming to our countries. We must also proscribe organisations that incite terrorism against people at home and abroad. Governments must also be shrewder in dealing with those that, while not violent, are in some cases part of the problem. We need to think much harder about who it’s in the public interest to work with. Some organisations that seek to present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community are showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism.

TFH: WAIT. Are you suggesting that we, sorry, ‘we’, ought to police Muslim communities? Decide who they can and cannot have preaching in their places of worship? Not give money to certain organisations because they’re Muslim? Islam is…a gateway drug? To terrorism? Is that…Are you…

DC, PM: So we should properly judge these organisations: do they believe in universal human rights – including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government? Do they encourage integration or separation?

TFH: Mr. Cameron, Honourable Sir…DO YOU?!

DC, PM: The extremism we face is a distortion of Islam, so these arguments, in part, must be made by those within Islam. So let us give voice to those followers of Islam in our own countries – the vast, often unheard majority – who despise the extremists and their worldview. Let us engage groups that share our aspirations.

TFH: That sounds almost reasonable, actually, Sir. Are you sure you’ve thought this through? Letting Muslims speak for themselves? About an issue which concerns them? Oh wait, sorry, what was that last part again?

DC, PM: Let us engage groups that share our aspirations.

TFH: Thank fuck! I thought I’d stepped into an alternate reality where you were becoming thoughtful, and not-quite-as-racist! You’re only going to let the Muslims who agree with you have a voice. Everyone who doesn’t, I imagine, will be accused of supporting those extremists you’ve been banging on about. What else?!

DC, PM: Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism. A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality.

TFH: I’m…flabbergasted…again…You…freedom? You’re promoting…freedom? But Muslims don’t get to choose which preachers come to their places of worship? They don’t get to hang out in internet chatrooms because you’re afraid they might talk about how pissed off they are with the West? They’re not allowed money from the Government for their organisations and societies? And this is…freedom of speech, freedom of worship, equal rights? Please, continue! I am intrigued!

DC, PM: I also believe we should encourage meaningful and active participation in society, by shifting the balance of power away from the state and towards the people. That way, common purpose can be formed as people come together and work together in their neighbourhoods.

TFH: Um. Is…so…Muslims are only meaningfully participating with society if they are chilling out with the white man? Muslims hanging out in Muslim-only communities, where, y’know, they might feel, uh, safer, because there are less racist white people who think they’re all terrorists, isn’t participating in society? My Grandma barely leaves the house except for medical appointments and talks only to family, but I guess because she’s white and racist, that’s totes cool? Let’s get old people on the streets! They need to meaningfully and actively participate in society! C’mon Mabel, what do you mean you’ve had two hip replacements and keep having mini-strokes? ACTIVELY PARTICIPATE WITH SOCIETY IN A MEANINGFUL WAY, DAMMIT, for the Prime Minister has decreed it thus.

DC, PM: So, let me end with this.

TFH: You mean, you’re going to be quiet after this? Thank…thank…oh no, shit. You still run the country.

DC, PM: This terrorism is completely indiscriminate and has been thrust upon us.

TFH: Whut? I…that 9/11 thing, which targeted the Twin Towers and the Pentagon…the USAian centers of commerce and war…that was indiscriminate? I always thought whoever did it was kind of saying, um, QUIT FUCKING UP OUR COUNTRIES WITH YOUR ECONOMIC POLICIES AND WARS. But, hey! I guess I could be wrong. Thank you for joining us, Mr. Cameron. It’s been emotional.

—–

1. This a mock-interview. Just want to make this clear before I get swarmed with e-mails saying “But the PM gave no such interview!”

This is a guest post by That Fucking Hippie. That Fucking Hippy points at things That Fucking Hippy does not like and says “I don’t like that”. TFH is a FAAB genderqueer non-binary individual who is made of sheer awesomeness as you can see nice people of the olde interwebes. I’d like to show you this magical page and tell you how it still works!

Filed under: Guest Blogger, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Ranting & Raving, Religious Commentary Tagged: Activism, Colonialism, David Cameron, Guest Blogger, Inane Pop Culture References, Nincompoop-y Life Issues

The (Othered) Woman In The Veranda

Jaded — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 03:12:32 +0000

The past two weeks, the US-ian leaning feminist blogosphere has been on campaigns against the horrid and religious-state sanctioned policy on codifying when can one press charges for being ‘really’ raped; this way the State-Religious-Oligrachal system that embodies most US-ian policies, can re-define a person’s right to abortion, which in not so pleasant terms comes down to only when the State deigns the person to be ‘really’ raped¹. I don’t need caffeine in my system to conclude that this is one of the most heinous laws I’ve come across; I’d probably file it under the law that proposes to normalise a particular hijra body over another and above the one that anyone who is NotWhite needs to identify themselves and prove their ‘legitimacy’. Last week I was chatting with a self-proclaimed ‘White Feminist With More Privileges Than You Can Count’ when she said, “I’m just glad that abortion in India is legal and you don’t have to fight such basic human rights”; and these words haven’t left me. She’s not wrong, well not wholly anyway considering abortion laws out here are pretty diffident to encroaching on human rights — there are definite loopholes when it comes to trans*, hijra, ‘mentally unstable’ bodies — and that the Govt doesn’t seem to want to start an overt war over reproductive laws. Not yet anyway.

But, like most narratives seen only through the Western lens, this one is too simple too neat too easy to consume without challenging it. Under this narrative, our only challenge is access and the patriarchal control of female — queer identities get erased yet again, of course — bodies; but when we look at it theoretically, the law is in place to all protect the right of uterus-carriers at least. This assumption is all too familiar that all we have to fight against is Our Orthodox Culture, the age-old trope that if we have to be ~~patronised~~ ‘helped’ it is to ‘save the brown women from the brown men’ and that our ‘problems’ exist in this horribly restrictive frame only. Here, the Third World Woman’s body — quite literally — becomes a palimpsest to be written over, She is simply a medium through with competing discourses of Imperial Feminism and Irate Conservative-Nationalism represent their claims, yet again written over with words of other’s desires, other meanings.

If I am to go by traditional representations of women from both nationalist as well as imperial feminist perspectives, the feminine body is more or less coloured invisible, especially since both ask us to choose between the ‘woman question’ and anti-colonial discourses, dichotomising not only our (in)visibility but also lived-experience. More often than not, it’s at the intersection of race, gender, class, disabilities, caste that the Third World Woman is positioned in; and choosing one over another is almost always impossible – though it does not have to be the only alternative — and as we fail to choose, the gendered Subaltern is once again robbed of a voice. Quite predictably, one of the most theorised topics in Indian feminism by the First World is female feticide, child marriage, honour killings and dowry deaths, all in the name of furthering philanthropy; while at the same time, this system as seen as quasi-acceptable as there are no ‘real’ barriers to abortion, theoretically speaking. Barriers of access — caste and class based — social stigma that is at once local and specific most ‘female’ bodies, that follows abortion and counter-conception discourse around gets ignored as once again we laud the legal framework. Such imperial hazing-over largely ignores the sanitising space the ‘Home’ is, where the vile idea that ‘females’ and feminine-identified bodies should only be Seen And Not Heard, where the ‘Home’ in essence must remain unaffected by the Evil Scheming And Cultureless West, Untouched By Material Realities and that ‘Woman’ is the embodiment and representation of this dance that sways to supposed equal parts tradition and ‘progress’. Meanwhile, the ‘Woman’ remains ‘bound’ in the Inner Veranda or the Inner Courtyard², steps one more step toward invisibility.

Reproductive rights are close to non-existent when we look at minority bodies of Dalit or tribal women, if you add disabled to this mix, these reproductive laws get chipped away even further; when we see here too there is a State-sanctioned and controlled framework when it comes to human rights — usually funded by the West. What is interesting is how the Third World Woman is at once the object of pity, of wonder, of disgust and of ‘well-intentioned’ condescension; she simultaneously is the pitiable statistic of female feticide as well as the one with ‘free’ legal access to abortions. Meanwhile, in the ‘real’ dusty realities we are too fighting to be heard and to be visible when speaking out against sexual assault considering many rapes against caste minorities are State sanctioned. Just like E. M. Forster’s ‘memashib’s in A Passage To India, many imperial feminist constructions of the Third World Woman locate the blame in native men, in their attempts to forge alliances with the ‘colonised’ woman who at times is the center of her sexual frustration, as well as a model of kinship as both seemingly live under fairly patriarchal standards. In the words of Mrs. Callender from the novel, “The best thing one can do to a native is to let him die”, the fight over possessing and territorialising the Third World Woman is between two inherently masculine modes of discourse, which slice her body in half, both want to ‘emancipate’ her on their terms.

We need to localise our histories, forge bonds with hybrid realities and identities in order to fully and faithfully engage with the ‘Woman Question’. Neo-colonising-Empire-licking practices will simply not do.

———

1. This game can also be used to determine Who Is Really Oppressed as we all know that any form of oppression exists solely in a void and is quantifiable, no?

2. Most traditional houses have ‘women’s spaces’ in the Inner Courtyard, where there are barriers — physiological and psychological ones — between ‘women’s spaces’ and the world outside.

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Ranting & Raving, Religious Commentary Tagged: Abortion, Books I Read, Colonialism, Feminist theory, Ivory Tower, rape

The SuperBowl Is Over And The Non-Rapist Is Going To Disneyland

sexgenderbody — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 18:27:41 +0000

So, the SuperBowl came and went. They guy who did not rape two women was chosen as the MVP. I got a text message from a friend at about 5pm yesterday asking me “Packers or Steelers?” and I replied with “a bullet to my head…my team’s arch rivals or a two-time rapist. ugh.”

Given that situation, I did what any rabid fan would do – I took my family to an Italian restaurant and ate carpaccio, gnocchi & gelato until the wheel barrel was summoned. While I sipped my beverage and gorged myself on EVOO and fresh-baked bread, my spouse asked me about the game and for whom I might be cheering. She was needling me deliberately, since she knows full well and good that the wounds from my team’s exit from the playoffs were still fresh and painful. She was shocked when I told her about how I could never support a rapist, much less a two-time rapist and therefore wished that my team’s rival be the victor. She, a card-carrying member of the the-only-real-sport-is-futbol club, had no idea of the assaults by Ben Rapelisberger. I explained it to her in great detail while her eyes glazed over and she sipped her wine, pretending not to hear a word I said nor even care.

Sometime after I finished my oratory, I overheard someone at the next table say the word “rapist” and I immediately wondered if I could eat my dinner with her. In this cozy little trattoria, the bartender had posted a television in front of the bottom-shelf creme-de-menthe for those of us that needed some advertising, hokum and jingoism with our antipasto. As I excused myself from the table under the pretense of verifying the correct time in Pago Pago via collect call, I made my way to the hoi polloi amassed around the television set. The game was the spectacle I expected and dreaded, but my sole request for satisfaction was indeed there – the rapist was losing.

Looking to my right, I noticed the person whom I had made a point of eavesdropping earlier. Being an Aries male, I knew that my opinion and agreement would be foremost on her mind, so I spoke up. As it turns out, she did agreed with me that it is a crying shame that the media machine of hype, advertising, delusion and sleight-of-hand that is the SuperBowl had slapped a coat of paint on a 6’6″ 260lb two-time rapist so that they could sell cars, wireless phone service, carbonated soda, beer and insurance – all with a veneer of red, white and blue-in-the-face horseshit.

I love the NFL and many other sports. Human existence, identity and experience are measured and defined in the physical and conscious realms. The beauty and splendor of what it means to be human, alive and aware – can be expressed in action, word, thought, sound and any measurement of the senses. Sports are a beautiful example of the meeting of body and mind. This existence and this universe are filled with beauty and horror, sadness and joy, fear and calm – sports are no different and they are not exempt.

I can accept that a a pro player may turn out to be a rapist or a murderer or a thief or a torturer of animals. I can even accept that the pro players benefit from the same abuses of privilege which allow the children of elected leaders to avoid dying in the wars that their fathers vigorously pursue and profit from.

But, I don’t have to like it. I’m glad that two-time rapist lost and I can’t wait for karma to catch up to the sonofabitch. I hope his dick falls off. I hope that the rest of his born days are spent sliding from privilege while he thinks about the lives he scarred with his excess, vanity and brutality.

——-

This is a post by Arvan. I’d like to remind all you nice people of the Open Guest Posting Policy Page and how it still works.

Filed under: Postcolonial feminism, Random things, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Inane Pop Culture References, Postcolonial feminism, Super Bowl

Cataloging Gray Areas

Jaded — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 01:19:52 +0000

As a person who is born and identifies as a (dusty) lady, noticing how my ‘body’ or the space it occupies is as natural as breathing; though this space is hued coloured over and eventually pushed to the fringe. As I’m considerably tall, it would be hard to not see me, one would assume. In fact, there are so many places where I slip in and out of corners and rooms without anyone noticing, sometimes this sort of partially-cloaked-conscious invisibility surprises me too. At first, this un-seeing of my body — whether consciously done or otherwise — seemed liberating. I could spend hours in my room reading or writing before my mum or aunt would come to check in and see what I was up to, generally hours would pass before they’d notice, or at libraries I would take in the smell of old musty books without the clerks giving me cold stares. Lately, this is changing as I’m “growing up” and my “womanly assets” are becoming more evident¹, but this hasn’t affected my (in)visibility. All that has changed is a few parts of my anatomy now stand for my whole person, and I remain as faceless as ever in most public and private spaces. I was self-absorbed enough for a while to think I Was The Only One and yesterday when I heard a lady behind me yelling at a rude dude who brushed past her, “Can’t you see I’m standing here?” when it hit me that being or identifying as a feminine body is more than enough to render anyone (in)visible. Interestingly, even when I’m in NotIndia, my body is more-or-less (in)visible, but what glows is my epidermal tissue. The Feminine Body — assigned or chosen — is more or less voiceless, especially if we’re hued bodies — how else will infinite access and possession be assumed univerally? – and this is the voicelessness of a privileged, able-body. Which is exactly why hearing about the women in most psychiatric wards left me numb and horrified last week. I thought I was (in)visible partially, when these women are seen as bodies devoid of complete agency.

Like most things we do say think assert about most aspects of behaviour is mediated, specifically from Olde DoucheColonial Standards to the New Standards Of The New Empire, especially when it comes to matters of psychology, psychiatry, medicine, sexuality and everything else, so do our definitions and boundaries of ‘crazy’, ‘insane’, ‘normal’ are still incredibly Western in chalking these lines, and as young as 40ish years in establishing the Indian Association Of Clinical Psychologists. The intelligence tests we take are Weschler’s revised tests, not all of them necessairily suit the Subcontinental Mode of learning and studying, most of these tests fall apart once we question the colonial mode of education that we still follow. I remember learning poems like ‘Daffodils’ and ‘Death The Leveler’ ‘by heart’ as a child; I’d be asked to recite these poems and the grown ups in the room would look at me patronisingly while saying, “She’s such an intelligent child! And the pronunciation! Perfect pitch!”, today I push those memories away as a violent master-slave dichotomy forms whenever I see yet another kid made to perform such poetry-acts. The doting adult steps in the shoes of the Omnipresent Coloniser, rewards the child for obeying the Empire’s mode of speech; all this while the text seeps in the skin and is absorbed by the ‘body’ as it were. Which is precisely why having the access and ‘command’ over English is seen as a matter of pride, not privilege. Psychology tests that are suited to Indian sensibilities were made first in 1999 and revised in the last few years, however most don’t take this colonial intake of knowledge into account²; similarly tests that detect ‘mental’ illnesses and disorders are still crafted for a part of the globe that isn’t as hued or as caught in colonial chains as we are. If the (in)visible feminine body is cataloged as ‘crazy’ (read deviant), and even ashrams as fluffy looking as this one — I don’t know what a white lady is doing in the header — become sites of dislocating and disrobing agency and consent as ‘those crazy women don’t know what they want anyway’. And this is one of the few spots that doesn’t peddle ‘crazy’ women as prostitutes as many government hospitals do, mainly because the ashram caters to women with class and to an extent, caste privilege. Meanwhile the detongued-subaltern-woman-animal that women and other feminine identified bodies roar silences as their caste, class and religion puts them in a position open to exploitation and manipulation.

In addition, true to the thickest stereotypes about us, there are a few communities who believe in the existence of witches and tantrics — not witches as one sees and identifies in the Western world, but rather as perpetrators of evil. Leaving aside the reviews of Nice Imperial People like the REALL organisation that published articles which say “Will These People Ever Learn?“, most incisive commentary like that by Mahashveta Devi shows the extent to which mental illnesses in women are largely another form of body policing and cataloging most deviant female bodies — we don’t care if the assigned gender roles match or no, especially not after the body is assigned as the ‘crazy’ one — to confine and restrict this perceived deviancy. In spaces where worrying about ‘pesky’ things like ‘postpartum depression’ isn’t a privilege, women tend to ignore symptoms, or no one pays attention to them till it escalates to a state of ‘lunacy’ — I can hardly blame them, when one is fighting for survival, mental health isn’t an important priority or most women don’t have the access to such knowledge — and the village or the community gets ‘rid’ of them. Women with multiple ‘miscarriages’ (read abortions to get the Precious Male Child) are often misdiagnosed as ‘crazy’ or ‘barren’ and left to fend for themselves, the Municipal Psychiatric Ward in Mumbai attests this horrid excuse. Even in popular media depictions, it’s the ‘husband’ (generally from a wealthy family) who is married away to a women from a lower class/caste background than him, she is more or less tricked into this marriage or her family pawns her off — remember Koshish, Ek Asha? — and her ‘love’ and ‘dedication’ (read servitude) ‘cures’ him of his ‘mental illness’. However, when women go ‘crazy’ they’re called ‘witches’ and are disposed³.

In these intersections of ‘madness’ and ‘being woman’ are gray truths I almost didn’t want to hear last week, I wanted to run away listening to anecdotes of these women — generally from lower ‘caste’ and class backgrounds — who have been identified as ‘crazy’ for being ‘queer’ or openly identifying as ‘not-women’, a few ‘insane’ women who checked themselves in after years of abuse and other ‘certified crazies’ who were diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia’ since their childhood. There is no doubt that people with mental health issues exist, but the less class or caste privileged you are, less amount of agency you have over this decision, less choice with what happens to your (in)visible body. Women and feminine-identified are stripped of their voice, identity and consent — some are given new names too — the moment the catalog on their body reads ‘crazy’. I can’t decide what bothers me more, this manufactured (in)visibility or the fact that most times it is their male-counterparts (fathers, husbands and/or brothers) who decide ‘what is to be done about these women’. I confess, I don’t even want to know.

