Gender divisions and performance in Why Loiter? and Seeing Like a Feminist

In an earlier post I mentioned that our Kolkata lit-fest discussion touched on the portrayal of women in popular Hindi films. Shyam Benegal, who was on the panel, has had so many strong and interesting women characters in his own movies over the decades that he is often referred to as a feminist director. I don’t know how Mr Benegal feels about that tag, but I do know that the word "feminist" unfortunately draws ambivalent reactions – some people, women included, are not comfortable describing themselves as such, because it is sometimes used as a derisive term, built around the stereotype of the bra-burner or the shrill, man-hating woman who is venting personal frustrations. However, as the journalist Rebecca West has tersely pointed out, feminism is not a complicated idea at all – it is merely “the radical notion that women are people”.

Of course, treating women as human beings can seem like a radical idea in a milieu where they are typically objects to be possessed or goddesses to be worshipped. The two modes often go together: the role of women as custodians of a family’s “honour” can easily become a way of denying them basic individual rights such as freedom of movement. (Those big goddess idols you see in temples or at festivals – they stay where they are, they don’t move around unless they are carried by men.***) It is also at the heart of the appalling belief – widely perpetuated in our country – that rape is “a fate worse than death”; that once a woman has been “shamed” thus she is no more than a living corpse, a blot that society must purge itself of and hurriedly forget about.

In such a climate, even those who consider themselves empathetic or enlightened can do with constant reminders of the many forms of discrimination that women face on an everyday basis. Here’s a recommendation for two fine books I read recently (one of them before the December rape/murder and the discourse around it). Nivedita Menon’s just-published Seeing Like a Feminist is an incisive, clear-sighted setting out of the many issues confronting feminists as they attempt to shift the markers of a patriarchal world; it is also an examination of the thought processes that lie behind mind-boggling prescriptions such as the one – frequently made by courts and other authorities here – that a raped woman marry her assailant. “The marriage is meant to restore social order,” Menon observes, “Once the rapist is the woman’s husband, the act of sex is retrospectively legitimised because of course, the consent of the woman to sex is irrelevant, in marriage and out of it. The morals of Indian society do not permit consensual sex outside marriage, but if you rape a woman, you can marry her!”

[That last sentence casts a chilling perspective on some of those Hindi-movie scenes we are all familiar with, where the hero “eve-teases” the girl he is attracted to. In most of those films, the heroine eventually reciprocates this strange love – but try extending the scenario into a hypothetical (and for a mainstream film, very improbable) one where the girl really isn’t interested, and then you wonder: how far will sweet-boy Rahul go to “get” her (and, with societal approval, “keep” her for ever)? Note: I’m not talking here about a film like Darr, where the stalker is presented as a psycho who gets beaten up by the regular hero in the end. Though even in that film, the character was treated at least partly as a figure of sympathy, a martyr to obsessive love.]

There is much food for thought in Menon’s book, but a section I found particularly stimulating was the one about the fluidity of gender, built on the idea that the classification of people into the watertight categories “male” and “female” can be misleading. Referencing the work of the feminist philosopher Judith Butler, as well as anthropological studies of gender roles in pre-colonial African cultures, Menon writes that being specifically a man or specifically a woman is to a large extent a performance that most people engage in, according to what society expects of them. Human bodies and psychologies are more versatile and complex than this, occupying various positions along a large spectrum (lactation can be induced in men, for example), but due to stern cultural codes “a range of bodies becomes invisible or illegitimate”. Thus a woman might, in a letter to a newspaper medical column, express her deep worry about her young son’s bulging breasts, and a doctor might reply that corrective surgery may be required – even though the boy’s condition is not necessarily a biologically abnormal one.

Nearly a third of the male population can have “breasts”, and if it is not due to rare endocrinological causes, the condition is perfectly normal. It seems to have no other ill effects than causing “disgust”, but, nevertheless, it is pathologised and made into a disease (gynaecomastia), and when other serious illnesses have been ruled out, the advice given is not to relax and stop worrying, but to undertake surgery, to make that body conform to a mythical norm.

[More excerpts from Seeing Like a Feminist are here]


Another book that touches on gender performance and learned behaviour is the very absorbing – and discomfiting – Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, co-written by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade. In public spaces in India, the authors note, the act of constant self-surveillance by women produces what Michel Foucault (in another context) called Disciplined Bodies. “At bus stops and railway stations, a woman will often hold a file, folder or book close to her chest, keep her eyes averted and seem to focus inward rather than outward. Men, on the other hand, stand in postures of control with legs held apart, look around with apparent ease and often occupy additional space with their arms [...] the average woman will occupy the least possible space, rendering herself as inconspicuous as she can.”

For a male reader, Why Loiter? is an eye-opening account of how hard it can be for women to use public spaces in a relaxed, comfortable manner, even in situations where there is no immediate sexual threat. Especially disturbing, I thought, was a chapter about the disgraceful lack of public toilets for women even in big cities, a feature of urban planning that tells us something about the still-prevalent attitude that a woman’s rightful place is in the home – that she has no business wandering about too much. As the authors point out, even in a relatively cosmopolitan city “the very presence of women in public is seen as transgressive and fraught with anxiety”. They must constantly demonstrate a sense of purpose when they are outdoors – they can’t be seen to be “merely” loitering, because respectable women don’t do that. Thus,

Women on their own in parks, for instance, produce a particular type of body language of purpose. They tend to walk a linear path, do not meet anyone’s gaze, and often listen to a Walkman or talk on their phones ... the effort seems to be to legitimatise their presence by demonstrating that they are walking for exercise and not for fun or social interaction. Similarly, when forced to wait in a public place, women will be careful about the kind of place they wait at, often choosing bus stops and railway stations. Tied to these spaces is a sense of legitimate purpose – that of commuting. [...] In other ways too, women legitimise their presence in public space by exploiting acceptable notions of femininity such as those which connect them intrinsically to motherhood and religion.

The very fact that presences have to be “legitimised” – and that many of the women who engage in this process are barely conscious of what they are doing, having internalised this behaviour – says something about how hegemonic our society can be towards 50 percent of its population. Both these books are a reminder of how far that hegemony and hostility has seeped into our everyday lives, and of the urgent need for both sexes to participate in the carving out of new spaces and new mindsets. Do read them.

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*** An old post on Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi – about a girl trapped in an image of divinity – is here