by Sukalpa Bhattacharjee
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
– Toni Morrison, Beloved
Every woman needs to ask herself “how free am I?” Since ‘woman’ is not a homogenous category, each woman in her own socio-cultural and particularly economic location will find herself negotiating with different meanings of freedom. There will be some who will experience a strangeness with the word ‘freedom’ and there will be yet some others who will force themselves to make-believe that there is such a thing called freedom in their lives. The question is that, like any other marginalized subjects or identities in the hierarchy of class, caste, race etc. gendered subjects, i.e. women also perceive their existence and freedom on the basis of the dominant social ideology. Drawing on Edward Said’s seminal postcolonial work Orientalism (1978) it has been established that the natives or the orients’ notion of themselves was a mirror-image produced through “western eyes”, during the heydays of colonial expansion (which of course is continuing even today in the form of neo-colonialism), Gendered subjects, i.e women also often fall prey to patriarchal notions of freedom, because patriarchy is the dominant social structure of our society leading to phallocentric interpretations of culture, value and human good. Such an inverted and complex notion of freedom which might appear to be very complicated to some, can perhaps be poignantly and subtly described through the words of the quintessential Indian female poet-
Yet, I was thinking, lying beside him,
That I loved , and was much loved.
It was a physical thing, he said suddenly,
End it, I cried, end it and let us be free.(emphasis mine)
This freedom was our last strange toy.
(Kamala Das Surayya, “Substitute” The Descendants: p 7)
Let us understand that the maintenance of patriarchal ideology requires production of certain spaces as gendered spaces where gender roles, the issues of rights and duties of men and women are socially justified through a politics of spatial division. The demarcation of spaces as ‘private’ and ‘public’, ‘home’ and the ‘world’ are all reproduced as stereotypes for the legitimization of patriarchal desires and control. This does not happen only within homes and communities but in social and cultural realms and through state-sponsored political propaganda in art, public images, internet and media. The projection of bodies and sexualities and their commodification through repeated public discourse, in everyday lives, at work, on the street, and in public places, show how everyday practices make stereotypical metaphors easily recognizable and normalizes discrimination even to the victim herself. That is why it is most difficult to convince women herself of how vulnerable she is with ‘this freedom’ as a ‘strange toy’. One can see this reflected in the features and spatial arrangement of modern life in the dichotomy of sexes: man-world, woman-home, where women are confined deep within the sequence of spaces at the greatest distance from the public sphere. The assigned position of women in Indian nationalist movement, or in traditional institutions of different communities will elaborate this point. Female body and actions are controlled by being bounded and positioned at the end of series of spaces, usually the kitchen or the bedroom, away from the predatory gaze of other men. One can also see the space between genders inside the house further differentiated in terms of location, accessibility, and comfort levels. Feminist critics argue that the protection/projection binary is not a fact of nature. Gender is culturally constructed and show that we inhabit two worlds: one of projection that is artificial, abstract, and male; the other is of protection that is sensual, informal, and female. Gender inscribed in space through the opposition between the ‘centrifugal’, male orientation and the ‘centripetal’, female orientation. The distribution of spaces in the name of gender roles actually creates a field of control of everything that threatens the ‘logic of practice’ created by patriarchal ideologies in the realm of family, community, politics and religion. Ironically, the ways in which a woman’s body is controlled and gendered, and the way in which she forms and understands her own notion of body as being. ‘beautiful,’ ‘ugly,’ ‘attractive,’ ‘provocative’ or ‘shameful’ is, as mentioned earlier, socially constructed. Even for an urban educated working woman, unless she unlearns all the social strictures imposed on her and learn anew the method of being reflexively critical in order to re-define herself, freedom will remain only a toy.
One of the ways in which we might understand the recent epidemic of bodily and mental violence caused by rape, across all sections and age groups is also through a clear analysis of issues of freedom and social control of women’s body in a patriarchal society. Confronting myths about rape is an essential component of rape prevention, and integral to changing attitudes about gender, power and misogyny. While the victim’s conceptualization of her experiences is influenced by societal notions of rape, the perpetrator is also strengthened by the cultural norms of a patriarchal society. Psychologists have been asking questions like “Is rape sex or violence?”, and the answer from studies on the sociology of rape has been that rape is basically violence particularly from the victim’s point of view and it is the patriarchal desire to control the victim’s bodily and mental Integrity. Bodily integrity is the inviolability of the physical body and emphasises the importance of personal autonomy and the self-determination of human beings over their own bodies. Thus rape as the violation of bodily integrity is an unethical infringement, intrusive and criminal.
The history of women’s movement across the world has always called for an inward examination of the notion of freedom for a female self and the acquiring of agency to realize autonomy through a set of rights-right to life, reproductive right, right to write, right to bodily integrity, economic right, right to political representation etc. Issues of rights and freedom therefore have always paved for the emergence of a gendered political self. With growing tendencies towards tokenism and commodification even of dates and events, the celebration of an event like International Women’s Day should not be divorced from its political significance of the day, as a strategy to promote equal rights, including suffrage, for women. Let us pay our tribute to the German Socialist Luise Zietz, who proposed the establishment of an annual ‘International Woman’s Day’ and which was seconded by fellow socialist and later communist leader Clara Zetkin. Let us not be swayed by a self-defeating inverted make-believe world of freedom offered by popular celebrations of this day under camouflaging captions, that projects ‘womanhood’ only as beauty and femininity without addressing women’s rights and freedom to exist with her bodily and mental integrity.
The author teaches English at NEHU Shillong and can be contacted at [email protected]