———

1. My great-aunts come up with the most delightfully-cringe-inducing phrases, always.

2. See Gauri Vishwanathan’s ‘Masks Of Conquests’ for more details about the ‘colonial intake of knowledge’.

3. Mahashveta Devi’s play ‘Bayen’ is an excellent example.

Filed under: Body, Postcolonial feminism, Random things, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Gender identity, Life Sucks, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

Speech Through Silences

Jaded — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:39:15 +0000

I got an invite from the Embassy Library this week, inviting me to a dinner they’re holding to celebrate Virginia Woolf’s birthday, the invite carries the stamp of the Bloomsbury Press that the Woolf’s used and there is a quote, “Arrange whatever comes your way”. Had I received this invite two years ago, I’d be squealing with enthusiasm because of the impressive logo, happy that I am a member of a library that holds such dinners — completely unaware of my privilege – I would probably even participate in the auction for the first edition pocketbooks. After all, Woolf was one of my first literary loves, I read every book she wrote in a period of six months at 18; I even presented an extremely gushy paper on her ‘stream of consciousness’ method of writing and how ‘revolutionary’ it was, considering it came from a lady, in a time ladies weren’t attributed to having many ideas or thoughts, how she situated politics of power in the Body amid other fangirly ideas. Today, I want to half-occupy that naïve girl’s space, be that ecstatic and genuinely in awe with Woolf, to not have this pesky voice in my head saying, “You know, if Woolf saw you at this dinner, she’d probably ask you to be removed out of the hall”¹; I want to unknow — in parts anyway — how her narratives construct me, always on the fringe, refusing me entry to her world. Today, were I to even forcibly re-inject ‘me’ or what ‘my body’ represents in any of Woolf’s narratives, it would be a complete waste as her construction of ‘me’ is a void, leaving gaps for Liberal Humanism to come ‘save me’. And to think a woman and a figure that set out Othering people who didn’t match her skin tone is a cult literary feminist icon drives the idea of constructing the DeTongued Third World Woman home; this Third World Woman represents a frame: one without a body or a voice.

If I were to ‘map’ this dis-voiced body, it appears everywhere from well-loved colonial texts to western feminist scholarship. If I got a paisa for the number of times any White feminist text or study references ‘the Indian dowry system’, ‘the Indonesian women working in sweat shops’ and ‘the eternally toiling Chinese farmer, who also takes the beatings of her husband with equal silence’ then I’d probably be out of ditches to feed and clothe. Most of these texts talk about oppression and inequality in predominantly First World terminology and insert the Third World woman between parentheses, marking the ‘difference’ between both in invisible neon ink; this Western Feminist theorist constructs herself as the ‘Local’ and ‘us’ as the Exotic-Global-Marginal-Animal that is brought out to make the statement stretch beyond America or Europe’s borders, theoretically speaking only, of course². Some take it a step further and go to great lengths to discuss the Devdasi traditions, bonded labour or caste-based prostitution with the feminist-as-tourist-in-an-exotic-land where the theorist exclaims, “I can’t possibly describe to you dear reader, how sad these women’s lives are! My heart gushes for them! I lived with them for about two weeks and now will go on to theorise their life though I probably took out my own interpretations, but these women won’t ever know, because people in ditches don’t read” in perhaps more culturally-appropriative language. It serves to keep the hued woman (or feminine-identifying body) under a cage of ‘difference’, this way the theorist can engage in healthy povertyporn as well as give in to their ivory-tower complex by playing the Theorist With Divine Knowledge Of Feminism That Will Save The Dusty Bodies without acknowledging the privilege it takes for anyone to see people from this anthropological distance – say, like the one I’m doing now! Privilege bites all our bums, dusty and otherwise — or to offer solutions that are theory and pitch perfect but go hollow the moment any subjectivity weighs in. Quite similar to the Dance Bar Ban of 2005 in Mumbai, in theory this ban aims to ‘liberate women’ but ends up putting sex-work, Dalit sexuality — as a big portion of bar dancers are from the Dalit community – behind stigmatised lines; making it ‘forbidden’ and impossibly ‘deviant’ in one swift blow, ignoring just how much harm it is doing to the very women it aims to ‘liberate’³. In spaces like these, the Silences of the DeTongued minority speak further and faster than any literary or theoretical mumbo-jumbo.

I’d love to live up to my reputation as a reverse-racist here and say, “These Western modes of feminism are horrid, we should burn all those books and just sit around in our ditches as Third World Women we are trained to do”, but eschewing western modes of feminisms and activism isn’t my privilege or concern. What interests this LadyBrain today is how we can take our colonially-given meanings and forms and twist it to our own cultural specifics, to make sure feminism reaches every marginalised body it has the access to or we will be re-writing yet another discourse that is designed to leave people out. Capitalism may be something Marx theorised first – only in the Eurocentric world that is – but till date, the site for production remains the bodies of dusty third world people, women in particular. More often than not, this Woman-figure becomes metonymic for the nation, her clothes become repositories of tradition, so curbing her freedom and her movement becomes synonymous with charting the body and the Nation, in any nationalist framework. Words glide glaze roam about and around her but very little voicing happens from her Body, meanwhile, the dusty realities of who ‘we’ as Third World Women live and experience step back into realms of fiction and mythology, fissuring our identities. This fissured identity fragments further under English – especially if this English term is learnt ‘by heart’ – so the colonial textual framing of this Third World Woman enters our bodies every time it is spoken aloud, every time we say words like ‘being the bottom tier of the site of production of meaning and form’4 and we absorb the narrative that is woven around us, especially in academia.

For many dusty bodies, feminism becomes another route to get tangled in Words That Are Spoken About Us and never To Us, no denying how colonial and imperial it can be – I’d rather talk about the different varied species of bullfrogs than suggest otherwise – but it doesn’t have to continue this way. Like Vandana Siva the eco-feminist says, “If we locate feminism in the Body capitalism and racism start their dislocation in, and work our way upwards, chances are we’d dismantle gender, class, caste, racial discrimination without even realizing it”. Imagine if we start with Dalit tribes, or any sexual and racial minority, how much privilege are we undoing? The Subaltern, the Third World Woman, The Marginal-Animal-Slave-Object doesn’t have to exist if we focus on the words that come out between cracks, if we see speech that comes from absences this very Third World Woman re-presents to us.

————

1. See Woolf’s Selected Letters or Diaries for her intolerance towards Indians.

2. See Gloria Steinem’s Outrageous Acts And Everyday Rebellions, Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman, Naomi Wolf’s Misconceptions, all are texts written in the late 90′s to early 10′s, so the excuse, “But they were writing in colonial times” is moot here.

3. Important to note that the feminists who supported the ban were mainstream upper-caste Hindu feminists who completely failed to see how much this law places Dalit women on a disadvantage. For more on this, see the wonderful Meenakshi Moon and Urmila Pawar’s introduction to ‘We Also Made History’.

4. This line is taken from Kristeva’s essay on Indonesian factory workers

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Religious Commentary Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Gender identity, Ivory Tower, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Postcolonial feminism

Cartographies Of Struggle

Jaded — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 23:33:46 +0000

As the eldest daughter of a Hindu family, I am expected to occupy a number of spaces that intertwine, merge and blur with the larger idea or identity that I like to believe is me, somewhere inside, that will still remain once the layers of cultural expectations, communally re-enforced values are taken away, not to mention that little role-play where I imagine for a while what would happen had colonisation not been a part of my collective history or memory. Very little of what I believe in — politically or otherwise — is designed to fit into this public persona of the Dutiful Indian Daughter™, we’re expected to be infinitely nice, obedient, subservient and perhaps more importantly, as voiceless as possible; all of this erasing and silencing goes down in the name of religion, tradition and customs. There is a clear demarcation between what is publicly acceptable and what isn’t, the moment that line is crossed, we become people like ‘that’; and everything we do reflects this invisible wall. More often than not, whatever is the ‘negative’ is seen as ‘Western’ and by extension it is bad — this list includes being independent, setting personal and bodily boundaries, speaking too much in English, wearing ‘revealing’ outfits, swearing, smoking, drinking alcohol, making ‘funny’ faces while eating ice-creams¹, sitting with one’s legs uncrossed among many other things. Most of these rules exist for bodies that identify or are read as ‘feminine’ — who cares as how people really identify themselves as long as society can can extend the chromatic heteronormativity to any body it wishes? — bodies that identify or are seen as ‘masculine’ get away with relatively more transgressions; in fact the closer they look ‘masculine’ the easier to overstep and discard boundaries. Meanwhile, ‘real’ identities swirl inside, lay hidden for the most part. God forbid you’re Queer in such a mix, then it’s just Dr. Dilbag’s guarantee to cure teh Queer out of your crotch! But I digress.

Contrary to popular opinion that ‘colonisation is over‘, we still walk move see swirl stand sleep in the DoucheColonial Daze, still go by Victorian standards², still see the image of the Woman In The Wet Sari as iconic to Bollywood cinema — an image that typically leaves the woman at the mercy of the ‘evil rain’ to not have her sari cling to her so much as to ‘make’ Randomly Lurking Dude rape or assault her, she becomes a part of Nature’s fantasy, the dude’s desire-object-animal as well as a spectacle for the viewer watching the film, washing guilt of assault completely away as it’s a part of a ‘performance’. Having dusty bodies open to assault without any kind of responsibility sounds vaguely familiar to colonisation, no? — as well as use the same excuse of ‘she shouldn’t have worn such revealing clothes, if she did then she can’t complain’ in law courts for cases of sexual assault and rape to citing that jeans on school campuses are ‘vulgar‘, we are very far away from shedding the Collectively Colonised Skin. Whether we acknowledge it or not, most of our fundamental ideas of ‘acceptable’ behaviour, sexual or otherwise, reflects Colonial ideals; there are so many who believe ‘reproduction that doesn’t produce children that we can make into Ideal Indian Citizens is of no use’. At this point my LadyBrain wonders if Blake and his supposedly ‘libertarian’ views – libertarian at the cost of his wife, as always — crafted our ‘modern’ sexual sensibility, or are we that controlled by the State. In any case, this web of colonial meanings, forms and words is the one through which we craft and project ourselves, and wrenching ourselves from such draconian standards is no easy feat³.

In such tangled ideas, as Dusty Ladies, our spaces are disciplined and marked, the body is policed and kept as controllable as possible. From such cracks of gender binaries, forced borders and chalk lines, there is a healthy proportion of lesbian and transgendered people despite the valiant — where valiant is the new repulsive – efforts to keep them out of narratives and as invisible as possible, and the lesbians that Deepa Mehta’s Fire brought out in the 90′s till date remains one of the biggest Indian Queer protests. I remember watching photos of women with placards that read, “I am a Lesbian AND an Indian” as a 10-year-old in the newspapers, wondering why is the inclusion of the word ‘Indian’ so important on that placard. Today, I don’t see nationality as inconsequential, considering an overwhelmingly popular opinion is “Such things (read Queer people) don’t happen Here. We are nice, good, traditional people. It must be happening in all those countries Over There”, clearly identifying being Queer to being UnIndian, as if Sarojini Naidu or Toru Dutt never played on homo-eroticism, ever! Especially not when speaking of the ‘Nation’ or ‘Nation-Mother’. That must be some Western Bugger’s doing, surely. Being Queer is being Other, walking and ingesting life as the Outsider because Indian society has no space for ‘such things’, if I am to go by the larger nationalist narrative. Recently, I watched a Bengali documentary, “More Than Just A Friend” on Bengali Lesbians and Genderqueer identifying people, where most of them admitted being hurled with the word ‘Lesbian’ on the streets, in a largely Begali-speaking narrative. This English word sticks out as a sore thumb, it sounded harsher than the curled Bengali consonants too. Using terms like ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’, terms that are specifically colonial in their origin, form and meaning is another step to Other the Outsider’s body and identity. I could claim to the the song-beats of Universal Sisterhood™, say that the term ‘lesbian’ is a liberating one, that being lesbian and Indian isn’t a special set of complications, then I wouldn’t live up to my reputation as a postcolonial reverse-racist now, would I?

Similar to the term ‘hijra’ that stands specifically to the caste-class-intersexed sexualities of the subcontinent– which are sometimes forced to keep the ‘tradition’ going — words like ‘lesbian’, ‘trans’, ‘genderqueer’, ‘gay’ etc don’t completely convey the dusty complications that come with these identities. Perhaps it’s time to start re-defining these terms in our languages — Urdu has a term ‘humjinsi’ which means ‘outside of gender’ — to root them in our crisscrossed hued cartography of identity and of struggle to be included in the term ‘human’. Besides, now that we have a word and a defined term in a regional language, those inane excuses that queer people exist only Over There can be cut up to pieces.

———-

1. Someone I know got reprimanded for eating ice-cream ‘seductively’ out on public. How I wish I made that up.

2. Parts of our Constitution, particularly that pertaining to sexuality will transport you back to 1821.

3. Number of Bhaba’s or Spivak’s essays do not change this reality, as much as I’d like to believe it.

Filed under: Body, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Religious Commentary Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Culture of India, Gender identity, Inane Pop Culture References, Ivory Tower, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Postcolonial feminism

On Peddling Access

Jaded — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 22:51:14 +0000

This week I heard at an international seminar, “Existing while woman is such a hard thing to do, but I do it because I have no other way out”¹. I thought of saying to this lady, “Existing while woman is indeed hard, horrible, twisted and sometimes oppression’s declassé sibling, Existing While Dusty would be more frustrating, given that we don’t even have Bodies — if I am to see any literature or not-literature that comes out of the West, Center or even Our Core — our bodies are given to us, constructed with seeds of neo-colonisation, imperialism and capitalism; they’re in a way genetically-socially engineered to ensure we always fit in the shoes of the Other, that this dust you see right under our pores is sewed on carefully so that we remain just where we were fixed so many years ago, and that sometimes I want to sit and bit by bit remove each dust particle out, unravel this debris to see what lies inside, hoping it isn’t yet mutated into something that again just furthers the idea of this epidermal tissue over another”. While I’ve begun to believe in the sacred act of Interruption©, to Not Let People Get Away When They Say Something Inanely-Appropriative, I didn’t say a thing when I heard this, mainly because this isn’t what many Progressive And Liberal-Bending People had come to hear. So if I did foil this plan, it’d foil their money’s worth, as well as make me guilty of having Marxists and other Left-Leaning people think of currency, and that is something my LadyBrain refused to take responsibility for, as there is nothing quite as heinous than having Liberals think they’re being UnLiberal or NotForward even for a second, no? But I digress.

The country they had come to discuss in terms of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ folds itself imaginary border upon border as they talked of sections unmarked by caste and practices, because ‘liberals don’t see such binary distinctions’ and the Land they spoke of had ‘potential’ and a ‘future’, nothing like it reality is, caught in a web of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. What amuses me — where amuses is the new disgust — that these Left-Leaning-Turning-Almost-Right-Liberals’ dedication to unseeing caste and ethnicity of minority tribes as one of the factors they’re kept ’backward’ as they talk yet again of which policies that will ‘change’ the life of ‘all class minorities’, defining lives of so many people, on class oppression alone, still ~~licking~~ believing Marx’s theory of the feudal-zamindari system, which was untrue then and hasn’t magically righted itself in the past 150 years. The objective of this seminar was clear, “Save the Brown people from their Brown oppressors, and let Marx and Engels decide what is To Be Done Of These People” — they were very subtle in promoting this view, I confess — what shocked me is how many people do actually believe in such dynamics, both Indian and otherwise. Before I could interrupt, one theorist started talking about reproductive labour and simultaneously I saw my braincells leave in a neat row. Words like ‘accessing bodies’, ‘egalitarian goals’, ‘globalised wombs’ swirled around us, as the theorist dabbled on his fanstastical vision of tomorrow’s reproductive labour; as if having the Orient ‘open its wombs’ is a mere co-incidence. What is interesting here (leaving the horrid racism aside) is how a Dusty Feminine Body is assumed to be limitless in a way only third-world-women’s bodies are, infinitely open and possess-able². Many doctors and scholars insist that surplus reproductive labour isn’t exploitative, especially because compensation for ‘womb’ services are rather generous, which just page one of Google proves wrong.

Another question that I can’t wrap my thoughts around is, who decides ‘surplus’ on reproductive labour? How can anyone determine that the Body has ‘x’ amount of reproductive value and everything else is surplus – is there any way of possibly determining what the body can or cannot do? — that after a ‘certain limit’ this labour or value becomes sellable. Of course, it’s pesky giants like neo-Empire that insists this ‘surplus’ value should be translated to money, and the caste-class-religion minorities do all they can, to survive for which I can never judge them. My problems step in — and are unanswered — when we begin to question the autonomy of these ‘womb-carriers’ or ‘breast-givers’ in such transactions, autonomy that legal documents do not support nor encourage. To further ‘complicate’ matters, many hijras also solicit their bodies³, as their other options are to beg for money, gatecrash weddings, make ‘profit’ from the mystique and Othering society places on them. As hijra bodies, their bodies and gender presentations don’t conform to ‘normal’ (read: chromatically heterosexual) manifestations, again questions of ‘surplus’ remain static. For instance, a hijra woman’s womb may be categorised as ‘surplus’ – because labelling people like laboratory animals is quite fun, no? — as zie doesn’t ‘need’ or has ‘no use’ of her womb, so to speak. But the ‘rates’ of hijra wombs are considerably lower because of their chromosomal anomaly, as people don’t want to ‘use outcast bodies’ if they can help it. In many cases, hijra women make less money than they would in their ‘traditional’ activities of begging and dancing. So is the ‘value’ of such a womb still ‘surplus’?

The insistence of the Left-Leaning-Right-Liberals that, ‘when people consent to certain trade activities, things like caste and religion don’t matter, only monetary gain or loss does’ disables the exploitation dusty wombs go through, precisely because the narrative of class-oppression is given importance, while consequences of being caste-religion-sexual minorities are consciously erased so that consumption of Third World Reproductive Labour can take place with a ‘placated’ conscience and ‘without any violations’. Access is peddled to us, through us, so that the guilt of erasing and privileging bodies goes invisible. How’s that for being Liberal?

——-

1. This was supposed to be ironic humour. But, all irony is lost on me when not-Dusty people start sprouting the woes of their lives, especially when they refuse to acknowledge what their Light Skin is screaming to me in neon signals, which is basically, “I’m shiny, you’re not. So I win”. Or maybe I have no sense of humour at all, which is understandable because ladies aren’t supposed to be funny anyway.

2. Ask Chandra Talapade Mohanty, she’ll explain everything.

3. “We must make use of all the body parts we can“, Jyoti a hijra said this, when asked why is she a prostitute as well a womb-subject of potential surrogacy in a CNN interview.

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Life Just Sucks, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Gender identity, Ivory Tower, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

Re-Righting Nether Roots

Jaded — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 18:14:56 +0000

Breathing as the Dusty Third Worldling on a regularly alarming basis, is a difficult space to occupy, surely; even more so if you identify as feminine, which by this time almost always needs a special mention, like a parentheses of obligation. Given the Empire’s dedication to mapping and charting such invisible spaces, boundaries and borders often make me anxious and claustrophobic. Growing up with the ‘Kargil War’ being a part of the bigger, back-ground, constant state of war with chalk lines between two supposedly different countries of the Subcontinent, hearing rumours in the school playground that America was going to invade us — soon after 9/11 — that Pakistan is going to launch an attack, that people from Over There may come in any time and take us over like they did in ‘those’ countries like Iraq and Iran, that it was indeed true when we’d hear someone’s aunt’s sister’s cousin’s maid’s mistress’s sister had fled Over There because these days patriotic-and-patriarchally-inclined people decided it’s quite okay to invade borders and bodies personally because they belong to the ‘opposing country, that ‘those’ horrid buggers — any nation we’re displeased at the moment comes in this category — are going to be the End Of Us, destroy the sanctity of a country as diverse, at parts even ‘broken’ like ours and then you’d hear sighs when people said, Leave It All To God. I’d think of all this when I’d pore over maps and atlases with my sister, tracing ‘borders’ with our fingers, see if we can stretch edges and make it a Nation Of The World, like our geography books said with, what seemed to me, utmost confidence. At the end, I’d read a paragraph that countries like India and ‘Others’ of the Subcontinent, continents like Africa are a part of the Third World or the Nether World — as my Childcraft books called it — and that such countries haven’t joined the First World, but if they ‘work harder’ and ‘do more’, one day we’d join the league of ‘developed nations’ too.

