I thought this month's piece would fairly
write itself given that it is meant to discuss that which is closest to what I
do, and what I've spent roughly half a lifetime (and counting) obsessing with:
the workings of that structuring principle of/in society we call gender. As is
often the case with anything we're too close to though, it's almost impossible
to decide where to begin, or what is to delimit the discursive field this piece
will inhabit: do I speak about the constructedness of sex (yes - think outside
the binary of male/female and realise these are constructs too - read Anne
Fausto Sterling's Sexing the Body: Gender
Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000) for more on this theme)
and gender (this is now almost a given - everyone knows, after de Beauvoir,
that "one is not born, rather one becomes, a woman,"[1]),
or am I to muse, after Butler, on what
it means to "perform" one's gender (Butler holds that gender is “a
stylized repetition of acts . . . which are internally discontinuous . . .[so
that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a
performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the
actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief,”[2])?
Or perhaps explore the import of work like Cordelia Fine's[3],
when she takes on the current glut of pseudo-scientific posturing which seeks
to reaffirm biological essentialism? Sing odes to Woolf, Gilbert and Gubar, Showalter,
Moi, de Beauvoir, Cixous, Kristeva, and the scores of others, from the earliest
suffragettes on, who made it so that the world didn't have a choice but to
recognise women as equal players in spheres public and private? I'd like to,
but it would take more an epic in terms of genre than a blog-post to make that
happen.
So
I'll do what I learnt to do from an old, sometimes imperious imp you might've
encountered in my posts before - you know the one - and start by examining my
immediate context. What does it mean to be a woman in India today? How does my
generation look at gender and its attendant politics? Does young India persist
in reading the body of the woman as the repository of her family's honour (and
shame when this body is violated)? How do caste, class, religion, access to education
and other factors coalesce in the making of this mythical beast we call woman?
There is a gender wage gap here of course, one of the worst in the world - see the
chart I've attached below for more - but honestly, that's the least of my
concerns. Why? Because more worryingly, for what it tells us about the society
it refers to, is the fact that India ranks 120th out of 131 countries in terms of
the number of women (around 27%) who participate in its work force at all[4].
This could be for various reasons of course, but the one I find most troubling comes
from a youth survey conducted by CSDS-KAS in 2016. This survey found that 40%
of its respondents - over 6000 young Indians between the ages of 15 and 34
across 19 cities - agreed with the proposition that women should not work after
marriage[5].
On matters pertaining to caste and gender, as becomes obvious very quickly through even a cursory glance at
this survey, young India is probably even more conservative than the
generations which came before it.
Source: http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/Pardon-the-gender-wage-gap-is-showing/article16921327.ece
Is there a way out of this mess? A move towards
gender justice and equity? I think there is, but it feels a painfully long way
away from our present. If it is to come, I think our only hope is to realise
that no one is free till everyone is; it is to recognise - and inevitably do
the hard work that such recognition necessarily demands of us as a corollary -
that intersectionality is our only hope for salvation: till the women's
movement speaks to the Dalit movement, and both to the various movements which
seek to eliminate poverty whilst arguing for a developmental policy which isn't
premised on bankrupting the natural world of its very finite resources, I don't
know how change can come. We live in a country where kangaroo courts (khap
panchayats, anyone?) order 'honour-killings' (Hint: there's nothing honourable
about killing. Ever.) if a woman marries outside her caste or religion; a
country where to be born a woman is to police one's every move - or have it
done for you by family, friends, "well-wishers" who only want to make
sure we don't get hurt if we decide to come home late one night - from
literally the moment we're old enough to walk; a country, ultimately, which
feels less and less like one where there's room for women to be read as human
beings, not defined by their relationship to men (as wives, mothers, sisters
and c.). For every hard-fought gain made by the women's movement, it seems like
we take two steps backwards, and this backlash is violent and vicious.
Young India dreams, but from the look of it, these
dreams are gendered. And they are not my dreams.
[1] Simone
de Bauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
[2]
See this link for more: https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwjFhKfq4abVAhUEgLwKHWtmBh8QFggsMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fartsites.ucsc.edu%2Ffaculty%2Fgustafson%2FFILM%2520165A.W11%2Ffilm%2520165A%255BW11%255D%2520readings%2520%2FJudith%2520Butler%2520handout.doc&usg=AFQjCNH0NUXhcp_63UeHtjr-AUXpXfKnBQ
[3] Do
yourself a favour and pick up a copy of her Delusions
of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (2010)
immediately.
[4]
See this article for more: http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/india-ranks-120th-among-131-nations-in-women-workforce-says-world-bank-report/story-Q5AVD5aRlmLHA1RAFpnZuJ.html
[5]
See this for an analysis of the survey: https://www.thequint.com/india/2017/04/04/csds-kas-youth-survey-report-attitudes-anxieties-aspirations-of-india-youth-changing-patterns
