Stree Mukti
Sangathan has organised its 17th workshop from 8-10 October, in
Naugarh, Varansi, Uttar Pradesh. The workshop had four main sessions and each
session had a brainstorming discussion. About seventy women raging from
students to working women and activists participated in the workshop. The idea
behind these sessions was to enhance our understanding on the emerging
political and theoretical issues and share experience of the different groups
and to learn from their experience. The
short description of each session is given here;
Feminism in
Neoliberal Times- Dr. Sudha Vasan, Sociology Department, University of Delhi
If historically
the term feminism has meant different things at different junctures by
different people, what according to us is the feminist project? Popularly the
struggle for various rights of women in several domains is seen as a feminist
struggle. Challenging the social norms of gender may be another such struggle
or a critique of the division of labour in society; the redistribution of
resources as well as reservations can also be acknowledged as part of the
feminist agenda. However, none of these can in a summative manner make up the
feminist project which is a total transformation of society, i.e. fundamentally
uprooting patriarchy by its annihilation - to use Ambedkar’s formulation –
which differed from his contemporaries who sought reform or betterment instead
of annihilation of caste.
The struggle
for some specific rights of women or the benefits or power that some individual
women may enjoy may not conflate and at times contradict with the project of
annihilation of patriarchy. Some of the examples that were discussed were: the
expectation that women in positions of power would do things for the betterment
of all women or make those spaces gender sensitive was a flawed one because of
the assumption that by being a woman, one automatically seeks the interest of
women instead of their own well-being, seems impractical and illogical. The demand
for representation of women may in itself be important but separate from the
struggle to end patriarchy. This same principle could apply to the recent
discussion around the presidential candidature in America which has never seen
a woman president and yet her support for policies detrimental to a majority of
American women has us wonder about the impact.
Another example
is when women in a position to employ cheap labour who seek their own freedom
from household work are more likely to exploit another woman than to fight for
men sharing the household work. This should have one reflect on what
implications does this have on our ideas of ‘natural’ sisterhood. Or someone
seeking the benefits of a child care policy as a working woman may be getting
time off of exploitative labour in one way but also at the same time be
reinforcing ideas of ‘caring women’ and involving other kinds of unequal work
at home. This again shouldn’t imply moral judgement towards a specific person
but reiterate the point that benefits for women may not always go along with
the larger struggle against patriarchy.
This also comes
back to the relationship between individual and society. And when we have to
speak about the end of patriarchy, the idea of an organization is essentially
interconnected. Thus one individual’s life struggle is not necessarily a
struggle against patriarchy, even if it has its own importance. The basis of
organizing needn’t be one’s own experience, even though it may be possible that
experience may have a role. And one may gain experience in the course of
collectively fighting against something. While sisterhood has been an important
aspect of organizing in the feminist movement, the reason why women are more
likely to fight against patriarchy is because of the existing conditions in
which they face more oppression but there is no natural correlation between the
two. Men can also be feminists, and in different conditions in society, more
men could become feminists.
The end of
patriarchy as a total transformative project also includes the struggle against
capitalism, but doesn’t exhaust itself there. While first wave feminism
emphasized the entry of women in the workspace, today capitalism itself needs
women as a workforce and women face new forms of patriarchy. The difference
between exploitation and oppression allows one to emphasize this point. In a
given mode of production, for instance capitalism, the labour-capital
relationship (a relationship of exploitation) may use existing forms of
oppression such as the threat of rape or violence against women, but may not be
necessary to it. Oppression predates capitalism and may persist beyond the end
of capitalism.
Agency, Structure, and Change: The case of
Feminist project and Women’s Movement- Dr. Ravi Sinha, Political Activist and
Marxist Scholar, New Socialist Initiative
This session
started with the unpacking of political terminology. Feminism as we understand
is a theory and practice of women’s emancipation. Emancipation is freedom from
restrictions and oppressions faced on account of being women. Oppression,
subordination and deprivation are three important concepts in feminist theory.
There are various types of feminist theories which vary with each other in the
analysis of society and gender and their politics of change. Feminism also have had various debates in
order to understand the reality such as how the reality is being constructed
socially, the essentialism debate and what makes woman (or man)? Gender is a
deepest layer of the social individual. However gender as a category can be
compare with race, caste and class. Social reality is constituted along a
multiplicity of social axes: gender, caste, class, race/ethnicity, sexuality,
postcoloniality and so on. Domination by white women and exclusion of women of
color in the feminist movement in the west started the debate; exclusion within
the feminist movement along racial and other social axes was posed as a central
problem of feminism. The arguments given were that women of color have social
experience different from both white women and men of color; they cannot be
represented by someone who does not experience life the way they do and race
and gender (and, for that matter, other major social axes) are not independent
variables and cannot be added or subtracted from each other. The essentialism
debate also pitches in this debate arguing that women do not share an essence
(“womanhood”); black women are constructed differently from white women. In the
process recognition of difference and exclusion has led to fragmentation. There
is a need to pay fresh attention to social ontology of Gender.