So, being a Lady born out of such Nether Roots, when I sit to write in my NotMotherTongue, I break and close while trying to form words and shapes of sounds; especially when I use this ‘harsh’ tongue English sometimes becomes to me to talk about ‘my’ roots or my experience that sees the world through dark-tinted glasses with splotches where ‘religion’, ‘culture’, ‘regional tongues’ intertwine to make what I can half-claim as ‘my world’. I was going over my earliest short stories this week and (quite predictably), they smacked of something Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie would write, with characters that had names I’d only see in such books, always in search of the ‘perfect Indian sun’. It’s only in the last six years or so that I found the knotted and restrained writing of most Dusty Ladies, echoing the truth I was feeling but could somehow never word out. A few months ago, a relative asked to read my ‘writing’ or the short stories I was working on, and when I showed it to her, as much as she wanted to support and encourage me, she said that, “Are you sure this is our reality?”, words I can’t seem to forget now; for in less than ten seconds, she’d outlined the biggest problem I face when writing out ‘my’ world: The Cultural Polemic that somehow speaks in a collective echo instead of ‘one voice’. Even while growing-up, seeing the occasional Indian contestant in whatever American game-show or later, ‘reality-show’ meant knowing ‘their’ victory was somehow compulsively caught with ours, and that any flaws that person would show on TV would be marked somewhere on our skin too. One writing advice I’ve got repeatedly — advice I specifically didn’t ask for — is that, “Forget everyone else, just write your own story” as if this ‘personal’ and the ‘public’ were indeed two neatly ordained narratives, and as if I could easily slip ‘in’ and ‘out’ of each at will, as it were. Relegating the ‘personal’ to the ‘political’ or trying the inverse isn’t an option, for Dusty Ladies — supposedly — Never Air Dirty Laundry, be it in private or public, because as it seems we don’t have any ‘dirt’ to show anyone anyway. Maybe this is connected to the idea when ladies write ‘angry’ writing, it comes from a deep and a dark space — maybe even the uterus? — and that this ‘anger’ that women have is just for attention or to join the race to become the country’s Next Best Prostitute¹. But I digress.

Constructing realities for me (and it seems many other dusty ladies²) is a problem, mainly because we can’t seem to divorce the personal from the polyphonic polemic reality we see around us. Either the words are too harsh or too far removed from the reality, because Cartesian dichotomies are quite fun to see the world with, no? Either, the words are completely censored, or the ‘fantasy or dystopia’ enters reality through tubes — as it does routinely for Mahashveta Devi — and then the stories don’t matter at all; for if it’s a fantasy, then it can’t have any bearing on our dusty backs or daily lives, of course. To voice such entangled truths, that we’re perpetrators, victims, enemies, servants and commanders of this epistemological violence, that the Empire may have crumbled — if history is to be believed at all – and we’ve created a new one in its place. As the Universal is designed to leave hued bodies like mine out, speaking from the personal is the only choice there is, at least until you ignore the censorship that sometimes runs bone deep. And after having these thoughts get past between my brain and eyes³, if any words do come out, it’s very difficult to not paint the picture like Shobha De tends to do, to show conflict that is consumable and easily resolved with a few — if at all, any — changes in the class structures; or to see the world through a single lens of ‘wholeness’ and ‘oneness’ the Indian government is always too quick to rationalise ‘diversity’ as. There are times, my friends and I wonder how would it feel to buy into the Nationalist Vision of India, to see it as a burgeoning economy which has somehow no debt to pay to the various people it oppresses — for ‘dalit’s’ are all ‘Maoists’ anyway, surely — and to enthusiastically and guilelessly cheer with Obama whenever he and the power he symobilises urges us to ‘do more’. Most times, we can do nothing beyond indulge in such empty fantasies, for we do know, that the moment the tongue starts twisting truths, it spits sharp stones edged syllables, no matter how thinly we veil it or not.

As a lady, who has always had history narrated to me, by people who do not resemble me, in a language that is not mine, many times, history feels like an interesting story someone’s weaved, but never physically real, were I to only rely on books and no narrativised accounts, of people I know and those I don’t. In such cases, I often wish I could change history, frame it as I see fit, stretch out voices that get shut in, and mostly, ‘erase’ the idea that we’re somewhere ‘down under’; so in some fiction pieces, I tried that too only to see the words didn’t sound like my tongue could ever form. It’s taken me a long time to see that I’m not a ‘point of access’ for people — familiar or otherwise — to my localised ‘history’, that constructing a reality that make me comfortable in my skin is the one that is going to dislocate someone else’s, or that I don’t need to be ‘away’ from the ‘story’ or ‘land’ or ‘soil’ that I see as ‘mine’ to build it successfully. Mostly, it’s a relief to find that Re-Righting My Roots isn’t my privilege, nor my duty, all I have to do is sound this ‘voice’ that comes as close as it can to mine, before I forget it altogether.

——–

1. Because ladies write about the time they had coitus (even consensually! Gasp!) or the time they wanted to indulge in coitus (even consensually! Gasp!) was enough for some famous dude to claim that Indian Women Writers Are Basically Doing The Prostitution Under The Name Of The Feminism. And dude’s opinions on ladywriting is never wrong, obviously.

2. Ask the ladies in the ‘Storylines‘ anthology, they’ll explain.

3. I stole this from Regina Spektor, but it’s alright because we’re both Ladies and therefore practically the same person, no?

Filed under: Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Religious Commentary Tagged: Books I Read, Colonialism, Guest Blogger, Literature, Postcolonial feminism, Writing

Sub-Merged Margins And Us

Jaded — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 01:57:18 +0000

Last week while returning a couple of books at the library, I saw the woman in the line next to mine was holding a copy of ‘Writing Caste, Writing Gender‘, a book I’ve read cover-to-cover a few times. She saw me looking at the book and started a conversation about the editor and how this was her first book on Dalit feminism. So I told her a few other names, and she marveled how I knew ‘so much’ about ‘them’ — as it turns out I’ve got ‘Privilege’ and ‘Hindu’ stamped on my forehead in invisible neon ink — because as she assumed correctly, I couldn’t possibly be ‘one of them’¹. While I smiled at her, I was cringing inwards to see how swiftly she spoke in ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ speak, forgetting the ‘We’, we forged somewhere in the middle, if the Constitution is to be believed at all. As insulting her words were — of course she ‘meant well’, after all Hindu Ladies have never really been evil, check our scriptures if you want! — this erasure of Dalit people, or the failure to acknowledge them as humans isn’t new. ‘Caste’ seems to be a word we love to forget, dropping it from our consonants as if it doesn’t matter at all, or as if the entire country just comprises of one monolithic Hindu ethnic identity. Moving across borders, an otherwise non-imperial article on Nepali bonded labour of little girls mentions the intra-generational debt, servitude and communal ‘tradition’ of gendered slavery, but yet again re-writes caste-struggle as a largely class-based one. Any time people want to play hide and seek with the term, I can only think of my aunt who calls Dalit women, ‘women like that‘ and almost wish I could ask them to pronounce the word like I do with my students when we learn new French words and phrases, just to make sure the word ‘caste’ can sound from their tongues too.

Looking beyond India’s borders, when the words ‘an Indian lady‘ are mentioned, the image that is the most popular is the Sari-Clad dusty woman, preferably looking docile and happy. Even a Dusty Lady as internationally recognised as Arundhati Roy, or rather the image² we know as ‘Ms. Roy’ caters to the same trope where beautiful bodies of spectacular South Asian women in silk and cotton saris, face framed with wispy, curly hair invites the consumer to gobble and cement the Image Of The Third World Woman as the one of Serenity, Peace and Wisdom™ and by extension further exotifying us. And in this one idealised ‘womanhood’ or ‘femininity’, Dalit or ‘lower-caste’ femininity, needless to say has no space to survive. No matter how subtle a form of body-policing is, when you erase or censor a body you censor words and voices too, the art of which Hindu society has perfected over centuries. In feminist circles and academia, talking about the Self as the Margin is a lofty trend, for occupying ‘Marginalia’ is the new PovertyPorn, where you can critique and consume your position in one easy move! While writing while woman is a hard job, writing while ‘marginal’³ is a far more lucrative option — especially if you belong to a community that does indeed squat in the mud, for nothing says ‘marginal’ like a ‘tribe’ or a ‘family’ that lived on trees or was related to Gandhi. While manufacturing this parallel universal that caters solely to the DoucheColonial Gaze of the Universal, bodies that are Othered step another foot back into oblivion. This is probably why we know of Jumpha Lahiri and not Bama today. Embodying the ‘marginal’ in writing films, in manners wise or otherwise, smacks too much of the lens filmmakers like Shekhar Kapur or Danny Boyle use, namely: See How They Squat Prettily, while guilting the audience into tears and gasps and nodding solemnly when it comes to collecting the profits. Playing this CharityCharade works only if the audience wants to see the same breakdown of seeing brown (feminine) bodies being saved from brown (masculine) bodies or any other notion that doesn’t challenge any Empires, of years past or the one we live in now.

A few years ago, when I went to Delhi the first time, like the over-excited tourist I did go to see the Taj Mahal and the tour guide spoke of length about the screens through which the Emperor’s wives looked from, the rationale behind them being somewhat similar to that of the hijab, to protect the woman from the MaleGaze and to preserve a certain amount of modesty. He used a funny word, he called it ‘women’s wall’ and since that day, any time I see any predominantly Mughal construction, I always look for that ‘women’s wall’. Recently, in many academic and theoretical discussions, this ‘marble slab’ or women’s wall builds itself up too, whenever the talk shifts to ‘those lower castes’ who always must be ‘given a solution to work with’. As upper-caste Hindu Ladies, there are quite a few systems that keep our tongues heavy, at the same time, we perpetuate the same suppression by keeping other feminine bodies and spaces as curtailed as we can, playing into the bait of embodying the victimiser, if only for a little while. Margins still exist, even if they’re constructed by feminine spaces or bodies; the ‘lower’ caste feminists need to erase their invisibility one step at a time, in spaces that are feminist and otherwise; whether we acknowledge this de-tonguing or not, it is a daily reality for them. Like the Bigger ~~Whiter~~ Universal culture sees many women of colour as ‘revolutionaries’ — or ‘terrorists’, pick one according to your mood! — as we come from ‘politically unstable countries’, the Dalit Woman is also cast as a Maoist, out to kill and destroy the precious government.

The Gendered- Subaltern, which occupies the lowest step on the ladder of humanity, is seen as a ‘submerged’ land, which will unfold and break away from the chromatic hegemony of Upper Castes and Classes, only through unraveling itself via memories, private testimonies and mainly, by re-writing and re-voicing it’s ‘voicelessness’. In this frenzy to ‘heal’ and ‘join’ spaces, people, communities — only tokens, mind you — repeatedly cast ourselves as the ‘marginal’, the detongued animal-subaltern-marginal sub-merges, bobs up and dives into silence. A few years ago, Spivak asked whether this Subaltern even has the ability to speak, today another question pops up, IF the Subaltern speaks, can we even listen anymore?

———

1. We have a lot of convenient labels for all sorts of unnecessary words. Instead of saying ‘people’ or ‘Dalit’ we just say, ‘them’; which serves as a distancing and a condescending tool, all in one.

2. This ‘image’ of Arundhati Roy has nothing to do with her as a persona, activist or an author but rather how this ‘persona’ is packaged and sold to us, engaging in (ironically) the same dichotomies her texts generally break away from.

3. ‘Marginal’ is the liberal-elite version of the Marginal –as it were — where differences are constructed so they can mark, decode bodies and cultures easily for instant consumption.

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, Caste, Chatting Jaded16 Style, Colonialism, Feminist theory, Gender identity, Inane Pop Culture References, Ivory Tower, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Postcolonial feminism

Looking For My Body

Jaded — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:51:51 +0000

It is nearly impossible to be a Dusty Lady and not have your body become a canvas of comments, critiques and opinions; specifically the one’s you didn’t ask for. You know the ones by orthodox ladies — and sometimes, not so orthodox people — who say things like, “I liked it better when your face was fuller, now you just look like a vegetable” or “You call that a chest? Pfft. How will you ever rear children with that?”¹ without lowering their voice or taking their eyes off of you, and then the next minute your head starts hurting and you think to yourself that you will never, ever again go to these silly events again, after which you get your cousin to spike your drink which makes the whole evening bearable, blissful even. Only when you next see these people again, you remember that promise you made to yourself; smack your head — figuratively, for your real hands must never do such a thing in public — and then start looking for a cousin to trick into slipping very suspicious liquids in your fruit juice, so that you can nod and let the words float by you till the time you get home and vow to never, ever go to such silly events till the next time. I don’t know what is more amusing — where amusing becomes the new migraine — that people don’t see the effect their words on the bodies they are commenting on or the fact that I’ve accepted it as a routine activity. Only when this week, some trolls made similar remarks focusing on the body alone, did I start to unravel and start re-acting to their statements and assumptions.

Bodies, dusty bodies particularly almost never speak. We are spoken for — of course colonialism still lives on! What do you mean the British left 60 years ago? — in true imperial fashion, and this tilted-equation even translates to the way we see, read and frame bodies. Last week, in a study break I ended up watching TeeVee for a bit. And just my luck, I ended up watching two minutes of Dabangg and I couldn’t help chuckling and then sobbing how this less-than-3-minutes trailer encapsulated perfectly how we view bodies. Here’s a convenient list:

Land is feminised — very subtly, I must give them that — so it’s ‘lawless’ and must be ‘disciplined’. Land becomes a deviant body and of course a dude has to ‘bring it back to its place’.
Dudely bodies are mobile. Feminine bodies move in the periphery. And this mobility is not restricted to just physical activity, it shows up in how feminine bodies are dressed too; dudes are in pants and shirts, most women in saris, bringing another form of ‘bondage’ and ‘restriction’ to play, as the sari needs to be physically and compulsively wrapped around the body².
A privileged dudely body need not respect any other bodies. Disabled or feminine, especially not if this body is a ‘criminal’. Bodily agency is for taking, obviously.
When a dudely body transgresses socially, it’s allowed and forgiven. When the dusty lady transgresses — talks back in this case — she is threatened with ‘romantic’ violence³.
If any dusty lady is portrayed as ‘mobile’ then she surely must expose her ladybits for a living — which as society routinely tells us, is a truly terrible, terrible thing to do. Because no ‘good’ dusty female body transgresses; if dusty ladies start doing vile, vulgar things like dance in public, who will cook and rear sturdy boy-children then?

As an upper-caste Hindu lady, I will never know how my identity as a ‘body’ is taken away communally, the brutal way in which Dalit bodies get erased or may never have to veil myself because of religious dictats. In that regard, my body does have privilege or a few liberties anyway; however this doesn’t change the fact that in most cases, because I’m a dusty lady, my body reads as one without agency, as the caste and social status come in later. What fascinates me today is how we’ve ‘accepted’ and mainly shuffled around the Olde DoucheColonial Standarde when it comes to keeping the feminine body free of annoying things like consent and autonomy, especially since we’re a country which claims to have ‘shed its tracts of being colonised’. But I digress.

I don’t really listen to any radio stations — dusty or otherwise — but whenever I do, in about a few minutes I have to compulsively turn it off as every other song is about ‘taking’ love (or bodies as sung by dudes or dude protagonists) and giving ‘herself’ up to the “man” or “husband” or ‘settling in her in-laws’ while every time my LadyBrain screams, “what about her?”. This isn’t to imply there are no songs where the female protagonist of the film gets to voice her point of view — such generalisations are the reason I’ve stopped reading the Times Of India — but that most narratives are built and written around the male perspective, sometimes even when it’s written by a lady! If I were to set out, figuratively or literally to ‘look for my body’ in re-presentations of our culture, say in mainstream Bollywood movies or songs, I come away with a big gaping void. The Feminine Body™ as it were, doesn’t exist in most representations. We do see a caricature of what femininity or ‘womanhood’ is supposed to be, but characters that are multi-dimensional and dynamic, radical and practical are almost never dusty ladies. This probably explains why I’ve taken to words and poems of Kamla Das, Eunice De Souza and Gauri Despande, almost like an addict, as these are the few spaces where the Body is aired and allowed to be. It may not be my body, or the way I even view the Feminine Body, femininity or even being woman, but such re-presentations reassure me that this body too, has breath and a voice.

Whenever I’ve spoken of such gendered dis-memberment of the Body to my LadyFriend, she laughs and then sighs, as for a person who claims to see the body-policing as a ‘routine’, there are many things that make me uncomfortable and livid. So then yesterday, I asked her amid a rant, “What do I do then? Ignore that I can only be at peace when I hear a few selected Ladies, who are generally white and sadly, dead? Why do I need to go read Dickinson every time I crave for The Body to come alive, or go through reading Das again, even when she says ‘he takes my body away, and I didn’t even nod my head this time?’. Do you suggest that I should learn to not think of how much this epistemological violence the ‘absent’ body undergoes?” and she told me, “You do what most women in your place did. They wrote”. And that’s what I did, in hopes that The Body isn’t voiceless, yet.

——

1. There are many variants of such body-policing, and these are just examples. The real thing is much worse. You can thank me for sparing your lobes later.

2. No, people who wears saris aren’t ‘bound’. But the way the sari functions, and the way we wear it does bring to mind restricting bodies to certain kinds of mobility. And by ‘bondage’ I didn’t mean to imply kink. Because dusty bodies never do such ‘Western’ things. Not even when you tempt them with coco-cola.

3. ‘Romantic’ violence is violence done or implied by dudes (generally) to feminine bodies because they want to woo them. No, it’s not scary at all, because they always fall in love and get married, so then violence is clearly ‘for a good motive’.

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Random things Tagged: body, Books I Read, Colonialism, Culture of India, Feminist theory, Gender identity, Life Sucks, List Making Jaded16 Style, Nincompoop-y Life Issues, Postcolonial feminism

Build Me My FatherLand

Jaded — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 09:04:28 +0000

My father is a bit of a history buff; and I get my obsession with mapping events from him. However, when it comes to seeing history as a linear pattern of events, we part ways. My idea of history is too ‘messy’ for him, as I tend to always look at Subaltern points of view — or the voices ‘history’ forgets, so to speak — while he is content with historian’s voices; and the fact that these voices come from a culture and a tradition of privilege aren’t his concern. Needless to say, we have a lot of disagreements when it comes to understanding and seeing history, even when it comes to news and current affairs. Yesterday when Azam Khan questioned how ‘integral’ a part of India Kashmir really was, my father flew into a temper, indignant at the idea that an ‘Indian’ had any doubts whatsoever regarding how much Kashmir means to us; he started talking about the Kargil war and how our ‘Motherland’ cannot be fissured any more if we want to maintain any semblance of stability. Later that evening, the same news flashed across major networks and my grandma grumbled how easy it is for people to talk about ‘borders’ and question the integrity of Kashmir without witnessing the struggle it took us to attain independence and make these ‘borders’ matter. And then she remembered one speech Nehru gave where he lamented, “what was broken up which was of the highest importance, was something very vital and that was the body of India”. The imagery both discussions conjured up was “motherland”, “mother”, “mother’s ungrateful children” — that is us — and “mother’s body” that ‘we’ve hacked up beyond recognition’. While these words swirl around me, I can’t get over the hyper-feminisation of space, as if this feminised space of imagining India as a “she” or a “her” is an entirely neutral construct and has no bearing on history whatsoever.

