THAT FEMINISM SHOULD BEAR THE IMMEDIACY OF WOMEN’S EVERYDAY LIVES RATHER THAN FOSSILS OF SOCIAL THEORY LAID DOWN BY PATRIARCHY, AS A PROVERBIAL TRAIL OF BREAD CRUMBS TO CRITICAL CONFUSION, WAS MADE ABUNDANTLY AND RFERESHINGLY CLEAR AT A RECENT SEMINAR, WRITES DEBASISH LAHIRI

SURELY one ought to find something else beyond Feminism, something couched in alterity, something that is more a learning of new realities than a recuperation or reinscription of old ones. But at the borders of Feminism we find Feminism itself. At the heart of this spider&’s web, ranged between the institutional construction of intellectuality and the social construction of sexuality, lie the woman and her articulation.
That the future of the discipline of Feminism was to be sought in a radicalism of deep commitment rather than of academic attempts to ride the mindless man-driven theory machine; that Feminism should bear the immediacy of women&’s everyday lives, rather than fossils of social theory laid down by patriarchy, as a proverbial trail of bread crumbs to critical confusion, was made abundantly and refreshingly clear at a seminar on the theme of “Feminisms and Beyond” organised by the Department of English, West Bengal State University, on 13 February. Interestingly, the choice of date was no less significant than the proceedings, it being the birth anniversary of Sarojini Naidu, India&’s “Nightingale”.
The seminar was propelled into orbit by Professor Nabanita Deb Sen&’s keynote address, wherein she focused on the importance of making Feminism a mainstream discipline in academia, where the exclusionary stakes of gender have been driven in with some violence. She noted how practitioners of “gender theory” had been regarded either with derision or suspicion and used the sauce of anecdotes drawn from her own life to season her discourse. Poignantly, she dwelt on the subtleties and intricacies involved in merging the porous boundaries of various disciplinary aspirations under the larger rubric of “gender studies”. Her encounter with the rise of ’70s radical Feminism, her experiences as a writer after her exposure to Western feminist thought and her status as a single mother were all brought out, but with an understated maturity and social awareness.
There was no Feminism that could be indulged in, she suggested, but kept, harmlessly, at arm&’s length. It was when Feminism became a career that the troubles erupted. It was about bringing Feminism truly home. That, as she pointed out, was the horizon of the “beyond” that everyone awaited. The first session that followed was chaired by Professor Jayati Gupta of West Bengal State University and there were three distinguished speakers in Professor Geraldine Forbes of New York State University, Professor Bonnie Zare of the University of Wyoming and Professor Krishna Sen of the University of Calcutta.
Professor Forbes prefaced her talk by dwelling briefly on the way in which her research developed from an unlikely archive: a box of glass plate negatives, lanternslides, negatives taped to glass and ordinary negatives, all pertaining to India. Among them were lanternslides used by Samuel A Perrine in his “infotainment” talks for the Dunbar Chautauqua Bureau of Chicago, circa World War I, as well as photographs from Perrine&’s years as a missionary to the Ao Nagas in North-eastern India from 1892-1905. These photographs led her to questions about history and memory, archives and visual evidence. Perrine and his archive attracted her attention because he had used images from his decade in India to create two different stories for two different audiences. It was this fragility of narrativisation, the changeling nature of the “story” that led her, she said, to the Mahanta-Elokeshi affair, or the Tarakeswar murder case of 1873.
In her reading of the case, she attempted to establish how it might be useful in helping us think about the persistence of and justification for violence against women. While 19th century reformers were concerned with changing society and especially women&’s position through education and entry into the professions, as she demonstrated amply, ideas about women&’s nature and vulnerability persisted. Forbes concluded by distinguishing between “Women&’s history” and “Gender history”. While the former made visible the lives of women, the latter was an explication of the relationships between men and women that could help undo injustice in gender relations.
Professor Zare sought to demonstrate how contemporary popular culture artifacts perpetuated mainstream misunderstandings about women of colour and influence American ideology about incarcerated women generally, omitting crucial information about repeated patterns of injustice that lead to the disproportionate imprisonment of non-white women. To illustrate her thesis, she chose to speak on the TV series Orange is the New Black and explore avenues that would advance dialogue about the sorority behind bars. She concluded her lucid and deeply committed talk by analysing poems written by women in prisons: voices that are muffled, but deserve to be heard.
Professor Sen explored the routes Dali Feminism in India had charted for itself. She began by trying to trace it to its roots, dwelling on the significant influence of the Black Panthers’ movement and African American cultural nationalism of the 1960s on the Indian Dalit Panther movement and Dalit cultural nationalism from ’70s onwards.
She pointed out how contemporary Dalit feminists look to African-American women writers and theorists for inspiration in negotiating similar problems — notably the need to contest embedded patriarchy within their own societal formations while presenting a common front along with their men against external hegemonic forces. But Sen saved the most illuminating area of her scrutiny till the end, wherein she spoke on examples of revisionary Dalit cultural nationalism, including testimonio, poetry and the Godna paintings. She held forth on the different innovations made by practitioners like Chano Devi and Jamuna Devi whereby Dalit women had begun, slowly, to appropriate the style, content and cosmology of upper caste artworks. Sen suggested this was one of the ways in which Dalit women had been attempting to lift themselves out of the morass of Dalit guilt to a new order of Dalit self-fashioning.
In the post-lunch session, Dr Paromita Chakraborty of Jadavpur University talked of the crucial role of feminist solidarities and chose the life and work of Adrienne Rich to make her point. Rich was keenly engaged intellectually and politically in struggles for justice and her work as a writer reflected these political commitments. Over a long life and a prodigious literary career, she had demonstrated, repeatedly, the importance of, and her commitment to, the will to change. Chakraborty concentrated particularly on Rich&’s concept of the “lesbian continuum”, a term she’d coined in her 1986 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”. By constructing sexual identity along a gradient, the term offered an alternative to traditional binary classifications of sexual identity. This concept was formulated with the intent of including women who do not ordinarily think of themselves as lesbians, specifically women who identified as heterosexuals.
Dr Anirban Das, currently Fellow in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, spoke at length on the positions he had been trying to demythologise pertaining to the role of corporeality in Feminism. He illustrated his learned talk with examples from his book, Toward a Politics of the (Im)Possible: The Body in Third World Feminisms. He situated his intervention at the intersection of two related yet different fields — one, the heterogeneous feminist effort to question universal forms of knowing and the other that followed from the mind/body dichotomy. He further explored the dynamics of the production of the “body” with a focus on the “others” (death, sexual and colonial differences) that fracture and define the notion of the body. An ethical responsibility to the “others”, he said, consonant with the “ontologically” differentiated body distinguished this notion of embodiment from standard versions of Third World Feminism.
The proceedings were rounded off by an emotionally charged panel discussion on the Queer Question and the ramifications of the Supreme Court judgment regarding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Law, re-criminalising “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”. Students of West Bengal State University, independent scholars and other college and university faculty present were set abuzz with excitement by the teasing presentations.