(Hi, I am Atreyee, a Blank Noise member for over a decade and a loyal associate of General Patheja. Other than watching the expansion of Blank Noise with great joy, I have long debates with Jasmeen on all things related to gender and its socio-political implications. I tweet at @milagrenia. Thanks!)
I watched the Qandeel Baloch murder on the internet – first
in anger, then in confusion, then in surprise. A young girl’s heinous death at
the hands of her brother turned into an internet festival, not dissimilar from
the Nirbhaya rape of December 16, 2012 in Munirka, Delhi. The feminine personalities
at hand are entirely different. Nirbhaya was trying to get an education and eke
out a living as a medical professional in Delhi. She carried the respectable
expectations of her middle-class family. Except one day she took a bus at
night. Qandeel craved fame and power. Un-respectable things for women to crave,
even strive for. She took to the internet and an active use of her sexuality in
order to generate fame and finagle a ticket to the world of celebrity. This was
not alright for someone of her socio-economic strata to do, someone who had
been married young and was the mother of a child. It is women like her that are
supposed to become beneficiaries of upliftment programs, companies’ affirmative
action programs, NGO-fodder for ‘violence against women’. Always the passive
recipient of care – one whose destiny is determined by others. Qandeel rejected
that image. In ways that struck many custodians of societal morality as ‘vulgar’.
What kind of a feminist was Qandeel? My friend Sarover wrote on Facebook,
“the relationship between feminism and sexuality
is a complicated one.
if complicit to patriarchy it is
oppressive,& sometimes if explicit, still continues to be complicit to patriarchy.even
when we choose the liberator discourse we land up in the other jail set up for
feminine, namely the exploitative gaze.i wonder if there is a way out. the same
conditions do not hold for men. liberation does not depend on displaying the
libido or hiding it. male space as much more an agnostic space of being, body and becoming. but our history is
tainted with honor killings, mutilation, abuse and extreme conditions of
oppression and exploitation. so the testament continues, the near irrational imbalance
of liberatory celebratory sexuality as commodity, on one hand and the vile,
vicious and violence of the everyday forms of patriarchy on the other.”
Sarover is right, in a way. And she is definitely a
fire-breathing feminist. Let us examine Sarover’s argument quite carefully –
she is saying, that the ability or intention to display libido should not be
considered a measure of feminism. It is not. I agree with Sarover, especially
in her critique of the western triumphalist in challenging and showing as
un-modern, the social fabric of the Other. My only addendum there would be that
women’s bodies are necessarily interpreted through the rubric of male desire
and male anxiety about male desire. It has been said in feminist discourse,
enough times, that female bodies are constructed as passive, devoid of the
capacity to desire. But the furore over women’s definite acts of showing or
hiding libido causes tremendous anxiety within all kinds of patriarchal
structures as it shows women becoming live, definitive subjects. So I am not
going to participate in the argument over which women is feminist and to what
extent. The argument has already gone around showing that women who observe karvachauth, or give up their jobs for
domesticity can also be ‘feminist’. My emphasis is on showing how paranoia
ensues when women emerge as subjects,
push back against a force, show the existence of an inner will, talk or observe
silence to make their point of view known, embrace publicness where privacy is
expected, embrace privacy when publicness is expected. Societies, of varying
grades of patriarchy, allocate varied roles for different groups of women –
thus, the wife and the slut are co-produced with different sexual and social
functions satisfying diverse needs of men.
Qandeel disturbed this arrangement – at least in the
perspective of her brother. The thousands of men who googled her and voyeurised
on her internet-presence saw her role differently though, but narrated their
disapproval according to societal expectation. Nirbhaya did something that
disturbed her perceived role as a young woman in the city of Delhi. Took a bus
in the evening. I disagree with much of the conversation around gender justice
that takes a particular object of clothing and a particular act of movement and
frames it in judgment of the quantum of violence or restraint attached to it by
patriarchy. My point is that the patriarchal disavowal cannot be seen in a
single object or act alone - it must be
seen in accordance with what perceived set of expectations for that particular
woman (in her socio-economic location) are. For instance, on Indian roads and
public spaces, the same clothes that pass the threshold of judgment on
non-Indian-looking (often meaning mainland India, excluding the north-east)
women, will not pass the threshold for Indian, or ‘local’ women. In this
hypothetical example, different sets of expectation are being pinned on
different women based on their ethnic, racial and cultural origin as understood
by those casting the male gaze.
In this context, we come to the latest incident of the
police forcing a woman to strip from her burkini on the beach of Nice, France.
The burkini being similar to the wetsuit is not the talking point here. For it
is not the wetsuit. It is a garment
women, given their communitarian circumstances, have chosen to wear in order to
the enjoy the pleasure of water-sport in keeping with the religiously coded modesty
regulations that are cast on their bodies. The burkini, therefore, becomes a
site of two patriarchies battling it out. One saying you’re weird and you
should not be seen among our midst. The other saying if you show your skin to
other men, you disrupt my claim to honor since you’re my wife, mother, daughter
– my kin-territory. Strangely, I think, the police’s abhorrence of the burkini
have not as much to do with the perceived submissive role played by Muslim
women, but to do with their disruption of the culturally coded aesthetic of the
‘beach’. A site of peculiar westernized mode of pleasure and sexual expression.
The same women could have worn their Muslim dress and stood behind a counter in
a shopping mall, it would perhaps be okay. But they dared to come out on the
beach in Nice. Where the west is enacting its westest self. It’s like if a
woman wore a bikini to a Hindu temple. It’s a spatial disruption that this
woman’s garment had inadvertently caused.
When we incessantly compare western women and non-western
women’s practices and cultural codes, especially in the garb of intersectional
feminism, we forget that in the grid of culture and gender there is a
complicated, systematic division of images, perceptions, expectations allocated
on the bodies and minds of different women. Some women are expected to lend
their bodies for male aggrandizement, if they turn celibate – there will be
much consternation. Other women are supposed to be submissive wives and use
their sexuality entirely towards reproduction of the family and the clan. Their
alteration of roles and images, as we have seen, in the Baloch case, causes
violent reactions. We must, in assessing these cases, see all the women as
serving diverse needs of the patriarchal machine, and their purposeful or
inadvertent subversive acts causing much perplexion which at times culminates
in brutality. We must also remember that a larger political and masculine
battle among several imperial actors is being carried out for sovereignty over
land, culture, resource and discourse. The violence on women’s bodies, is
necessarily, woven into that larger battleground.