Swapping bodies or rather the Body with a female one, isn’t a fateful or even a convenient co-incidence. The female body bears a herstory of discipline and confinement, historically and otherwise. Victorian novels are full of such cracks, where a feminine body is kept locked up, or just kept to the house. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals talk about walking with her brother, and about constantly stopping to sit down and then eventually to walk back, bringing to bear the immediacy of physical body policing that went on under being ‘Feminine’. Moving forward a century and a continent, during the partition, Muslim and Hindu women’s bodies literally became markers of the religion or the ‘side’ the belonged to; where women were abducted, raped, assaulted and in some cases, ‘marked’ in the truest sense of the world to ‘correct’ their faith. Here, the female body is displaced, abducted, and systematically scarred to signify community, nation and state. Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers may be a ‘fictional’ re-telling of the partition, a particularly gory one that too but the issues of feminine displacement the narrative unfolds strike a little too close to home. Urvashi Butalia mentions the many barriers she faced while recording the partition for her book The Other Side Of Silence as most women of the Sikh community had repressed their memories of the communal mass-violence. These memories only re-surfaced decades later, when there was a similar Hindu-Muslim riot; what is striking is, this is a communal memory that most women had suppressed unanimously. Men’s account of the same event details violence and loss of land, women remark the loss of ‘the body’. Sadat Hassan Manto or Ismat Chughtai’s short-fiction reflects the same horrifying gendered violence that we almost never mention when we talk of the partition. Can words like “motherland” still be conceived of as words that have no specific significations, collectively and polemically?

We talk of Kashmir as the ‘glory’ and ‘crown’ of India. Many believe how ‘ugly’ the map will look if Kashmir won’t adorn it. The strict governmental control we keep over map-making and specifically regarding the ‘borders’ of Jammu and Kashmir, almost meticulously and possessively hashing the lines as if these lines will somehow duplicate themselves over other ‘borders’ too. Many leaders and voices from Kashmir have denied their role in such political cartography, while we still carry out our fantasy of ‘possessing’ Kashmir. Given how sensitive the issue of ‘borders’ is for the Indian government, whenever any government official makes a statement, almost always it’s the nationalistic rhetoric that coerces the notion ‘Kashmir is ours’. Repeatedly, India and Kashmir are converted to feminised spaces and bodies, thus possessing these spaces — even metaphorically — becomes an achievable activity. Now that this “body” is feminine, it is then easy and necessary to “map” and “mark” the body in order to discipline the inhabitants of Kashmir, so that this “marking” becomes at once visceral and metaphorical. The feminine body is known to be ‘limitless’ if we go by the traditional folklore; the ‘motherland’ isn’t ‘limitless’ geographically but the emotional and patriotic sentiment it projects to us is. There is a Toru Dutt poem that mentions the “mother is half of my sky and half of my body” and “now my body is disappearing”, as she slyly notes the nationalist anxiety the nation as a whole had over the loss of a defined border before the British left. Today, her words take a double edge, where not only are we anxious about keeping borders intact, we also actively participate in ‘capturing’ and ‘keeping’ the body in tact, be it in maps or in our minds. Leaving theoretical ramblings aside, women are seen as ‘honour’ and ‘dignity’ of the community, as the fleshy signifiers of morals and values — publicly and otherwise — and when they fail to uphold this ‘honour’, punishing and disciplining this flesh doesn’t remain just a fantasy, as we well know.

If we were to consider a FatherLand, a land defined by borders alone, by keeping in mind the Body as a masculine space, would such gendering of violence even be a question? Would we expect our FatherLand to mold to our cartographical desires? Would we think his honour is tainted by a stretch of land gone to the enemy? The truth is, in order to possess and ‘claim’ Kashmir as ours, it needs to be feminised and tamed, it has to remain bound so that we can call it ‘free’.

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Religious Commentary Tagged: Books I Read, Colonialism, Gender identity, Kashmir, Postcolonial feminism, Rants, Religious Manipulation

The Landscape Ahead: Who Will Identify The Individual?

sexgenderbody — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 21:06:18 +0000

Identity—the very essence of who we are and how we interact with others—is in the middle of a period of extraordinary tumult. The Internet and a host of new communications technologies have transformed the concept of identity and redefined our relationships to businesses, governments and constantly churning networks of friends and peers.

Growing numbers of digital natives now define themselves by their Web presence as well as their real-world presence. Indeed, they move seamlessly from their online to offline lives, and they expect to assert who they are on their own terms.

Call it the audacity of self-identity. I am whatever I say I am.

J.D. Lasica, Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing (emphasis mine)

There are several types of identity by which we all are known. The two identity types that most people are familiar with are:

Self Identity – the way one person is defined by one’s self. It is the act of a person telling a group – “This is who I am”.

Group Identity - the way one person is defined by a group of people. It is the act of a group telling a person: “This is who you are”.

Most of us employ a mixture of group identity terms as self-identity. We use language, which we did not invent, to describe who we are. Often, we did not even choose the words we use (i.e. fat, skinny, smart, gay, man, woman, tall…and so on). Labels, judgments, names, terms – all consisting of language.

It is society, in this model, that decides how ‘best’ or fully to recognize someone and define them. What are a person’s rights? Society will decide. What is good behavior in personal appearance, sexual preference, gender assignation? Society will decide. Who is good-looking? Society will decide. Basically, when the question is ‘how am I to be identified or valued?’ Society will decide.

Regarding labels, let me briefly touch on some reasons why they are unreliable, right out of the gate:

Language is a metaphor. The words we speak and print are substitutes for things that we use to communicate. The words ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ are not people. Each of us is our own self, made up of different atomic mass, independently operating, existing and thinking. We don’t even look or sound the same from one person to the next, based on differing values and sensory perceptions. ‘Gay’ or ‘straight’ mean different things to different people and they mean different things simply if the label is applied after or before two people meet for the first time.

Perceptions vary. What looks blue to me can look violet to the next person. I can look at a 30-year-old person and see someone young. My daughter can look at the same person and see someone that is ‘very old’.

My working theory is that labels are most effective when a person uses them to describe one’s self. They are much less accurate when someone is labeling another person.

None of this is new or revolutionary, but it’s important to bear in mind for this conversation.

The dynamic between self-identity and group identity is mirrored in the competition between self-determination and herd/mob behavior. This struggle has been in the mainstream conversation for over 200 years, because it played out in the struggle for democracty and liberty in the United States.

The evolution of ‘the rights of the individual’ is interesting because the topic is framed within a context that rights are granted by government, society, the group. The Declaration of Independence opened the door a crack with the following language:

all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This document is essentially a list of ways that the group (US Government) will recognize people. The Bill of Rights, furthers this assertion of primacy in the description of individuals. People exist as rights, because the document (as proxy for the group) says so. Also, the document states the manner in which people will be recognized, not just who but what.

For its time, the documents above were revolutionary. Everyone’s frame of mind was in the collective…parish, village, family, clan, tribe, kingdom and so on. They took group definitions ‘out onto the skinny branches’ where they were dangerously close to being more about the individual than the group – by asserting that in some ways the group must recognize the individual.

From there, the definition of the individual has been tested, refined and broadened to extend these rights to include blacks, indigenous peoples, women and children. As grew the rights of the individual, so grew the expectation of autonomy from one group of individuals to the next.

Looking back, I think that the biggest crack in the herd model was the First Ammendment. Free speech, freedom of assembly basically left open the barn door, eventually allowing the herd to roam free. There have been attempts to slow the exodus by trickery and fear-mongering, with lines drawn in the sand even now, on issues like gay marriage, gender rights and more.

A common thread persisted however, that when these individuals spoke up for and demanded their rights – it was over the larger group’s objections and with their permission or decree that rights were granted. The framework of the group granting the individual a definition of rights persisted. It was still about smaller groups fighting to have rights as individuals.

Over time, the framework for the conversation shifted. The model for a group demanding the rights of its individuals had been established as precedent. Namely, that individuals could wrest power from the mob. Eventually, people began to ask other questions, changing the context:

What other rights do we have?

What rights to I have?

Why am I asking for my rights from the group?

The cat is out of the bag. Not only are people asking these questions, but we are coming up with answers. Free speech gave power to the individual.

The Herd or the Individual?

The herd-mind is everyone working for the group.

The hive-mind or herd-mind can be inefficient, dishonest and manipulative. The herd-mind behavior is assumed to be a coordinate effort by many to achieve a common goal. Even if the coordination is merely a reliance on tradition and allegedly proven ways of success and the common good. The messaging of herd-mind labels and definitions of who people are and what they should be doing, comes from religion, government, advertising, entertainment and corporate culture settings. Dress this way, speak this way, think this way…and so on.

It is in reality, many people operating for the benefit of a few or for no coordinated reason. Whereas most people in the herd are working, making money, spending money, paying taxes and going along with things because it is a past-looking view. A patriarchal view of the idealized family structure imprinted upon the society at large. It is also a convenient responsibility dodge for the timid masses. As if people become clones of Sgt. Schultz “I see nothing!” becomes the mantra.

It is the status quo.

The individual mind is one person working for their own benefit.

The examples of selfish individuals, concerned only with themselves and their own successes are in everyone’s life. That is the unhealthy version. The image of a balance individual is not one propagated through history. In élite circles, certainly these minds exist, but as ‘shakers & movers’ and ‘captains of industry’. For a very select few, the whole slate of freedom and individuality have always been available.

The model of an individual naming one’s own self in one’s own terms is not a common one – until now. What has been needed is for individuals to stop defining themselves on the group’s terms.

Neither a society of only individuals or only the group can be viable.. There needs to exist a middle ground, where the health of the group and the individual are both supported. Throughout history, the balance of power was tilted toward the group. With overpopulation, starvation, disease bearing down on us, we will either choose now to find that balance or soon find ourselves without a say in the matter, as military dictatorships place us all under their thumbs ‘for our own good’, using the urgency of the world crises as justifications for their draconian dictatorships (see Bush/Cheney right after 9/11). We can look in our past and our present for some likely examples: Somalia, Ethiopia, India, Burma, China, Darfur…and that shameful list goes on.

Our societies are in crisis and status quo political and religious organizations propose that we eschew science for religion, and reject birth control for rampant breeding. Both strategies good only for swelling the ranks of poverty.

Signs of change and a way forward.

Social media is a playground for creating new identities on the fly. People are practicing the craft, the thought process, the experience, the creativity and the rewards of creating themselves in their own image – for their own reasons. Web presences in various formats abound with new ones being created daily, from pictures, email addresses, names, avatars, moving characters, sounds and operational / functional creations each serving as a new identity.

Here in the phyisical plane, we are seeing an explosion of ways that people identify themselves in their own terms and for their own reasons. In terms of sex, gender, body – definitions that have been taboo or criminal for centuries are now simply someone’s way of saying ‘this is me’. Which, is what they always have been.

Conversations in the lives of trans gender people are among the most rich and fertile examples of the choices and fluidity of self-identity.

Sex-positive groups, blogs and other social meeting points are a place for individuals to practice this new craft of individuals existing in their own terms as a healthy group that can sustain itself and its members. It is a very exciting time that we live in. We are watching the birth of a society built upon the strength of individual identity.

This is a weekly post by Arvan. Remember the Open Guest Posting Policy? It still works!

Filed under: Body, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Random things Tagged: Activism, Gender identity, Postcolonial feminism, Sexism, Transgender

Breathing As The ‘Eternal She’

Jaded — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 18:05:05 +0000

As a DustyLady who completely and absolutely hates restrictive dichotomies, more often than not I’m squeezed into a tiny box of stereotypes so tight I eventually grow claustrophobic and completely disinterested, barely an inch away from completely disengaging myself from these situations. As Women Of The Broken World, we’re supposed to be either poor, limitless, undeniably open to possession and incredibly in tune with Nature or Gramsci’s little organic intellectuals, capable of seeing through oppression enough to elevate one’s status to an Earth Goddess, imparting wisdom on every stone; while the dusty realities of who we really are conveniently effaced. Sometimes I just need to read an article like this one and hear distinctive popping sound in the vicinity of my temporal lobes and hope fruitlessly it’s going to end soon. And no, sometimes, even caffeine doesn’t help. Just reading opinions like “I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil,” makes me want to pack every book I possess, a vat of coffee and just go live in a cave till this blimp called ‘civilization’ is over. In which way can you say Assange isn’t being an arsehole excluding the one that implies cultural appropriation and tokenism is a sign for appreciation? If you can figure that one out, let me know.

Assange translated for everyone -- courtesy Of the Privilege Denying Dude

Once the urge to puke at his every word went away — by the fifth or so read — one thing that becomes clear is the cast of the ‘Eternal She’¹ that is manufactured for women from ‘broken countries’ to keep us at an exotically attainable distance. Exotic dudes are generally just pouty and exude potent sexuality, capable of letting the ‘inner beast’ — of course all exotic dudes are animals inside! Who said colonial tropes have to die anyway? — possess them into taking the WhiteWashed Lilly of a Woman for an erotic journey, but exotic ladies or the ‘Eternal She’ is always in a position of subordination. If the Dusty Lady is not in a submissive position, sexually or otherwise, then she is either Westernised or has 2 parts English ancestry, which makes her not ‘authentically’ Dusty anyway, so giving her quasi agency doesn’t upset the world order. From the ~~drugged~~ tame Auoda who is rescued by the adventurous White Man, to say Peter Walsh’s Daisy whom he leaves behind in India² as he re-forms his ties with Clarissa Dalloway, and all women that I can’t name right now, so many whose names we’ve erased away, all fit into the shoes of this ‘Eternal She’: Eternally passive, eternally waiting for the White man to rescue her, or just make her more than a minor background detail in the narrative. Her ‘ethnic’ identity comes through from her ‘native garb’ that she loses through the course of the narrative, to something more civilised as a dress or a skirt. In my mind’s eye, eventually their skin goes white as well. In this way, ‘Ethnic’ dress becomes interchangeable with tradition and essentialism, and the female body enters an unstable arena of scrutiny and meaning, till you can change ‘Ethnic’ with ‘Woman’ with ‘Body’ and come away with the same image, ready for consumption at will!

Besides the obvious problems with the ‘Eternal She’ Earth Goddess routine, what is more brutal is the complete ahistoricisation of WOC and their communities. When you place this woman as a representative for her entire ethnic class or group, it becomes quite difficult to think of the ‘Eternal She’ as a product of her specific history or circumstances, considering you just robbed her of her history. One example that comes to mind is ‘Jewel’ from Lord Jim whose name is changed from ‘Ratna’ (which means jewel in Hindi) depriving her of a visceral geo-political location. When characters like Ratna roam the pages of these colonial, cannonised texts we see them as side-steps to the Bigger, Whiter character. Is it that big a surprise when we as WOC still have to prove to the world that, why yes, we are people too? Ratna (in this text) and all other ‘Ratna’s we don’t know are brutally displaced from their land, their people — somehow they still maintain the most stereotypical qualities of their communities — till we begin to see them as isolated specimen in a Female Of The Species kind of way. So if this character undergoes any kind of gendered hardship at the hands of her community, the Bigger Whiter character can save them and still not be accused of abhorrent racism. See? It’s a win-win situation for all; and surely Ratna, whoever she was or is needed to be ‘saved’ anyway. If this ‘Eternal She’ gets the bearing of history on her ‘broken’ back, then she can hold such colonial narratives and spaces accountable for their actions, so twist her tongue till she forgets her culture and people, till she resembles the biologically made Frankenstein, devoid of past and by extension a memory.

Another trope that upsets me with this ‘Eternal She’ routine is how her story is narrated, conveniently told to fit in the agenda of the narrative — from emancipating the Third World Woman to giving a detailed Marxist solution to her problems — that though she speaks, no words come out. Reading Hosseini’s ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ left a bitter taste in my mouth precisely because I couldn’t hear her at all in the book, though the book’s protagonists are two Dusty Ladies. Reproductive labour is the one space that all such narratives love to delve into, while completely forgetting how different reproductive labour is in colonised countries. It’s not a ‘simple’ case of hiring womb services — which is in no way simple actually — it’s an un-negotiated idea that women’s bodies are up for reproductive labour. Here there is no case of ‘surplus’ labour being sold off for profits, for bodies become surplus; a new-age psychic ‘re-memberment’ of sorts, if you will. The ‘Eternal She’ cannot be placed on any Marxist axiom or any other mainstream feminist chart, fixed to be rescued or helped. Instead of urging this kind of faceless framing of bodies, it would do us good to keep our histories, our memories — collective or otherwise — and not consume our part-human-part-animal-part-clone identity of the ‘Eternal She’ on such a regular basis that ideas like ‘women from such countries have stronger and more defined characters’ are commonplace. We’re not your metaphors neither do we exist to lend you wisdom. We are not the Eternal She.

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1. I stole ‘Eternal She’ from Spivak. But we’re both feminists, so stealing is totally okay. Because what is feminism if I can’t plagiarise content from you, right?

2. Yes Daisy is essentially English, but she’s been in India for so long that she is now Dusty By Association™. Yes, I hear it’s quite contagious.

Filed under: Body, Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Culture of India, Gender identity, Ivory Tower, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

Tales This Tongue Didn’t Twist

Jaded — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 22:24:25 +0000

There is a story my father likes to tell when people ask him what his eldest daughter wants to do ‘with her life’. It seems that I was 13 and determined when I’d interrupted his important business call to say, “When I grow up, I’ll be a famous Lady Author” with hands on my hips and my eyes defiant. He says, almost always laughingly, that was the day he’d started worrying about me. Quite predictably, the writers I admired were White Ladies or Dusty Men — say hello to the child born on the brink of globalisation — and I had a grand scheme of writing a book by the time I was 25 and saying wise things like, “Oh writing is like breathing for me, I may have never consented to it, but it keeps my veins full”¹, appearing on TeeVee and inspiring little ladies everywhere to write, pretty much like Jo of Little Women, maybe with pants instead of frilly skirts though. And then, between all these juvenile fantasies, words and tongues I started opening up to, it became clear how alien and few Dusty Ladies were a part of my daily vocabulary, how little I knew of my culture and it’s deferential treatment to anyone who identified as female within its folds, or that I’d never really felt represented in words as much I could in this hued writing. It shocked me to see that I didn’t identify as strongly with Anne Eliot as much I had previously thought after reading Ismat Chughtai’s stories or that as much I suffered with Clarissa Dalloway, truth was she would probably never see beyond the hue of my epidermis tissue. This is where I stumbled into wonderful — feminine-identified — Indian writing, my world began to fill with names like mine, and people who too found themselves stuck on the fringe between being Western or Dusty, and of course the silences accompanied this writing too.

