“By the time I was your age, my younger child was in the
fifth standard.”
“That’s great. Did you aspire to marry?”
“Ya, what else? Now you also should get married…”
“I have different aspirations and I’ve worked towards them.
I’m perfectly happy where I am, and will marry if and when I think I am ready
and want to.”
“If you stop all this feminism-veminism and all, you’ll get
married soon.”
“What makes you think feminism is exclusive of marriage? I
know plenty of amazing feminists who are happily married.”
“How? Feminism tells you to hate men.”
“Nope. To the contrary. Feminism advocates equality.”
“That’s ridiculous. If it’s equality, why should we call it
feminism?”
“One reason
is ignorance like yours. It is called Feminism because women need to be put back
in to the equation of equality and restore the balance.”
“But women
are already doing so much, they are not poorly off. Women are going to school,
going to work and all that. So many women leaders also you see!”
“That’s
only a fraction. Did you know that many times more than this number of women
face violence every day?”
“Hey come
on, that’s all because these girls dress so badly these days and go running to
clubs and pubs. They shouldn’t be staying late.”
“That,
right there, is why we need feminism. Your mentality is reflective of something
called patriarchy, which is a form of structural violence. Patriarchy thinks
that men have a right of dominance and power over women and their bodies. And
this is so deeply ingrained in our society, that it affects how we think, how
we interact, speak and behave, and affects our systems.”
“But tell
me, isn’t it right? If you have a watch worth millions of dollars, will you
keep it on the street?”
“Your
choice of likening the body of a woman or a girl is precisely what is
structural violence. By likening her to an object, aren’t you detaching the
personal agency of a woman from her? Aren’t you reducing her to a certain value
you ascribe to her, and then think she is nothing more than property.”
“Oh…”
“When you
look at a woman through such a lens, you are creating a space for the
assumption of her inferiority, and you constantly encourage the perception of
her mind and body in this way. Since you think of her as an object, you don’t
think that her consent matters, that her choice matters, that her freedom
matters, that her safety matters. It is this mentality that puts the honour of
a whole family or a society into the woman’s vagina. But it’s truly her body
and her choice, she cannot be forced to carry the honour of her family!”
“But tell
me, if a girl is raped or molested, isn’t her family reputation defiled? Who
will marry her?”
“Let’s
unpack that a bit. Why should her family reputation be defiled when she did
nothing wrong? Tell me, do you punish the murderer or the murdered? Do you
punish the bully or the bullied? We punish the perpetrator, right? Similarly,
the molester or the rapist or the one causing the assault is the wrongdoer
here. Now the second part – again, why are we saying that a woman must only
aspire to marriage? She can be so much more – if she wants to marry, she will
marry someone of her choice, who she is happy with. By wondering who would
marry her and giving that more importance over helping her heal from her
trauma, you are again reasserting that she is property without personal
agency.”
“So you are
saying all this is because of patriarchy?”
“Correct. When
patriarchy subverted equality, the male was dominant, and the female was
subjugated. But gender, you see, is fluid. This fluidity allows for one who may
identify as male to also identify with certain aspects of female, or, for one
born as male to identify as a female. This fluidity was seen as anomalous – for
it was not considered “normal” or “acceptable” for the dominant to identify as
the subjugated. So – feminising the rhetoric by putting women back into the
dialogue will lead to creating an equal space where none is seen as the
dominant or the subjugated, and therefore, fluidity will not be an anomaly.”
“Fluid?
What do you mean fluid? Gender, sex, all the same. Man or woman. That’s all.”
“Ah, my
friend. Neither gender nor sex is binary or confined to male and female or man
and woman. Sex is what you are born with – your anatomy. This means that
someone looks at your body parts and says you are a boy or a girl, at birth,
and then they bring you up that way. But, sex is more than that: you can be
born with boy parts or girl parts, or even be born intersex. Doctors and
parents try to “correct” intersex bodies – which is actually unfair because
unless it is a medical hazard, such correction surgeries encroach bodies by
making perfectly normal bodies come across as abnormal. Now gender, on the
other hand, is a social construct and a question of personal identity. It is
what I want to identify as, and so I can be anything from male to female, to
fluid, to a-gender, to questioning, to queer, or even transgender.”
“Wait,
wait. If it is so personal and it is one’s choice of identity, why does this
even matter?”
“It matters
because gender identity has been turned on its head to create hatred and
discrimination on the basis of gender. People are forced to conform to what
some people consider to be normal – when in reality, nature has never defined a
normal. It’s just mankind and its inherent insecurities that sought to assert
something as the acceptable norm, to exclude those that they didn’t want to
include.”
“Right. So then
we’re still not so badly in need of feminism, right? We have so many schemes
and laws for women. We can just create more.”
“That’s a
bit of an oversimplification that does no one any good. This has two
components. First, you can’t just make laws and schemes, you need to implement
them. Second, when you implement them, you should be aware of the many
dimensions involved in the way they manifest when implemented. It is important,
then, to acknowledge something called intersectionality.”
“Are you
saying that many other factors intersect to affect women?”
“Exactly
that. As a community of people, they have faced years and years of
oppression and marginalization, and are placed vulnerably at the bottom of the
hierarchical ladders of India’s caste system, class segregations and gender
identities. If feminism was not intersectional and looked at her from a
choice-consequence dimension, it would view the Dalit Woman as one identifying
as a Woman; as one who is vulnerable to violence; as one who is, well, like
other women. Intersectional feminism, however, would see her differently.
Vulnerable as a woman, disenfranchised as a caste, marginalized as a caste,
isolated and oppressed in society and therefore, even more vulnerable than most
other women. And there are numbers, facts, stories and truths to back this
correct understanding of a Dalit Woman’s position. There is enough and more in
the form of evidence to show you exactly how Dalit Women are exploited,
oppressed, discriminated against, isolated and vulnerable to violence. In a
nutshell, not only are they dominated over by men in the power relations of a
patriarchal social order, but are also fighting against a toxic hegemonic
pillar of power in the form of caste, and coping with the poverty that comes in
with a progressively divisive class system. This establishes the circumstance. Let’s say a Dalit Woman and a woman from a caste and class
that are higher up (let’s call her privileged woman) in the hierarchy are
brought into the mix. Let’s just say that the both of them have aspirations for
their lives ahead, and let’s say that they aspire to pursue a course that would
make them Mechanical Engineers. (If you raised an eyebrow, check your privilege
and break those limiting stereotypes inside your head). The Dalit Woman is
encumbered by the burden of a system that started with her exclusion: she had
no access to education that would suitably enable her to attempt the entrance
exam, which, by the way, is administered in English. But the privileged woman
has had the benefit of school, extra classes and access to resources online.
They take the test. The privileged woman makes it, but the Dalit Woman doesn’t.
Strike one. She still harbours some hope, that she will make it in the quotas
that have been reserved for a range of castes and classes. But no, she is among
the last few in the pecking order, and therefore, waits, and waits, and waits.
Strike two. Almost like an afterthought, she is sent an admission letter – a
rarity, for many of her caste are left at the bottom of the pot. But the fee
she is expected to pay is the next new hurdle in her path. Where can she afford
to pay a year’s tuition if her family can’t scrape enough to afford a square
meal? Strike three. This shows you how constrained choice truly
is. These “choices” are not choices. And so, even without the
right to make a choice, she has to bear consequences.”
“Interesting. So
it’s not black and white?”
“Nope. It never was,
and can never be.”
