Let me begin by
thanking Centre for Cultural Studies, CIEFL for the ready cooperation that they
have extended in making this seminar possible. This seminar has taken quite a
long time to materialize and I am glad that it is finally happening. As a
women’s studies research centre, Anveshi’s interest in the theme of this
seminar emerges from its perspective on gender – a perspective which stresses
that neither women nor women’s issues are out there to be documented – that it
is imperative to see the ways in which ‘women’s issues’ are being constituted
through diverse but interconnected fields of law, education, development, media
and health in India. Since gender is deeply historical and contextual, women
cannot many times be the objects of investigation but need to be located in
relationships, institutions and structures that give them an objective reality.
Anveshi’s engagement with issues of sexuality has therefore been largely
indirect – approached through the lens of health, domestic violence,
development etc. Explorations and investigations that focus on the normative
charge of masculinities are important ways of developing women’s studies that
do not focus solely on women.
What I have in the
name of introductory comments are quite skeletal and tentative. Building on
some moments in shared histories; events in institutional life and
conversations that occurred in the context of this seminar, I have strung
together my thoughts which I thought would have a bearing on the theme of the
seminar. And I hope that you will find them useful.
Years ago, during
an anti-rape agitation in Hyderabad University Campus, a strange conversation
among a group of students and faculty members took an explosive turn, giving me
a glimpse into the extremely violent face of public masculinity. It was an
agitation against the rape of a woman student by men from outside the campus.
It was an occasion for women students, obviously led by upper caste women, to
speak openly about the kinds of harassment that they face in and outside the
campus. For sympathetic faculty members, it was an occasion to show solidarity.
For upper caste men, it was the time to demand increased security for women
i.e., surveillance on their movement. It was also an occasion for a dalit
student association, to express solidarity with the agitating women students,
where they included the demand that the victim be paid compensation. Unaware of
the history of the SC/ST atrocities act where such compensation by the State is
the rule, the women protestors reacted sharply. A sympathetic faculty member,
trying to calm down the heated tempers on both sides, but obviously in a
self-critical mood, said that men should learn to listen to women, at least in
such critical moments. The colloquial use of an abusive term by him in
deprecating men including men himself – “we men are all bastards, we should
learnt to listen to women” proverbially opened up the Pandora’s box taking an
unprecedented violent turn. For the first time, all the men in the campus
mobilized as men saying that the said faculty member insulted them as men and
demanded a public apology from him. They attacked his house, went around in
procession against him through out the huge campus and stopped just outside the
women’s hostel complex where the women students hid him. In an extremely tense
and violent situation, with only two rings of faculty members protecting him
from the mass of male students, the faculty member apologized publicly and
withdrew hastily into the women’s hostel. What I want to point to is that this
aggressive mobilization of male students was not directed against women per se;
but against a faculty member, perceived to be pro-feminist and perceived to
belong to an elite section. The men who mobilized had serious political
differences and would be on opposite sides in the course of a normal day; they
would align themselves along caste, regional, class lines. For many of us
currently in the room, the moment of their coming together was an eye-opener –
into the intertwining of caste and class in the sexual politics of the campus –
prompting us to begin to think of gender, and masculinity in ways other than
the familiar and comfortable male-female binary.
When one learns to
disassociate gender from binary notions of masculinitiy and femininity, even
seemingly consolidated formulations such as ‘domestic violence’ begin to
develop cracks. I am not referring to the involvement of female in laws in
incitement and engaging in such violence, but to the difficult to establish
linkage between men and male interests in such violence. In many instances of
such violence that come into the public realm, it is not uncommon to see fathers,
sons and brothers accompanying and lobbying for women in various public spaces.
It is not also uncommon to see male mediators, apart from lawyers and policemen
defending women’s interests (leaving aside the question of effectiveness). In
fact, it is also common to see that women defending victim-women’s interests
begin to adopt and occupy conventionally given masculine traits and spaces:
assuming the authority to intervene in the inner sphere of the family; making
their presence felt in spaces such as police stations; instructing husbands and
wives to perform their duties well; instructing in-laws to change with the
changing times etc. These are the women who have understood the logic of such a
governmental space, opened up through the public recognition of the rights of
wives against domestic cruelty, and it is the authority obtained through
occupation of such a space that allows them to (suspend) render some
familial-conventional norms of femininity/masculinity redundant.
Problems arise when
governmental category of domestic violence with its rigid conceptual grid of
rights and duties of husbands and wives becomes the dominant analytical
framework for understanding such violence. Domestic violence discourse in India
is replete with such essentialist notions of masculinity and male violence,
where violence is mapped onto the male bodies. In such a depoliticized,
moralistic discourse, there is very little space for articulating this violence
as structural, leave alone opening out the question of conjugal sexuality to
explore how men and women inhabit this norm. After all, there is nothing new in
the insight that it is not politically useful to trace all male violence to
individual men. Rural women in the anti-arrack movement in Andhra Pradesh in
early 1990s have articulated it by organizing against the arrack contractors,
excise department and the police when abusive behaviour of alcoholic husbands
became too much to bear. Investigations of domestic violence at Anveshi, by
dis-articulating the question of domestic violence from masculinity and men,
are pushing us to ask questions such as: how far does the rights
discourse in domestic violence help us in understanding women’s desire to
retain ‘the affective ties of the family/husband’? How is conjugality tied into
these affective ties – of care, belonging and attachment? In what ways do the
bourgeois notions of conjugality, that underwrites the rights discourse,
delegitimize an entire range of non-monogamous lives and practices?
The last event that
I want to refer to is about the presence of male bodies in a feminist
conference. The conference was titled, Listening Together: Talking Differences,
the first South Indian Young Feminist Conference, was ambitiously aimed at
bringing together women who have entered feminism in the post Mandal, Masjid
phase. As feminism was defined in terms of politics, the question of men
definitely came up – can’t men who think of feminists attend the conference? By
a majority vote it was decided that they could not. The clinching argument was
- when sensitive experiential accounts are being shared it was felt that men’s
presence would impede a free sharing among women. But, the issue continued to
stay alive - in the form of two male videographers who were taping the conference
– creating annoyance and irritation to some. However, what emerged as the major
fault-line of the conference, was not the gaze of the male videographers but
that of the upper caste, middle class women – with rest of the groups,
especially dalit women, perceiving themselves as speaking on a platform which
did not belong to them. The Dalit women group’s presentation on sexuality
emphasized caste as the most important determinant of the identity of dalit
women – marking them as chattels, joginis, sexually loose and immoral. Unlike
the upper caste women’s anxieties that centred on choice in marrying or not
marrying, or compatibility and incompatibility in marriage and/or domestic
violence, the group presentation of dalit women stressed on battles of an
entirely different order – where injury and violence was primarily experienced
in and through caste. Politically, ‘masculinity’ was not a problem that they
found it important to articulate at that moment. The issue that the dalit
women’s group presentation forced us to think about was – that of the different
social histories of dalit women and upper caste women- that mark their
perspectives, battles and visions in very different ways. How does one begin to
discuss sexuality and/or masculinity in ways that are attentive to these
differences?
------------Introductory comments to the Travelling Seminar on Masculinity hosted by Anveshi in 2007 at the then CIEFL
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