I’m still adjusting to this shift, from the open prose of George Eliot, which is ‘open’ and ‘free’ in the way only a few people in this world are allowed to be, to the heavily veiled writing of Dusty Ladies. I’m still haunted by Abburi Chaya Devi’s protagonist in ‘Sleep’ who grows up in such a restrictive environment that she doesn’t know what to do when she wants to laugh. I can replay the scene in my head when at the climax of the story she wakes up her mother to say anxiously, “Mother, I feel like laughing. The laughter is bubbling up, what shall I do?”. Years later, I realised it was a snippet of her own life where she was punished for laughing by her parents for laughing at a professor’s joke. I’ve always reveled and lost myself in Emily Dickinson’s verses — to an extent, I still do — and then I stumbled somehow to Eunice De Souza whose verses give silence quite an another underbelly altogether. This silence intrigues me as sometimes it enters my writing too, it’s something a lot of women have noticed and re-negotiated. It seems if you identify as a Lady out here, some people just cannot wait to bind you in rules and borders, asking and clearly specifying the lines you are not allowed to tread. Last year I attended a writing workshop where the speaker started with asking about things we, as the current youth demographic of India, wrote about or were sensitive to. The most common answers were politics, religion and sex. Then the speaker asked how many people would fearlessly write about these topics, and it was quite telling that most people who raised hands were dudes; most girls in the room and I shared guilty looks², for not letting that part of us out, as if we’re betraying ourselves in some strange way. Of course, then the speaker went on to explain how we should ‘break free’ from these cultural chains and just give in to writing urges with the loathsome self-assurance that only Upper Caste Hindu Dudes in India enjoy. The truth is, we can’t wipe away gender — whether assigned or taken — as if it’s a dark stain, scrub away till it lightens its way to disappearing completely; in fact the more we try to hide it, the more it reeks up the prose³.

Whenever I’ve given any such exotic — all Lady-Prose is exotic! — prose to read to my male friends, the most predictable plea they come up with is, “Maybe be a little less intense? I know you’re oppressed, or your protagonist is, but does your writing have to be this violent? It’s frankly upsetting sometimes”, which is when I explain that I didn’t give in to half of my hysteria while writing and they hastily change the topic to something less ‘dark’. This self-de-tonguing steps in earlier than we let on. In Storylines, most writers speak of this ‘looming monster’ that prevents them from broaching subversive topics, too fearful of what their parents, community and spouses will think or say. This doesn’t mean that women writers in India only talk of unicorns and babies, but they have to negotiate a lot of guilt — self-imposed and otherwise — for guarding their tongue and measuring syllables and in the privacy of their Shelved Selves, the guilt of giving in to societal expectations. Sometimes I’m amazed that we get any writing done at all considering how our time is different from dude’s concepts of time and space: it’s cyclical, lunar — Ladies remember the block of time when they did so and so household activity more than the analogue or digitalised time research, by one French Feminist says so — and excruciatingly repetitive, and that for many writers today, time and space are still just abstract concepts they don’t have possession over.

This blog turns one today, however I can safely say I’ve concealed more than I’ve bared myself. Every time I write something I’ve to carefully step over spots so as to not hurt or overtly expose who I really am, or my parent’s concept of ‘me’. For all my feminism and dedication to activism, there are a lot of things that are left unsaid and buried. Maybe one day this tongue will truly uncoil. Who knows? Today, I’m just glad for all the conversations and ideas we could initiate despite all of this.

P.S. Special thanks to Wallamazoo, Arvan and Veronica for being such kickarse friends and all the adorable guest bloggers without which this space wouldn’t have been as interactive as we want it to be.

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1. In my defense, I was 13. You can’t fault a 13 year-old for daydreaming, can you?

2. This doesn’t mean women don’t write about religion, politics or sex. Just that in that room, we definitely didn’t own up to writing about these topics even if we did.

3. The Dude who was organising races for the Next Best Prostitute will tell you a lot about the female stench.

Filed under: Books I have read, My Writing, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Random things Tagged: Books I Read, Culture of India, Feminist theory, Gender identity, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Sexism

What To Do With A Cadaver: Our Relationship With The Dead

sexgenderbody — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 05:15:32 +0000

Have you ever seen a dead human body? Some day, we will all become one.

What will your body look like when you are dead? How will it feel?

Real dead bodies are all around us. Everyone we know dies. Everyone. That face we see in the mirror, the hand we hold in the movies, the coworker we beat or who beats us for a promotion, the person serving your coffee as you read this – we will all die. Our bodies will lie still and the energy systems of chemical bonds, electricity, gravity, heat, motion and momentum will no longer constitute themselves together as a person bearing our name. It will all dissipate into other forms which themselves will be no more or less noble until they too give way to forms that follow.

Hiding from dead bodies is basically a luxury item (and a privileged one, at that).

Whether or not someone actually sees a corpse depends largely upon the society that person lives in.

In a society where people have no health care or hospitals, people die out in the open a lot more. On the side of the road, in their home, waiting for a bus, in a store, out in the woods. Poorer countries are often ravaged by war and brutality, which create corpses en masse.

All in a day’s work.

In affluent societies, we take great efforts to keep dying and dead bodies in the hospitals, away from public exposure. If someone dies out in public, an emergency vehicle comes immediately to remove the body. Any mess is cleaned up right away, leaving no trace or indication that someone – a person came to that place and died. In our anonymous societies it is very difficult to leave any trace that we ever existed at all and our death is no exception.

Any bystanders who witness a public death in such societies are encouraged to move along, forget that we saw anything and pretend as if it never happened. But we do not forget death.

There are no zombies.

The dead do not come back to life, seeking brains and bearing the disease of death. For the most part, we humans do not like to think about ourselves as a lifeless mass of rotting cells. People talk about an afterlife, ad nauseam but rare indeed is the conversation about our decomposing tissue, skin and bones.

But, we do have a fascination for death. We read about it in the news, watch movies about it, romanticizing death by telling tales of loving vampires and fearful zombies. Death registers in our minds and we do not soon forget it. Whether one witnesses the wholesale slaughter of massacres, famine, starvation, cruelty and malicious death or the occasional glimpse of a home death or accident on the side of a road – we carry that experience of death with us through our lives.

In our deepest unconsciousness, we know of death. We don’t tend to look it right in the eye – unless we are forced to. In our affluent societies, we romanticize it, fear it, cry about it, parade it as tool to manipulate others and sometimes even fuck it. In the poor cultures where death is everywhere, we walk in it, play in it, eat, drink and work knee-deep in death, all the live long day.

Life with death.

My own experiences in encountering the dead have ranged from the curious to the clinical. My father’s mother died in our house. My 8 y/o sister found her lying on the hallway floor one morning. I found a dead body once in a motel room. A woman had committed suicide after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. She took pills and died on the bathroom floor. Her skin was blue-green. I dissected cadavers while in medical training. I have assisted in an autopsy of an MP who crashed his car into a brick wall. The pathologist showed us how to find the injuries and determine the cause of death. His heart had been crushed when his chest hit the steering wheel.

A friend of mine told me of another kind of death story – one that is much more traditional. When his father died, the family chose to wash and prepare his body for burial. They are not a religious family, but they looked to a traditional means for honoring, accepting and embracing a death.

They went to the funeral home with a clean set of his clothing. The family then took to cleaning and dressing the body of this family member. He described an experience of reverence, love, care, appreciation and bonding. There they were, a whole family working away on the last moments that any of them would have him. They shared laughter, tears, silence and conversation in the tasks of preparing this person for burial. The funeral director told them that it was one of the most special things he had ever been part of and thanked them for choosing his funeral home for this event.

Oh, about that afterlife…

You may believe in an afterlife. I don’t know if there is such a thing. If I could earn money for my daughter’s college fund, I’d lay heavy cash against it though. No one living knows and that’s just the way it is for now.

One thing I will comment on is how human fear tends to drive behavior. We humans talk about the afterlife right and left. The religion business is marketed around the idea. But it strikes me as not just odd that people freely discuss the afterlife while simultaneously avoiding the topic of our own death. Go ahead, sit someone down and ask them about the afterlife. Ask them what they will look like and what they will be doing. See how long you can stretch the conversation. Stop after one hour. Then, ask them about their own death. Ask the same questions. Send me an email if you make it past 10 minutes.

What does that say about our relationship to death? I cannot say for certain that this behavior is delusional and fearful – but the resemblance is uncanny.

So, what is available to us all if we look at death, accept it, understand it and allow ourselves to knowingly be identified by it? Our human form and the lives we live are precious and special because of death. We are beautiful in all our varieties of individuality and culture. Each human being is amazing and living against all the odds of disease and hardship that make life so very fragile. Birth, life and death are the sum total of our human experience.

Why not look at the dead forms of each of us as a last chance to appreciate the fading remains of a brilliant corner of the universe? The eyes that once beamed. The lips that once uttered the words of that will only issue from one person in this entire universe. The heart that began in a mother’s womb and ran its race until the final day. The muscles, sinew and bone that carried this mass of flesh as far as they could conspire to go.

What is so frightful about that?

The world’s best looking corpse for 86 consecutive years. Only the Cubs have been this dead for longer.

P.S. This is Arvan’s weekly post. For some reason the author name isn’t showing, so I thought of making the distinction.

Filed under: Body, death, Random things Tagged: Cadaver, Death, privilege

OutSourcing Dusty Bodies

Jaded — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:04:11 +0000

Existing as a Dusty Third Worldling while being a Lady is a strange enough predicament on its own –whether it’s under Western or Oriental eyes — anyone who identifies as a Lady in this part of the world will tell you so. Before you can get your words out, she’ll tell you how unfair her life is simply because there is no Y-chromosome in her body, she will meet your stare and agree that it was too essentialist of her to fixate on that Y-chromosome but won’t let you make her feel guilty as she firmly asserts, “This is how things are here” and when you start to talk about enough trans*people in the world get discriminated over a few socially ‘unfit’ or ‘mismatched’ genes, she’ll observe wryly that it’s the System and Patriarchy that makes her so and this cold, scientific speech and facts aren’t her preferred mode of communication or discourse anyway; then she’ll go on to say how trans* bodies are policed in her community and you’ll squirm in your seat, wondering why did you ever challenge the notion that being a Dusty Third Worldling is a hard position to occupy as she points out systematically the many viscerally real forces that oppress her while now you feel guilty for pitying her even as she talks which she sees right away and starts enumerating other factors that lead you deeper in the existential quagmire this conversation has long become and you further alarm yourself by thinking if she wants some donation money out of you as you try to keep your face expressionless. Meanwhile, the ‘economically-challenged’ Dusty Lady she employs sweeps the floor beneath your feet as the two of you further dis-sect the post of the post-colonial.

Leaving creative flippancy aside, many discussions and discourses coming out and around the Third World tend to not engage with the Subaltern — who knew the Third World had its own systems to squash and oppress? — they simply talk about this bottom tier as it were. Words keep floating by, and till people from the Subaltern are addressed by someone stepping in from caste or class privilege, the Subaltern is kept mute — raise your hand if you think this is too imperial to be true — and when the Subaltern does speak, these words are too exotic, even for its Dusty counterparts. So then this detongued bottom shelf is appropriated and fixed in as many ways as possible, quite akin to a laboratory animal positioned to be experimented on. One example of this Subaltern-animal is the burgeoning female surrogacy industry in India, where we speak of the people who give out away their Wombs as helpless, agency-less creatures who don’t understand the ‘importance’ or ‘boon’ that motherhood is as she ‘pawns’ her uterus away. Not only is this image of the benevolent Third World Woman perpetuated in urban and privileged echelons of India, but quite predictably in the West as well, with an even more sinister motive. When the image of the Dusty Goddess-Mother is created for Western audiences, it creates quite ostensibly a loophole that allows people to see it as a part of our chemical make-up, where we exist to serve you and just as easily over-writes the slavery it really is, leaving the Westerner free of guilt and ready to consume bodies, like microwaveable dinners. It comes as no surprise that Indian wombs come cheap for rent, as medical tourism is quick to remind us; too quick even. While I am not at all against surrogate mothers or people who choose to have babies through IVF, I am skeptical to what extent this transaction is consensual or non-exploitative for Dusty Ladies.

Thanks to India’s lax laws when it comes to adoption and surrogacy, we’re the perfect location for OutSourcing Bodies, both in reality and in metaphor; both locally and globally. One thing that irks this LadyBrain to no extent is how many people completely dismiss surrogacy as potential exploitation by saying “It’s paid for, like a womb-service if you will. Besides it’s not like the mother is made to do 16 hours of backbreaking labour each day” as if exploitation or exploitative spaces exist only if menial labour is factored in. As a Lady who has never given birth, I cannot possibly know what are the emotions associated with birth or the attachment a mother develops for her child, I do know however arguing that “the skin tone of the child will be different from that of the mother, so she wouldn’t feel very attached to this child” is too simplistic and an effort to erase Dusty Ladies off of the scale of sentient, autonomous graph. Such myths also obscure other forms of reproductive labour, such as contracted breastfeeding — like Mahashveta Devi’s text ‘Breast Giver‘ beautifully shows — and bonded child-rearing. More often than not, the Lady offering her mammary glands or other parts of her body associated with reproduction is of a lower caste background — somehow here we aren’t too concerned with casteism in such instances — and a backward socio-economic background; giving people with means a ‘Mother’ to purchase and use. Like Devi says, contracted motherhood isn’t as simple as an exchange of money as capitalism would have us believe, she even goes as far as to say, ‘Is a Mother so cheaply made?/Not just by dropping a babe!” bringing to our notice how the label of ‘mother’ can mean a plethora of violent meanings. Even mothers of ‘normal’ households are aware that they’re womb-machines, like Gehna of Balika Vadhu contests in one of TeeVee’s most popular shows, she even walks out on her husband and child initially keeping up with the implied transaction but she’s (predictably) brought back due to insistence of a large horde of fans. As Dusty Ladies, we know how important our wombs are in society and in determining our value as ‘useful resources’, which is precisely why Indian surrogate mothers are said to be ‘more compassionate‘ as we know how skin-deep the stigma of being barren goes.

In instances as hued as these, a traditional Marxist analysis of exploitation of labour doesn’t do as Marx never really accounted for the transaction of wombs or other reproductive services, certainly never thought about Dusty Reproductive labour. For instance, many surrogate mothers give up to some extent, domestic space and work post the first trimester and the Dude of the house resumes the domestic responsibility for a while. So, who is being exploited in the case, the domestic worker who doesn’t get paid or the person renting out her reproductive service? It’s important to see Dusty politics from our perspective and more importantly from the point of view of the Subaltern — I am after all a privileged lady class and castewise — to see how far OutSourcing reconciles the notion of ‘profit’ or even ‘just compensation’ back to people who need it the most. The Breast Giver’s milk is Dusty, she squats in the muddy soil while stepping in (un)knowingly in the shoes of the Earth Goddess, and to validate such a specific position we use tools and methods of analysis that were designed to leave her out of the bargain? Explain to me once again, how this isn’t exploitation; I admit, I’d love to see you at least try.

Filed under: Books I have read, Life Just Sucks, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Ranting & Raving, Religious Commentary Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Culture of India, Feminist theory, Gender identity, Ivory Tower, Literature, Postcolonial feminism

Dusty Women And Our Spaces

Jaded — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:10:39 +0000

Yesterday I was cleaning my grandmum’s cupboard as I do every winter on her death anniversary. We’ve given most of her things away, all that is left of this amazing woman are a few clothes, a few letters and many photographs for which I cannot be thankful enough. Every year I see these frayed pictures, and she’s always standing in the kitchen, or the veranda. Some pictures show her in room where the temple is. And a few are with me, standing beside me in the balcony, pointing at something far off in the distance. I’ve seen these pictures many times, today I couldn’t help noticing how in all of her pictures she is in one corner or a room. There are just two pictures of her outside the home space, those are when she went to her native place with my grandfather. This isn’t to say she didn’t ever travel out of the house or that she was kept confined. In fact, my grandmum has visited most of India and a few countries of the Subcontinent as well. But if you just see these photographs, you’ll see a woman always in a room, in a corridor or in the veranda; never is she idly sitting either. She’s either cooking, praying or showing something to her grand-daughters. If I were to construct her life on the basis of these photographs alone, you’d see a Lady who never set foot outside the house, was preoccupied with many household chores as one would expect from any Lady of her generation — or this one too — a life that revolves around others while she is lost in one of the other corners of the house. The truth is, there are many women who didn’t enjoy the class and social privilege my grandmum had, who spent and continue to spend decades in their homes. I don’t mean to intone that this is in any way a negative thing or just blame The Evil Patriarchy for it — how I wish it were that easy! — but rather point out how some spaces are so heavily hued with this blemish called ‘gender; till even their representative counterparts share the same inscription.

These gendered spaces aren’t unique creations of this country or any specific community, rather it is a universal disease. White Women’s writing and even movement has been heavily censored and controlled by their spouses or other male-relatives — from Christina Rossetti to Sylvia Plath — isn’t exactly a secret or a revelation. However, if these women had been Dusty, this LadyBrain thinks their disembodiment would have been much more severe — here we can place responsibility on the Empire all we want! Squee! — as the idea of a Dusty Lady being anything other than an object to be gawked at is a threat to Whiteness. Earlier this year a movie called Eat Pray Love starring Julia Roberts came out and I can safely say I’ve never seen so much loosely packaged neo-colonisation since AVATAR came out. Spaces, people, cities, people all open to lead the Whitewashed tone of the film into giving us a ‘well-rounded’ spiritual journey of a woman who wants to ‘discover’ herself, predictably in adequately exotic countries. For the most part, indigenous people exist in the movie to lend insights to the Poor White Woman who is simply lost, who has lost her appetite for life and simply must appropriate other cultures ceaselessly to feel better about herself. At one point, the protagonist comes to India in search of ‘the spiritual’ — because White people come to Dusty Land for mainly two reasons leaving aside their fascination with Dusty Poor People: Either to feel closer to God in a language they don’t understand or to learn Kamasutra — and quite predictably, we see the protagonist provided with a Dusty Lady (Tulsi) who makes her realise how lucky she is, to not have parents who will marry her off like cattle. Liz enjoys the kind of mobility and agency only White people can in movies and spaces like these, where she says “Perhaps you and your husband will be happy after all” in her parting scene with Tulsi. Another similar example that comes to mind is Elizabeth Russell from Lagaan — yes Dusty films can perpetuate Whiteness too. Insert appropriate gasps here — who is allowed physical as well as social mobility because of her pearly exterior, whereas Gauri is laughed at when she talks about the power Elizabeth yields. In addition, Gauri has to contend being the Third World Earth Goddess, one who soothes the male protagonist’s wounded ego, Elizabeth can openly defy her brother’s imperial policies and is rewarded in the course of the narrative. Even in many books, Dusty or otherwise, the same claustrophobic policing of gendered spaces is upheld when it comes to further erasure of hued women. As readers we’re encouraged by the narrative to sympathise with Jane Eyre while Bertha burns in the attic, to not question when Tagore’s Dusty women remain within the home sphere while his Memsahib’s coo exotically over the ‘enchanting landscape’. Even in Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, women who identify as Western (though they may never be able to scrub off their hued epidermis) or who are Western are the one’s with any real complexity or nuances. Many Dusty Ladies are simply a litany of names, or are present in the scene just to make their lighter counterparts seem more ‘liberal’ or ‘emancipated’.

Even in literature that comes from pens of Dusty Ladies themselves, strangely we carry our confined spaces with us. In Nabneeta Dev Sen’s ‘Ami Anupam‘, as delightful and wickedly funny the prose is, women almost always speak from within rooms, from the kitchen or from the periphery of the garden; Kamla Das’s ‘LadyInsights’ in her autobiography center around her being completely still and passive — in and out of situations involving coitus even — where thoughts come to her the moment she goes catatonic; Jumpa Lahiri’s Ashima’s silences in the Namesake speak volumes at the dinner table or when she’s cooking food. The names, bodies and faces change, the voice still comes from somewhere within the structure. Like the jarokha Mughals kept their wives behind, Dusty Ladies see and perceive their realities through the gauze of the DudeCouncil’s pre-approved gendered spaces of the inner courtyard, of the back room and other places where silences each come heavily garbed in meanings, waiting to imprint or latch on to anyone who enters. Today, we still have gendered spaces, only now it seems like a unanimous ‘consensual’ action as yet again all Ladies flock in a corner at any social gathering or dinner.

What really perplexes me today is how easily many feminists or ‘gender-sensitive’ people talk about ‘Sisterhood’ without missing a beat, without pausing to consider how much privilege it takes to say “We’re all sisters in a struggle” when the ‘struggle’ we face as Dusty Ladies is more than just a fable of the Third World, it’s our lived reality. Instead of toting around Sisterhood as some kind of badge for identifying as a Lady, it would be wiser of said feminists and ’gender-sensitive people to make it a goal to aspire toward to: Sans appropriation or patronising Dusty People. I know it will be hard — for where will all the well-meaning neo-colonising-Empire-hugging-people do now? Think of deconstruction as your new hobby and it will just come to you.

Filed under: Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Books I Read, Colonialism, Culture of India, Gender identity, Literature, Optimism Jaded16 Style, Postcolonial feminism, Rants

Musings From The Empire

Jaded — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 11:29:32 +0000

So this Link Fest is two weeks late. In my defense, I was super busy, away on weekends and lazy the days I wasn’t away. But this means there are more links while I try to drag my lazyarse into writing more regularly. I’d like to remind you nice People from the Olde Interwebes that we have an open guest-posting policy here if that sort of thing interests you. Also, this time around in the link fest, why don’t you drop in a few links from your own blog or anyone else’s writing that you enjoyed reading? This way sharing becomes truly sexay!

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1. Kuzhali Manickavel in oh little flower. see you lover. see your chittu kannil pattu pattu sikki konda lover (which has got to be the best title for a post yet) talks about povertyporn, Previlege Denying Dudes among other things:

I think we can all agree that orphans with AIDS have enough issues to deal with without having to also deal with multiple abandonment issues from wealthy temp caregivers from other countries who are hoping to do something exotic and charitable for their summer holidays. And so I nobly offer this alternative. Voluntourists, come take care of me. I live in third world country, hence the third world name of this third world blog. I don’t have any major diseases but almost all my acquaintances have had diseases like typhoid, malaria, dengue fever, jaundice, chikungunya, cholera and one person even has TB! So you can come down here and wash my clothes and cook for me and buy me stuff (you can’t touch me though) and I won’t talk in English at all, we can communicate using sign language to make your experience more authentic. Then you can give me lots of money and you can go back home and tell everyone you were a caregiver for a third world ghetto vampire in India. That’s way haut, trust me because it’s like poverty porn and Twilight mixed together. Massive street cred.

2. The Indian Homemaker discusses how patriarchy percolates in women’s friendships and makes dichotomies between then in A Woman is Not A Woman’s Worst Enemy. Patriarchy is :

Traditionally women’s partners are discouraged from seeing their marriages and their wives as important parts of their lives. It’s common for men to be shamed and taunted for showing they care for their wives or marriages.Jokes like ‘Shadi ke laddu, jo khaye wo pachtaye‘, or taunts like Joru ka gulaam are common. And this when women must move in among near strangers and depend on the spouse’s support to feel at home in a new environment.

Traditionally men’s partners are brought up to believe that finding a partner and ‘keeping him’ is their only goal in life. The education they receive, how they talk (softly), walk, look , respond to questions (always respectfully), the careers they choose (no jobs that require traveling) – everything is permitted keeping the comfort and approval of a future husband and his family in mind. Women are brought up to seek approval.

3. Desi Girl talks poignantly and beautifully about the plight of Desi Parents when their children abandon them and how they are stuck between two lands effectively in Desi Mothers: Lost In Translation :

In two years the couple had a baby; MIL immediately took off from work to take care of the baby and the new mother. Once the new mother was out of childbed things started to change, MIL’s work load increased, she was the one responsible for the baby and gradually two more children followed along with new dramas. Once bahu had a baby she became edgy, she started having problems with everything MIL did and she would not let her husband be alone with his parents even for a minute. Their son started acting up, yelling and screaming at the mother and often times not talking to the parents at all for days. After second child bahu asked MIL to give up her job for good as she wanted to work. MIL took it as a retirement bonus to be with the grand kids. Managing two homes across the border and three children under five became a full time job for MIL. Gradually the quarrels became so frequent that MIL felt she was a prisoner in her own home. It is then she asked her husband to move out.

4. Sharanya Manivannan’s poem Parampara among others in Softblow :

I willed my bleeding to
coincide with full moons.
It’s easier for them to
attribute my lunacy that way.
Rumour has it that I do my
sprinkling at the stroke of
midnight. I do it in the late
afternoon, after the radio
switches to news. I don’t
care for news.

5. KJB rebuts an article by Rita Banerjee in Locating Gandhi where she smooths out more than a few factual mistakes :

One of the best quotes I ever read about Gandhiji and women came from his great grandson Tushar Gandhi -

“I would say that Bapu was a champion of gender equality. But the moral strength that he imputes to women has an almost inborn, genetic complexion to it, which bears little or no relation to the exploitation, humiliation and hardship that has been women’s lot, historically speaking. Bapu remained fixed on the symbolism of the Mother. His was a passive picture of womanhood, of a person who undoubtedly possessed freedom but functioned within narrow parametres [sic] and defined boundaries.”

Filed under: Musings From The Empire, Postcolonial feminism, Random things Tagged: Culture of India, Literature, Musings From The Empire, Postcolonial feminism

Re-Presenting Absences

Jaded — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 19:24:07 +0000

As a simple defense of the well-being of my lobes, I tend to not interact with people who believe Culture is one monolithic and omnipresent entity, that somehow it is the particular duty of the “youth” to uphold it and keep it intact, for reasons that sound eerily close to neo-colonisation and imperialism. However, there is only so much a DustyLady can do to avoid such people; especially if this person is the key-note speaker to one of her seminars, avoiding him becomes a tad difficult. This speaker spoke of ‘urban myths’ that the ‘young people of today’ perpetuate and one of them is Lesbianism, supposedly. Of course, he didn’t say it that bluntly; he slid it in as one wry statement and I almost missed it — by the time he got to this part, I was already sleeping — but my friend nudged me and whispered “This dude thinks Indian lesbians are a Western myth, like the moon landing or something” and I couldn’t help laughing and then sighing, because not only is this opinion too popular, it has some inkling of truth as well. Lesbianism is seen as a Disease Those White Hippy Buggers From The 80′s Left Behind In India though authors like Devdutt Patnaik have shown traces of queer identities and characters in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist folklore and mythology. As I’ve discussed earlier, Indian lesbians are made invisible, consciously written off as non-existent to uphold patriarchy, despite a plethora of virtual and real spaces like Gaysi and other LGBTQI forums thrive with many people who identify as lesbian. We’re somehow relatively tolerant of gay men and ‘hijras exist on the fringes of gender and cities anyway’, so we don’t engage with them unless we absolutely have to. But the idea that the SariClad Ladies Of Our Traditional Country™ may have feelings for other people who identify as women, collective gasps and cries can be heard.

It’s interesting to see how such visible absences are re-presented in media and even in everyday conversations, however homophobic they may be, such re-presentations do exist. One of the most famous and early lesbian stories is Ismat Chughtai’s Lhiaf which remains shrouded in ambiguity and innuendos throughout, which still cost the author a court trial for obscenity. Today when we study the text, we try to see beyond the draconian control in the writing and see queer-relations within an airless patriarchal setting; we can almost tolerate it, as long as we contain the author and her work into walls of ‘fiction’ and ignore other contemporary queer artists. Amruta Patil‘s graphic novel ‘Kari’ that voices a lesbian protagonist is seen as an ‘experimental’ novel at best. The nuanced drawings and references in the book — she mentions reading Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry a few times, the Body is shown as a site of navigation of memories and events, exercising agency at all times — are obscured under readings like “look how angry her art is!” or “did you see the pretty colours?” and we deliberately unsee the presence of a queer protagonist. It gets to me when voices of people are rendered voiceless by religion or patriarchy, just because it doesn’t fit in the six by four-foot box that people are supposed to fit in, and those who don’t, we paint them invisible. This making invisible is done under the waving flag of religion, where we firmly state that “our scriptures do not depict such lifestyles ever!”, again ignoring a myth in the Mahabharata that talks of two lady priests who make a son out of the earth, mud and soil pouring life into him, modern re-readings show hints of a queer family model in function; however short the verses describing their life may have been.

Such visible absences become even more painful when we move away to more heteronormative narratives, or stories that fold under the ‘bigger’ causes — Uteruses aren’t big enough causes on their own, of course! — to other side-stories that we just never talk about. Every once in a while the word ‘Kashmir’, ‘Arundhati Roy’, ‘Separatist Movement’ peppers conversation as it is one of the most debated issues right now, passionately arguing for or against the ‘self-determination’ of India’s so-called pride, but when it comes to hearing voices from Kashmir, we turn to stone and pretend Kashmir is voiceless, open to be conquered and possessed. This is why it takes voices like the rapper MC Kash from Kashmir to make songs like ‘I Protest’ that reaches airwaves, ripe for ready consumption, the voice is a heavily hued with hip-hop traditions and sounds so far to what we can localise as ‘Kashmiri’ or even Indian¹, so that we can empathise and sympathise from a cultural distance, see the film before our eyes, nod and stop the song when we want to, without really engaging with the visceral nightmare Kashmir today is. Another recent re-presentation of absence is having Hrithik Roshan play a quadriplegic magician, despite being able-bodied in his real life; we applaud his role for ‘portraying disability’ while obscuring the disability, by prioritising a healthy able-bodied person over zie’s disabled or ‘broken’ counterpart.

And even the disease is made aesthetic as the trailer too shows, it’s a romanticised and a lofty notion — something viewers can only enjoy in theatre halls, not that different from Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s (the filmmaker of Guzzarish) earlier film ‘Black’ where he portrays blindness, autism and a few other disorders using the same formula of aestheticism and using able-bodies and able-bodied narratives to almost make ‘real’ disability a myth and a grotesque reality. Once again, we represent absences without ever completely engaging them — not that far away from Colonialism are we?

When these ‘absences’ are interrogated, what emerges out is a society or culture that painfully and willingly turns its head away from ‘pressing issues’; but we can’t use this Society as a scapegoat either — even though I may really want to — as even this ‘wilful’ apolitical bliss is political. It’s a choice we’ve somehow collectively taken in the past few years. We’d much rather ‘proceed forward’ to being one of the nations that are regarded as a part of the First World than interrupt and question these absences. Of course the ‘inconsequential’ muffles coming out of the Invisible — spaces and people alike — are further devoiced by keeping them firmly absent. But who cares about people Progress, Change and Development can’t see anyway?

—-

1. I don’t mean to intone MC Kash is any less ‘Indian’ because he doesn’t sound like one, in his song, or chooses to engage with a Western form of music, but rather that his accent is used to Other him. Also, he’d probably sound Dusty if there were any hip-hop songs that sounded like they haven’t come out of the same New York neighbourhood.

Filed under: Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Ranting & Raving, Religious Commentary Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Culture of India, disability, Feminist theory, Literature, Nincompoop-y Life Issues, Postcolonial feminism

Trigger Warning?

sexgenderbody — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:43:37 +0000

I was recently asked to provide trigger warnings for some images and links we posted on the SexGenderBody Tumblr and Twitter feeds.

This is a topic that I have struggled with since we started the site. We don’t get many requests for this, but when we do – I take stock of what we are doing, how it might impact people, where we are accountable (or want to be) and what choices we make as we go forward. So, I thought I would share my thoughts and open it up for discussion.

I take such requests very seriously. SGB is designed to honor the terms of our individual identities and that is no easy thing to do.

We cover a lot of ground at SGB: anything to do with sex, gender, body. This includes not only the first things you might consider regarding these topics, but everything else. Including but not limited to: sexuality, asexuality, age, gender, queer, body mods, tattoos, kink, vanilla, celibacy, non-monogamy, relationships, family, friendship, politics, feminism, rights, advocacy, activism and a zillion other expressions and conversations about the human body.

Every person on the planet has their own definition and terms that they use to define their own sex, gender & body. Some of these are common and some are less so, making for a very large (almost 7 billion) sample of variations. Additionally, we each have our own ideas of what we like / don’t like / are attracted to / offended by. These too come in common and uncommon variations.

Many of us are survivors of assault and when we read about such things it can be very difficult for us. We may wish to avoid such things or at least know that they’re coming, so that we can manage it in some way. Even if someone is not a survivor per se, they may simply wish to avoid such topics for some other reason. Certainly, the desire for such advance notice is a reasonable request. So, on one hand I would like to honor that request. That’s one element of this issue.

The elusive standard.

My struggle is in addressing a pair of considerations.

One problem is: what is offensive? What words or image qualify as “offensive” in their mere existence?

The next issue is: What is it to cause offense? What actions does a writer take that are by definition – an offense?

Do we give a trigger warning for “likely“ or “possible” offense? What determines “likely” or even “majority“?

Not to be callous in any way, but I have yet to find something that deals with sex, gender, body that does not run the risk of offending someone, somewhere. With so many people, so many cultures, histories, languages, conventions and beliefs – finding a majority view of “offensive” or “inoffensive” worldwide, is a very hard thing to do (much less actually prove). It seems to my untrained eye that location and language determine whether something is considered “offensive” more than content or anything else.

A picture of Charles Atlas on a beach with no shirt will not get many people fired…

but a picture of a “topless” woman on her vacation could very easily do so.

Even the word “topless” is more slanted toward the meaning of a woman with no shirt. If a man goes topless in many places, it is of no concern to anyone but him. He might be called “shirt less”, but not very often “topless”. While at the same time, a woman would be arrested for doing so. Again, this varies from one culture to the next.

We have readers and contributors from across the globe, so the question of what is “offensive” becomes even more difficult to answer. In each of our own personal lives and the communities we touch, we get a sense of what we think is a generally accepted definition of “offensive”.

That said, it seems like a “no-brainer” that some things should come with a warning: murder, rape, torture. But, a “no-brainer” it is not.

The newspapers are full of murder stories daily. If murder is offensive, then the NY Times should have a trigger warning on the top of the front page. But, that would be silly because we are used to reading about murder, mass murder, genocide, starvation, disease, famine, queer bashing, kidnapping and a slew of awful things done by humans to other humans.

When it comes to rape, that’s in the papers, too. Rape is as foul a thing as there is on this planet. There are very few absolutes and rape is not one of them. Some people have healthy sexual fantasy and role play that involves consenting adults in a rape scenario. Their voices are no less valid than the rape survivor who cannot stand the mention of the word. They are just different people with different identities. The site will deny neither identity nor the expression of those identities. They are not the same thing and neither one is better or worse.

In a very similar comparison, torture and kink can have vastly different expressions of identity and reactions. The key distinction is the presence or absence of consent.

The issue at hand is that however any one person identifies themselves, they are welcome to share their identity here.

Is a warning just a warning?

When someone places a “NSFW” tag on a picture of a naked human, what is communicated? It seems to mean “if your job will fire you for looking at naked people, then don’t look at this”. This usually includes pictures of sex or genitals, but some companies have different levels of acceptable flesh that they are interested in their employees looking at.

But, that’s not all it means. Some companies apply that directive at such topics as politics, (competing) religion, workers’ organizing, education, media, human rights and many more. Depending on the culture of any websurfer, the list of “NSFW” can include a wide selection.

Language and images are not neutral – they carry a great deal of meaning besides the initial, immediate usage would indicate. For example, when “NSFW” is used concerning nudity or sex, it also reinforces messages regarding the value of people based on their gender, sex and race. So, when we throw “NSFW” up, we run the very real risk of reinforcing a truckload of patriarchal value statements on whether or not

Do we consider the impact of our content?

Yes. We think about it – a lot. We consider whether or not we are reinforcing value statements about someone’s body being devalued based on some gender, sex, body term of devaluation as well as whether or not it may be “offensive”. We think about a great number of considerations. Hopefully, we find voices that are less frequently heard, perspectives that are unique and assumptions that are largely ignored to be examined.

Are we responsible for people’s emotions?

No. This is not a flippant or dismissive response. It’s a fact. The only person’s emotions that any of us are responsible for are our own. Many cultures and individuals believe and agree with each other that they are either responsible for other people’s emotions or that others are responsible for theirs. I am not talking about a physical contact, actions, drugging / poisoning or some physical act that leads to an emotional / physical response. I am talking about words and images. In this case, all the agreement in the world is nothing more than agreement and it is still not a fact. A person may believe that other people are responsible for zie’s emotions, but zie still chooses zie’s emotions inside the context of those beliefs and not because of any actual causality between one human and the next via words or images.

We are responsible for our own words and if we are preaching hatred, intolerance, lies, cruelty and encouraging the rights of others, then there are laws to protect society from such cruelties. That having been said, I also know from personal experience that words can be very upsetting. In the case of blogs, we have a simple recourse - close the browser window.

What is “acting with responsibility?”.

This can also be defined from person to person, based on their values. The values of this site are to foster an open discussion on sex, gender, body that allows people to articulate the terms of their own identity and to hear / accept others as they articulate theirs.

In the end, I suggest that when people read something upsetting (here or elsewhere) – don’t read that site again, or for a while, etc. Put some space between one’s self and that information / image that caused the upset. That is good, rational behavior. The world is full of things that will upset each and every one of us. We share this world together and it is unreasonable to think that we can ask the world to stop talking about things that upset us or to label them on our behalf. We need to find a way to accept that by moving about in the world (and on the Internet), we will bump into things we don’t like very much.

If we don’t like what we see, we can move away from it. I completely understand that. It’s a smart thing to do. I don’t want anyone to be upset and I don’t want anyone to think that we are deliberately ignoring their concerns. To the contrary, but we are also hosting conversations about the entirety of human corporeal form and identity and nobody is going to like or be comfortable with all aspects of those conversations.

If you don’t like something that you see here or on our other outlets, I apologize. I wish that it was not so. If you need to leave our site and never return for any reason, then I completely understand and honestly, sincerely wish you to be happy. If you have to tell everyone you know that you think our site is the worst possible thing on the planet, I fully support your right to say and believe that. I won’t agree with you of course, but you won’t get any argument from me about you doing what you choose. I am with Voltaire on this one:

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.

If you are at work and you could get in trouble for looking at nekkid humans, then don’t surf sites with the name “SexGenderBody” in the title. Even if it’s not ours, I could win most bets by guessing that you’d see some flesh. Do your spreadsheets and check us out when you get home. That is a good, responsible thing to do on your part and only you control which pages you view. We don’t have pop-ups, spam or any of that stuff. You can only see our site by coming here of your own volition.

So, to conclude: I leave it up the each contributor on the site to include or omit trigger warnings. I will not be adding very many trigger warnings. I don’t want to say never, but I am having a hard time figuring out just exactly where. Other writers on the site may include them on every post and that is fine with me. It is their choice, and I am very proud to support that.

-arvan

Filed under: Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Random things Tagged: Activism, Gender identity, Postcolonial feminism, rape, Sex-positive movement, Sexism, Sexual assault

On Treasuring Difference

Jaded — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:39:05 +0000

This weekend I went away to another city to see an old friend and to mainly get away from a busy routine. As always, it seemed I didn’t feel like I left Mumbai back at all, it seemed everywhere I went, a tiny part of the city followed me around with the same malls, coffee houses and other signs that point out Capitalisation is here to stay. I can’t say I was too surprised when I heard the discussions on Difference out here too, after all they are quite commonplace in Mumbai, where being cosmopolitan is more important than being political, where we cherish Difference with a fetish. It’s funny — where funny is the new painful — how strong the rhetoric of “let’s celebrate our differences” can be heard from so many corners of our country, especially in the light of the ‘Kashmir Issue’ India is trying so hard to placate. I remember my geography texts having at least once chapter on ‘Unity In Diversity’ in any given year, where we’d learn that though we come from so many languages, born into a myriad of dialects and religions, we ultimately have to live with each other in peace and solidarity. On a Glocal platform, as Dusty People of one of the “biggest democracies in the world”, Difference is a buzzword to use for us — and in our place if you don’t remember a politically ~~convenient~~ correct term — where Difference becomes A Good Thing, within parentheses of course. Lately even in feminist discussions the idea of a ‘politics of Love’ is a recurring one, and I can say it does sound appealing at first, to love through discrepancies and asimilarity. But when we probe a little further into this uber vague concept of ‘Difference’, big gaping cracks show up that cannot be ignored.

A few weeks ago my friend got teased for ‘not knowing her own mother tongue’ by people in her art class, easily glossing over the fact that she spent most of her childhood in a pro-BJP State and any language except Hindi was somehow detongued from her colloquial dictionary. “We pride in the fact that as a nation, we have such a vibrant tradition of languages and dialects” is one of the most repeated sentences in public and private conversations, nationalist debates and any other type of discourse that wants to reduce reality to the most simple and ‘rational’ factors. While we repeat these hollow phrases, the MNS makes yet another discriminatory policy based on Difference in language. Difference is a word I’ve always hated, even as a child I couldn’t understand why this Difference wouldn’t let me play with dudes my age, why I had to take care of the way I walked and not place blame on some dudes who looked at me in a ‘weird’ manner or why I couldn’t share my Childcraft books with my cook’s daughter, though we both took equal delight in reading. Today Difference is the reason I get invited to conferences that want to perpetuate ‘diversity’ by giving voices which are from multilingual Hindu backgrounds, as this time around Difference isn’t too noticeable or too marked as being born with LadyBits is. Now, if I were from the lower shelf of Difference, at a disadvantage because of caste and gender, then these words wouldn’t have the luxury of being so flippant about these boundaries. While you can rightly argue that this Difference isn’t the one theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Chandra Talapade Mohanty urge us to celebrate; in fact these walls cage us further in like laboratory animals, each of us bearing sophisticated labels of ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Scheduled Caste/Tribe’ to the extent that these few words decide our levels of access in society, I can’t ignore how difficult cherishing plurality can be.

As a DustyLady, in most feminist discourse — virtual or otherwise — I’m supposed to slip into the shoes of the ‘Third World Woman’ who must be adequately exotic yet knowledgeable, whose Difference should be as heavily marked as possible, otherwise the degree of just how ‘Indian’ or ‘Colonised’ I am is under scrutiny. My friend and I joke sometimes that we should carry portable swarms of flies around our faces so that people see us as “dusty” right away and we don’t waste any time explaining (yet again!) how we speak English though we come from a ‘backward country’ or that we don’t huddle in ditches as a fun activity. More often than not, a composite — singular — Third World Lady is produced or re-presented to uphold the age-old authorising signature of Western Liberal Humanist Intentions of Greater Good™. In such a space, my ‘exoticness’ or ‘plural ethnic identity’ becomes the reason for Othering hued skins. Almost like pesky anthropologists, ethnicity now enters a place where it can be exposed of ‘untruthfulness’, a grading scale that decides how ‘x’ amount of authentic fervour the voice carries. In other safe(er) spaces, ethnicity or caste privilege (or lack thereof) becomes the raison d’ être for entry and access. There is a book club my mum goes to which is exclusively for Hindu ladies where they re-interpret old scriptures and religious texts; the reason they believe in catering to a certain selective audience is “Other people don’t understand us”. Such exclusionary actions justify shutting people out because of ‘difference’ and the need to keep the borders drawn; to make sure demarcations exist.

As much as I’d prefer to have a ‘Politics of Love’ wash over us in bell hookisan fashion, the truth is such lines-marks-borders do more harm than good. One one hand ethnic identities have to be preserved before they drown into the bigger flow of being ‘Universal’ or ‘Global’; at the same time ethnicity and the very plurality can work as a trap. A popular opinion is that social memory is lodged in the Body, so to preserve it, the Body has to become a site of re-location. As always, dislocated and diasporic bodies of postcolonial people don’t have the privilege of re-locating the Self or the Body, of undressing one ethnic layer of skin over another or of problematising which ‘hued difference’ takes preference over the other. All we do today is clutch on to this Elusive Difference, hoping that somehow it becomes a ticket out of further appropriation or objectification.

Filed under: Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Random things, Religious Commentary Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Colonialism, Culture of India, Feminist theory, Gender identity, Postcolonial feminism

Dislocating Discourses; Rewriting Boundaries

Jaded — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 11:44:39 +0000

This weekend my parents’ friends are visiting some obscure little village in some Dusty Part of India, because they apparently have a house there — and they didn’t even know it! — and the lovely Government wants to run it down and make a road connecting two villages, all in the name of progress that almost never reaches people it professes to help. After dinner, while cleaning up my Mum wondered out loud how different their lives would have been, had they lived in that house instead of this one in Mumbai. My sister and my cook began to imagine hilarious scenarios of stereotypical country life, of menial labour — because bonded labour is the new funny, People Of The Olde Interwebes — and suddenly she exclaimed, “They would speak a different Gujarati! And their English would sound like something out of a bad nightmare. I’m so glad they live here”. The idea that language and dialect would be different troubled her, especially that the family’s English wouldn’t be as ‘polished’ as it is now; their past-present-futures are different when this new dialect is injected in. The friends in question started marking the differences, he said he wouldn’t have been a corporate lawyer, she wouldn’t have been able to work and so on. Through this dinner I was stuck with a bitter taste in my mouth thinking how easily the Other is always an intruder, a predator, dangerous; it unsettles this well-established center. The Lady in question concluded, “We could be better people living here. Can you imagine us there? We would have probably been zamindars or something” and many other UnEntertaining variants of playing the Desi Coloniser. It’s always easy to claim superiority if you’ve already relegated a space that unbelongs and is unhinged as different, for this is what difference boils down to, an excuse to claim, possess and punish in one swift act¹.

Long after this dinner, I was still thinking of the above conversation. I couldn’t put down exactly what unsettled me so deeply, it was only when I started rereading Spivak’s essay ‘Can The Subaltern Speak?’ did the pieces fit together. At one point she writes, “The Coloniser constructs himself as he constructs the colony”; like did this couple. While imagining this alternative life, their present life was romanticised and their rural “would-have’s” were conspicuously ‘backward’, which is precisely why selling away that house didn’t pose a big problem to them. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only instance I’ve heard or experienced where more ‘developed’ or narratives of ‘progress’ take center stage. This week my friend put up a picture of me on Facebook dressed in traditional Indian clothes. A few people who know me from my blog and know this friend found it startling that someone who speaks so ‘freely’ and ‘liberally’ on many issues can choose to bend down tradition’s way. These are times when my ethnic identity or just wearing ‘ethnic’ dress becomes interchangeable with embodying tradition and essentialism; the alternative is to completely disengage with this identity and embrace being ~~‘universal’~~ Western. What’s the problem with e-showing and choosing to dapple in my ethnicity — out here as a Hindu woman of a certain caste and class privilege – you say? More often than not, I’m perceived as someone who doesn’t necessarily have a voice or someone who is touting for my country’s oft spoken about ‘traditionalism’. Anyone who knows me, even a little bit, knows about my strong distaste for patriarchy. Somehow in traditional clothes, the ‘me’ they saw was a different one, and immediately an inferior one. One acquaintance even wrote to me asking if everything was okay because as she put it, “This is so out of character for you!”. And on Facebook, a tiny argument broke out assessing if I’ve changed or not; while no one talks to me just about me. This is another advantage of being Othered — as DustyLadies, this is a common experience for us — words fly all about you, but you will never be able to catch them. Like the figure of Sati (the widow who has to put herself on her husband’s pyre and be immolated with him), there are only two readings of DustyLadies. Either some ‘progressive’ Westerner is telling us how terrible our lives are, because we follow certain traditions or our Male Counterparts who speak for us (like they did in the case of Sati) and almost always showcase tradition as a voluntary act. Meanwhile the woman on the pyre burns.

Disgruntled by the thin demarcation between ‘ethnic’ and ‘orthodox’ I turned to a few close activists who know the rural realities of my country better than I do to see if there was anything of credit in this construction at all. While they understood and sympathised with my situation when speaking in a Glocal context, they referred to Indian rural women as “ourselves undressed” more than once. While this binary is troubling, damaging and too narrow, this is a very common opinion; it perhaps even has a dash of truth lodged somewhere between the Othering and imperialism. But once again, voices are being dubbed as ‘tongue-dumb’, as ‘backwater verses’ and god knows what else — I had tuned out of the conversation long before this part — these voices are repeatedly disallowed of agency and choice. My school teacher always talked of dislocating discourses from their words and environment, to see them empirically in order to arrive at a fair conclusion. One Dalit activist I know is trying to get her anthology of short stories published, and is often rejected because it doesn’t ‘tap into the tribal sentiment’ of Dalit women. Because her voice is different, because it cannot be localised to this part of this state, coming from this dialect and community, it’s declared ‘inauthentic’. Another example is of the poet Kamla Das who salaciously wrote her autobiography in order to earn much needed money, later she interrogates her fault at leaving out or exaggerating certain parts of her life, blaming the ruthless form of the autobiography for expecting a specific role out of her, and then she blames herself for giving in. Because, once again, her relationship with truth is a controversial one, her poems are rejected as ‘authentic’ experience of an Indian Woman. We still want to adhere to the well-formed Indian Doll Figurine in the words of Torru Dutt or Sarojini Naidu.

Voices of Dusty People — Dusty Ladies in particular — undergo a lot of censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, and in this case to dislocating such voices becomes a double bind, not only you strip them of any ethnicity, authenticity and value, they’re reduced to muffled words that easily slip into the ‘Ourselves Undressed’ bind that the West is waiting to devour. I’m not arguing that anyone who identifies themselves primarily through their ethnic persona is wrong but rather I am more than what I dress, how I speak. When you ‘other’ me, immediately cast me two steps below everyone else because of my difference, dislocated from my soil, all you will find is an empty shell of ‘me’.

——

1. See the brief history of colonisation circa start of time till present date.

Filed under: Books I have read, Life Just Sucks, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Random things, Religious Commentary Tagged: Books I Read, Colonialism, Culture of India, Feminist theory, Gender identity, Postcolonial feminism

When Freedoms Are Threatened, #1

wallamazoo — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:10:19 +0000

There comes a time in American politics where the Politicians take certain movements too far. Such as the banning of Gays in the military. Or the attempts to ban Firearms, and Violent Video Games (in California, no less.) What they try to make a point in, is that by taking away violence in video games, or removing firearms from the public vendors, you suddenly remove any possible means for anyone to get their hands soaking in blood. But this is wrong, you see. The Criminals who attain these weapons when otherwise being unable to purchase them publicly, will be even more dangerous. They will have access to all sorts of underground arms that common folk have no idea where to even begin to look. And asking around is suspicious… And then about video games? Jeez, kids at such a young age will just go outside and play “war” with each other. Beat each other up, use play-guns to “shoot” each other, and imagine maiming and bleeding out. So, what’s the point? I will say that Politicians like those who try and pass these movements are either a) trying to make a name for themselves(McCarthy vs. Communism), or b) just plain idiotic, or c) both.

Just Plain Idiotic

In the last 10 years, during of which the 8 that President Bush took office, the Senate believed it had more power than the congress originally allowed them, and took great advantage of it. The Evidence? Passing several business related laws to send jobs from various established companies, such as Boeing, overseas to countries – mainly China. Or let’s say, the Patriot Act, which is only two or three steps away from Martial Law, and the lawful invasion of privacy. (Quick Point: The Patriot Act, under a different name in the 60′s and 70′s, allowed police officers to mine data from civilian activity to weed out Communists, Hippies, and Gays.)

In short, the banning of Video Games and Firearms break the first two Constitutional Amendments: 1, and 2. These are the most common of debated Amendments, the Right to Free Expression, and the Right to Bear Arms.

The Right to Free Expression: Video Game makers aren’t elves who live in a tree who make diabolical games in order to enslave people and rack up money using obscene prices (unless you’re EA.) They are a group of Artists and Programmers who are dedicated to a common goal, of expressing their creations. This is especially true when they make games that often look controversial, or appeal to very small groups of cult-style fans. There are of course other supposed “repercussions,” such as:

violent games cause addiction
violent games cause crimes
violent games cause social deviancy

We should remember that Parents, Lawmakers, and Idiots, will always target things they don’t like FIRST. The sad incident of Columbine was first blamed utterly on Doom, one of the original First Person Shooters of that time. Yet, the game “Doom” didn’t show up in the diaries of the two assailants of this massacre. What was pointed out by them was bullying, teasing, and the inability to act or think in classrooms. One was a great manipulator, and the other was a great follower. Neither really had social lives. Therefore, it must be blamed on Video Games. (See Above, “Causes Social Deviancy,” “Causes Crime.”)

Allow me to explain a little bit about addictions. Normally, they happen on their own. Whether or not someone has an addiction, is mostly based on their “Addictive Nature.” Sexual Addicts, Drug Addicts, and Alcohol Addicts (or Game Addicts) aren’t really there for the thrill, excitement, or pleasure… rather for the power, need, and habitual nature. Game addicts aren’t any different from the other Addicts. They seek out something, anything to defeat boredom, and the normal every-day beat of life. Often this happens without realizing that this escape becomes their every-day life.

Let me point something out about the Grand Theft Auto games. On news broadcasts, in the Senate discussions, and in talk shows, GTA has been demonized for allowing the player to kill Police Officers, beat Hookers with baseball bats, and run various people over without any cause of belief that you’ve done anything wrong. Well, it’s true! One, it’s a video game! The moment you walk in front of a Police Officer and point a gun at him, think of two things. 1. You probably don’t know how to handle a real firearm, as opposed to your high-rank in the video game. 2. The Police Officer knows how to not only use their sidearm, but WILL fire on you if he/she is threatened. Next, people need to think about what they’re saying. Many Politicians sleep with Hookers, but then deny them their rights on the Senate Floor, but then give them the same “humane leniency” in video games. This is kinda screwed up, honestly. While there isn’t any reason for beating up anyone, the game simply “allows” this to happen. Meaning, there are no missions where you actually are forced to beat up hookers. The same style of Postal 2, is that you are “allowed” to do as you wish. I once went through a GTA game WITHOUT beating up a hooker. Let’s look at it another way. Hookers in Television: Bad, nasty women who hear all the good talk, and sell that information. They’re dirty, full of diseases, and you should probably stay away from them. Hookers in Movies: Bad nasty women who like being dominated by their Pimp, and do so voluntarily. In the case they don’t like it, the movie becomes based around them in a freedom-seeking hour fest that somehow introduces a Manly Man to do a lot of fighting. Yet, in GTA, Hookers just act like Hookers IRL: they want you to get “in the mood” so you buy their services. So, you can either buy their services, deny their services, or in GTA, run them over with a Semi-Truck at full speed. For more on this topic, you can watch this video.

Who’s The Tool Now?

Much like adolescent Emos, guns are highly misunderstood. They are often confused as being “violent” and “dangerous.” Yes, they are. However, like many tools of trade, anything able to craft or destroy is considered dangerous. Take for example, how many workers lose fingers or entire limbs due to the Industrial Machine, in comparison to actual gun related injuries or death. It’s actually rather small! Next, take Automobile deaths per year, and compare them to gun deaths! Another gap! Yet Automobiles, for their sincere advantages over (gasp!) walking, they will never be banned. Since guns don’t necessarily have a practical use in modern society — not here, here, here or even here! — (sigh) nevermind. The above videos are a reminder that it isn’t always the criminal who has the firearms. But let me tell you that these videos would be far more gruesome and tragic if those same firearms were banned. Across the United States, the most common gun-related robberies are related to Pizza-Deliverers, who are lured to the robbers home… or taxi drivers. California has been very hard-pressed to ban firearms to the public, but considering how many well-armed gangs there are in California, I would say that it would be very stupid to disarm the innocent half

Another point that I have, is that many news casters and journalists very rarely look at Police Reports given to the public for common knowledge, which will show the actual numbers recorded with Firearm Involvement with Crimes, as opposed to “trusting” private research institutes. The number of true gun-related assaults are very small, even in urban cities. Well, this is because of how expensive Firearms are in a Gun-Shop, and surprisingly (or not so) more expensive in the underground trades. Not to mention, a knife is more deadly than a gun in many aspects. For one, a bullet when penetrating a soft target may only cause a small entrance wound, and an exit wound of only an inch or so more wide (With the exception of Hollow-Points, and some larger rounds/cartridges.) Most deaths related to gunfire are mostly due to shock and bleed-outs, but they can actually be treated easily. Knives on the other hand are much more mortal. Do your own research, I don’t really need to explain the idea of metal slowly rubbing against skin, as opposed to a bullet that shoots faster than the blink of an eye.

Rather than outright banning the Private Trade and Selling of Firearms, why not just require a permit that requires schooling and training? If a Police Officer must pass a training exam to earn his 9mm, why shouldn’t common folk like us? And I don’t strictly mean being able to hit the bulls’ eye at least 3 of 50 shots, I mean proper handling and knowledge. You know, the most important aspects of knowing when, where, how, and why to use a firearm for personal protection. If someone doesn’t know how to properly store their weapons away from children, or even the robbers themselves, they shouldn’t own a weapon of any kind. In fact, either your child should never know you have a firearm, or you should at least have the common sense to teach them about how dangerous the weapon is. No, wait, always educate everyone about dangerous tools that you have around your home. Or, just don’t own one.

My main point is, that the Gov’t should have the option to regulate weapon trade as far as difficulty goes, but remember that there will always be someone with a much more easy way to sell a gun – even if it were illegal. Just look at how well banning Marijuana has improved in keeping it away from people. Heh, not very well. The Gov’t also needs to constantly remember just why Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wanted the public to own firearms. Personal Defense, yes, but more importantly so the public can rise up and have a fighting chance against any possible dictatorship. It is so that a Militia can defend their country in time of dire need, should it arise, instead of running away. If many of our own revolutionaries ran away from conflict, then Britain may still be in control of America, Canada, India, and Africa with their colonies. Perhaps even China would be a part of their growing colonization? Oh wait, guns were only a small portion of the American Revolution. Barely anyone remembers all the talk, paperwork, and community aid that actually won-over the war for America, and all that jazz.

Filed under: Life Just Sucks, Radicalism, Random things, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Colonialism, Gender identity, Inane Pop Culture References, Rants, video games

“Dad, I’ve Been Meaning To Ask You: What Is A Slut?”

sexgenderbody — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:26:26 +0000

Image courtesy of Married to the Sea

I was in the kitchen with our cis-gendered daughter of nine years age, a few weeks back. She was eating her dinner and I was reading a post by Rabbit White. Striking up a conversation, she asks me:

“Dad, I’ve been meaning to ask you – What’s a ‘slut’?”

Now, there’s an ice breaker. Of the many lessons my daughter teaches me ongoingly, perhaps the most noticeable is that the critical moments in our lives and relationships show up with no notice, no plan and no place to hide. Intimacy, relatedness and honesty don’t pussyfoot around.

So, I closed the laptop and looked at her. I told her that it is an insult used on women, by people that want women to feel small, shameful and bad for being human and to tell women that they are not good. I said that all mammals have sex and that humans are mammals. I told her that in many cultures, women are insulted for a great many things, treated like property and denied the right to enjoy many (if not all) freedoms that men have.

I said that I know some women who embrace the word themselves, to claim the right to enjoy their own lives as their own terms.

I said that the word, like any attempt at insult is only powerful if a person believes that other people define that person. I told her that if someone insults her, the insult is not important. What is important is that she learn the many ways of dealing with insults.

Most of all, I informed her that no word will ever be who she is, whether spoken by an enemy or a friend. The definition of who she is, will always be a gift that only she can give herself. No one – NO one on this earth can ever take that away from her.

I shared this on twitter because I thought it was pretty funny. (Almost as funny as the time I used the word “orgasm” in front of her and had to explain that…to my bride’s amusement at my lump-headedness). One person suggest that I bail on the explanation and pass it off to “mommy”. That’s not really my style, though. I’ve embraced digging myself out of awkward moments for a host of reasons.

- I am this girl’s male relationship role model. If I don’t show her what an honest conversation from a man looks like, who will?

- We don’t have that kind of marriage. We don’t run from those moments. We cherish them because they will never come again. Each one is special. Rather than treat them as disasters to avoid, we hold them into our lives and share them with each other as gifts of the tales of our lives alone and together.

- In those awkward, uncomfortable moments between people – there is an opportunity for honesty and relatedness. That awkwardness catches us off guard because we don’t have scripted platitudes, prejudices, reactions, assumptions. These moments are gifts and they startle us with their immediacy, their undeniable presence and the sudden awareness that we not alone. Someone else is with us, right now and they are as aware of us as we are of them.

- I like to spare my acts of cowardice for real emergencies (like NOT wearing my Bears jersey to a Packers home game…again)

As I considered and digested the event and that comment, I ventured back to a familiar train of thought for me: The gift of a girl child. We only have one, so she’s the first, oldest, best, etc. I have been able to interrupt, notice and replace my own internal sexist assumptions and behaviors – every day for the last 10 years. I am fairly certain that I would have passed on and glossed over a great deal of sexism to a boy child, given the knowledge of what I’ve learned since she was born. Being married to an amazing feminist woman as I am, I’m sure these things would still have come up. But, she’s a real gift – as I believe all girl children (whether cis or trans) are.

In face of the selective abortions of girl fetuses, abandoned girl babies & murdered female infants, she is a miracle. Given what a scheming revolutionary I am, working against the kyriarchy / patriarchy / military / religious / financial model of oppression as I am…she is going to be more than capable of carrying on the family business.

Any gender is a good gender to me. That said, the presence of this girl child is the most amazing and powerful gift of all my born days. She is the promise of a life that will not be dull - ever.

Filed under: Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Random things Tagged: daughter, gender, Gender identity, parenting, Postcolonial feminism

Slipping Out Of Gendered Spaces

Jaded — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 20:04:56 +0000

Earlier this week I was discussing Wuthering Heights with my class of 11th graders. We were talking about how demarcations, borders and outlines of the Body are continuously challenged in the text, in such a way that the Body becomes a hybrid of human and beast. At one point Catherine exclaims, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He is always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being”, here the Body possesses masculine and feminine spaces simultaneously, which by extension ‘queers’ love, as well as allows the Body to dislocate itself from chronic heteronormativity. I was about to explain how the text polices this ‘abnormal’ body when one student asked me to stop. He couldn’t reconcile the idea that a woman’s body can embody and imprint from her lover’s body and identity. He didn’t like that she remained autonomous of her identity while slipping into Heathcliff’s body (figuratively speaking) at will. The way he put it, “Why isn’t she happy with the space she’s given?”. As trans-phobic his statement was, I could understand where it stemmed from. Even when all I wanted to do was stop the class right there and start discussing transphobia, probably also whack him on the head¹ with Gender Trouble till he saw how pungent his assumption was and all I could do was try to not start ranting and fuming, I could see why he thought this way. As a culture, we’re told to see transsexuals and intersex people as the Other, we’re encouraged when we participate in erasing people who identify as trans; so my student’s reaction was hardly out of the ordinary. What stuck with me is how ‘natural’ it was for my student to say what he said, without even pausing to consider that androgyny or ‘gender bending’ may go beyond people who are ‘born that way’.

I don’t really remember how I finished the class, I do remember mulling over what my student said even as I was waiting on the platform for my train to come. Before I knew it, I’m standing in front of the ‘Ladies Compartment’ marked with blue stripes and for a second I couldn’t move. We gender our spaces wherever and whenever possible, and this differently ‘marked’ compartment proved just that. The reason behind keeping separate train compartments for Ladies and Dudes is to keep groping and sexual harassment to the minimum — by employing the Cure The Disease And Spare The Symptom Method — but the boundaries are clear. If I look like a Lady, I must travel in the space alloted to me or I shouldn’t complain when I get assaulted when I travel by the ‘general’ compartment; questions whether I identify as a Lady are quite easily ignored. At social gatherings and dinner parties, somehow unanimously women use separate rooms or tables, where even the talk is gendered. The Dudes sit sipping alcohol and talking of ‘dudely’ things finance, architecture, politics — I don’t even know what else as I’m generally in the opposite section — whereas Ladies talk about children, husbands, cooking, chores and ungrateful relatives. As a child I used to think that men must speak a different language altogether as they seldom talked to girls or women. This isn’t to say the two genders never interact socially — we’re one of the biggest populations on the planet, so some social intercourse is happening somewhere — but that in the presence of these different spaces, we don’t step out of our boundaries. I am often uncomfortable in such gendered tables or rooms as the manufactured differences always get to me; not because I’m uneasy in my prescribed gender but because there is no scope for me to transgress if I ever wanted to. Media and social traditions foster the idea that a person who identifies as queer or trans is a laughing-stock. In fact most encounters with hijras leave people giggling, because opinions like “can you imagine being a man down there! It’s so sad and funny!” are too commonplace. In fact, “Bobby Darling” is used as a slur to discourage boys from showing their effeminacy, effectively silencing the woman behind this slur as a body who independently chose her trans identity.

Under feminist discourse, the Body is a site of production and consumption of knowledge, power and desire; but the question that concerns us today is which Body is allowed this power. As Butler beautifully points out in Bodies That Matter, often there is a selective politics involved in normalising cis, White and thin bodies over any other Body. Which is precisely why trans and intersex bodies are seen as strangely asexual or overtly promiscuous – pick one according to the ruling party’s policy as well as your mood! — the goal is to render them ‘alien’, Other, ‘different’, to ‘expose their limitations’. This way, passing invasive laws, abusing trans people, trafficking trans bodies becomes quite easy. Earlier this month the Indian government passed a bill that offers hijras a monthly pension as a way of ‘helping’ them, since “most eunuchs live in misery” as Jagdish Mamgain of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is quoted by the Belfast Telegraph as saying. While there is no denying that most hijras and trans people of other lesser known communities do live in abject poverty, that they are often discriminated against because of their ‘ill-fitting body’ or that they belong to an ‘inferior caste’, I don’t see how this bill is any way beneficial to them. My problem with this bill doesn’t lie in the idea that ‘those filthy hijras get money for being deformed!’ like many right-winged arseholes do, but rather how even here the trans body is under scrutiny and policing. According to this bill, “a eunuch must submit a medical certificate from a government hospital as proof of no longer having male genitalia, as well as an affidavit proclaiming they are not married and proof of age” to qualify for this meager pension. So hijras whose male appendages have been forcibly castrated — to keep the fine tradition of the hijra community alive — in other words, people who identify as transwomen are allowed this pension. What about transmen? Or people who aren’t born intersex, but choose to transition or identify as trans? Apparently, their bodies don’t matter under the Law’s consideration. We’re again ensnared into normalising and preferring one type of trans body over another.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of such a law or any gendered space is how any category — hijra, woman, man — are placed in a metonymic process where people who fall under specified categories — transwomen, heterosexual woman and man — become interchangeable till the point that any individual who deviates from this norm is punished and coloured invisible. While I am indeed happy for people who will benefit from this bill I can’t ignore the Othered Bodies, left to be oppressed and disposed as the stronger hegemonic narrative wills them to be. And out from these policed and controlled laws comes yet another gendered space where the Body is yet again sculpted, chained and punished till it mutates to socially sanctioned norms while the metaphorical body within it is long dead.

—-

1. Not really, as I oppose any kind of violence — especially the violent kind — but I did get furious for a few minutes.

Filed under: Books I have read, Postcolonial feminism, Random things, Ranting & Raving Tagged: Activism, Books I Read, Culture of India, Feminist theory, Postcolonial feminism, Teaching, Transgender

Caught Between Colonised Consonants

Jaded — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 22:36:27 +0000

These last few weeks have been rather stressful for me, so by the time I get home, I’m more than exhausted, crash on my sofa and let the TeeVee numb my LadyLobes into oblivion for a while. This is around the time my grandmother’s favourite soaps are aired and we’ve developed a routine between the two of us. I help her to get dinner going (in my limited capacities as a non-cook) and she fills me in to whatever I missed in the first 10 minutes of the show. Over these weeks, I have now become familiar with the plotlines of more than seven shows, each predictably depicting middle to upper middle class Hindu households, where the protagonist, generally a virtuous woman battling a myriad of obstacles from abusive husbands to nosy-parker neighbours, this Indian Daughter In Law suffers and endures rather vapidly, always quoting from some scripture or following orders to a T. This is TeeVee land after all, where women go to bed in saris and with their full make-up on, where the idea of a ‘diverse’ family is a multilingual Hindu family — what? have a non-sterotypical Muslim or a Christian character? Never! The TeeVee roars back — and where always, good triumphs over evil, after about every 200 episodes. Of course, when I’m watching these soaps with my grandma these quips are contained in my LadyBrain as she genuinely enjoys these shows. Plus if you saw her blushing the way she does when a Dude and a Lady on the screen brush hands, you’ll get it too.

Yesterday I noticed something interesting in one of these shows; it reminded me of my other grandmum that I lost a few years ago. One of the senior actors on the show had the exact expression as my grandmum would get when I’d start rambling too quickly in English; like many MudSquatters she too could read and write English quite well. Though she was the one who introduced me to Austen and the Brontës; when it came to sounding the syllables she fell short. The actor on-screen was making an exaggerated effort to understand her grandson as the child blathered on in the Coloniser’s tongue – with the American accent no less!—when this grandma of mine looks at me and teases me, “Isn’t this like us? You and your English books, always ranting in that language! Going so fast that no one can even understand! God knows what you must be saying in that language about us!”. While my parents and I converse in English relatively easily, for my grandma this language remains an unexplained pun, as she correctly guesses our tones but the words and their exact meaning escape her. For her not learning English remains her way to defy the Empire, while today I believe in smashing the Empire from within, using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house and caught in the middle are people from my mum’s generation who learnt English to get jobs and status. My parents have a more intimate relationship with our Mother Tongue than I do, for English remains a means to an end for them, as for me English is one of my primary expressions; it’s alienating, frustrating and yet the only tongue I can dream in. The debate of ‘Whose English Is It Really?’ can continue forever. What interests me today how this language is used to cut, to prod, to break into and make room for new dichotomies to absorb. I’ve noticed how my tone changes when I’m speaking to my friends or students, while at home even my English shifts its tenor, it slows down. Here, a few words from my Mother Tongue blend in, the way I leave questions open is again extremely specific for my community, the language flows more smoothly till the transition to speaking entirely in my Mother Tongue has been made. Sometimes when my Mum and I don’t want to let the maid know we’re talking about something that concerns her, we shift unanimously and almost subconsciously to English and then step right out again in a similar manner. Here, English is used to show and maintain class and to an extent caste supremacy whether we’re aware of it or not.

Till date, English remains as a ‘gift’ and ‘boon’ granted by the coloniser to us dusty colonised people, we don’t own it, command it, manipulate it. We swim in, forth and sideways at best; which only further cements the concepts of ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds. Even while re-reading canonical texts as Austen, Dickens or T.S. Eliot and many others¹ from this camp, the one thing I’m constantly looking in this dance of conversations between the Master and the Slave is where is the end of one and the exact beginning of another’s border. As to tell the history of the Other is to expose and ‘deal’ with the limit’s of one’s own history; this is where the obsession with defining the Empire and its Colonies becomes visible as our bodies are written upon as ritually as possible by narratives of literature and media. Similarly, the Mother Tongue is heavily washed with English till all is left are Anglo-Saxon and Nordic sounding syllables in the place of well-woven langues that are birthed from Sanskrit. And this ‘conflict’ is of a Lady who belongs to the upper echelons of society — caste and class wise — where the negotiation between my Mother Tongue and English doesn’t seem as violent as it really is, as ~~erasure~~ ‘progress’ that comes packaged in Disney and Beatrix Potter books masks the harshness. People who aren’t as privileged as I, who are forced to learn English and are told that their ‘worth’ will increase to that of a human only if they speak in English, their transitions into our Collectively Colonised Skin is much more painful and gory². And the few who scrape pieces of themselves from this system, they are rejected later for ‘poor English’ pronunciation, ill-formed grammar regardless of what their potential is.

Here all previous notions of ‘dismantling’ or breaking the Empire go void, for words and sounds that were never yours to begin with cannot be called back or used to ‘talk back’ to and dreams of a ‘new tongue’ are long gone. What remains are shards of sounds, words, alphabets with which the POC has to start building a ground that has to move out of its previous feminised sphere — hence available and penetrable — and work to a negotiation that rests with neither the colonised nor the coloniser, the concept of ‘nation’ has to be reconciled with neither the subjugator nor the subjugated skins is the solution to interrupt and resist imperial narratives. The question that haunts me today is just how far do we force ourselves to indicate this ‘OtherLand’? All I can hope so, this defining doesn’t result in a pompous show of appropriation and tokenism. Like in the case of my two grandmothers, English has to move beyond a forced ventriloquism, a dubbing of tongues or all we will be left with will be tongue dumb tongues³.

——

1. Ask F. R. Leavis. If you can resist puking at the Wikipedia page that is.

2. Most first-generation learners of English are people from ‘backward’ castes and indigenous tribes.

3. Thank you Nourbese Philip!

Filed under: Books I have read, Life Just Sucks, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Ranting & Raving, Religious Commentary Tagged: Books I Read, Culture of India, Feminist theory, Gender identity, Inane Pop Culture References, Ivory Tower, Literature, Postcolonial feminism, Western culture

Musings From The Empire

Jaded — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 17:48:14 +0000

Busy week as usual, I’m still coping with the post-Diwali hangover, meeting gazillion family members and of course, asking them for blessings and taking money for it*. Meanwhile, the Indian Blogosphere — regular as a clock! — reminds me just why I have such a long way to go before growing up. Because sticking to deadlines isn’t something I have down yet. Ahem. Apologies for being a week late, on with the LinkFest now!

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1. Sue from Sunny Days talks about contraception rather pragmatically and sensitively in Let’s Talk About Contraception.

Makes you think, doesn’t it? Two very close friends of mine have had to choose to terminate pregnancies because they were unplanned. Both were already mothers, and money, family concerns, health and other obligations helped them make this impossible choice. They know they did what they needed to, but one mourns a lost child… it doesn’t seem to make a difference whether you lose your baby by miscarriage or an MTP, the pain of losing a baby is something you seem to carry for ever.

A third dearly loved friend has just made the decision and there’s nothing I can bring myself to say except to wish her the strength and courage she needs. I know a woman who has kept the ultrasound scans of the baby she had to abort because those are the only ‘pictures’ she’ll ever have of this child of hers that she wanted so badly. I know a woman who closes her eyes and sees the daughter she never gave birth to, growing older in her head.

2. Dalit poet Meena Kandasamy’s poem Mohandas Karamchand takes a critical look at Gandhi

“Generations to come will scarcely
believe that such a one as this walked
the earth in flesh and blood.”
—Albert Einstein

Who? Who? Who?
Mahatma. Sorry no.
Truth. Non-violence.
Stop it. Enough taboo.

That trash is long overdue.
You need a thorough review.
Your tax-free salt stimulated our wounds
We gonna sue you, the Congress shoe.

3. Shail discusses the polemics of languages and decisive lines between tongues and states in Language Wars.

Now the topic of ‘mother tongue’ is a touchy subject anywhere and everywhere. There are people out there who are ready to beat up and even go to the extreme of killing each other over it. They think their own mother tongue is the best and the rest are just dust.Excuse me, I beg to differ. In the event that I were to grow up without ever hearing a word of my mother tongue, I could still be expected to turn out into a pretty decent human being.

So, personally my opinion on mother tongues is on these lines: Everyone has a mother and mothers have tongues. So what is so special about any particular one?? This I know is blasphemy to the language chauvinists. But then, language chauvinism bores me to tears.

4. Indian Homemaker in a chilling post about how words of women who’ve attempted suicides by trying to immolate themselves aren’t taken seriously even by the law in Dying Statements Of Vengeful Women Settling Scores By Attempting Suicide.

When I discussed this, one of the commonest reactions was, “Oh these women know very well rat poison/pouring kerosene on themselves is not going to kill them, they just want to threaten their in laws.” It wasn’t considered odd that any woman should feel (if they did) that the only way to ‘get back’ at their in-laws was by hurting themselves (and risking death).

On the other hand one does hear about self immolation and suicide as desperate forms of protest.

Women hurting themselves to ‘settle scores’ with their in laws were (are?) generally seen as unaccommodating, head strong and vengeful troublemakers. The court seemed to blame this burns victim too.

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*Don’t take this too literally. Well not so much anyway.

Filed under: Musings From The Empire, Postcolonial feminism, Radicalism, Religious Commentary Tagged: Culture of India, Gender identity, Musings From The Empire, Postcolonial feminism

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