Agency is
roughly defined by three properties; intentionality, instrumentality and
standpoint. Agency can be understood as surplus to structure. Agent is an
external to the structure, in that sense agency must come from the “outside”. Structures
have their own internal dynamics; this dynamics is animated through
role-players located at the nodes of the social relations constituting the
given structure; it does not require agency. Structural dynamics expresses
itself also through conflict of interests; subsumed social individuals located
at different nodes have different interests (workers-capitalists, women-men,
Dalits-Brahmins and so on). Interests, in this sense, are internal to
structures; not sufficient to define agency; class-interest, for example, is
not enough to define class-agency. Women’s interest (in the context of the
patriarchal structure) is not enough to define women’s agency with respect to
that structure. The principal domain of patriarchy is ‘life-world’ (social,
cultural and private life); but it intrudes into the ‘system’-domain in a major
way. The dynamics of the ‘system’ and the struggles in this domain can play
crucially important role in protection or abolition of the patriarchal
structure.
Women’s
revolutionary agency (feminist agency) arises out of the socially created
woman, but it exceeds itself; it is surplus to the woman. Woman’s social and
life experience and her interests are key ingredients in her making, but not
enough to constitute her agency vis a vis the patriarchal structure. The
surplus comes from a variety of sources – from other layers of the human
individual as well as from life and experience along other axes of social
reality. Advent of modernity offered the biggest opening to the ‘external
world’ – a kind of Archimedean Point from where to change the “woman’s world”;
the system-society differentiation is one such example where processes in the
systemic domain can intervene into the patriarchal structure from “outside”. Changes
in women’s lives and in the patriarchal structures have been greatly
accelerated after the advent of modernity; three thousand years of experiencing
oppression and subjugation did not result in as robust an agency and as
significant a change as have happened during the three centuries of modernity. In the process of change, patriarchy will be
abolished, but as some feminists think that gender as social relation of
subordination will be abolished, but as an identity will continue. It is an
almost universal aspect of social process that difference gives rise to
identity; key objective should be that identities should not result in
inequalities, exclusions and subordination; “different must be equal”. In the
domain of change women of-course wants, Emancipation – Abolition of Patriarchy;
full self-determination; enhanced autonomy – but what does this translate into?
What are the steps? The steps could be; the system, the public sphere, the
community and the family. There are three tasks for strategic reorientation;
• Task 1: Open out, do not close in!
– Feminist project is not the only project of
women – Feminist project is not the project of women only
– Remember, agency comes from the “outside”;
remain “inside” but be the “outside”; march out
– know everything, fight everywhere, conquer
everything
– Woman’s
revolutionary agency (Feminist Agency) = Women’s Interest + Woman’s Will +
Woman’s Knowledge of Everything
– Overemphasis on experience and an overdose of
phenomenological approach is harmful; do not demand ‘reservation’ within the
movement and do not ask for women’s monopoly over the feminist project; be
confident of your leadership over the feminist project and over the women’s
movement
• Task 2: Take sides, link with others!
– Women may
be divided according to castes, but feminists must take sides with the
oppressed castes
– Women may
be workers and women may also be capitalists, but feminists must side with the
workers
– Women may be divided according to race,
ethnicity, nationality, and so on; but feminists always side with the oppressed
everywhere
– Majority of women may be hetero-sexual, but
feminists defend individual’s right to sexuality and sexual choice
• Task 3: Bring the women back in!
– Undo the
ill-effects of emphasizing Intersectionality; stop fragmentation of the
feminist project and of the women’s movement
– Once again, do not overemphasize experience and
difference; race, caste, community and so on do not trump women and the
feminist project; fight for equality and justice but do not ask for reservation
within the movement for your own caste or color
– Sexuality is an issue for everyone – men, women,
third gender; feminists fight for sexual choice like everyone else
– it is not their monopoly nor is it their special
task
– Do away with all the fashionable postmodern
nonsense; do not be afraid of universals because there are universals albeit
approximate and qualified; do not shun every form of essentialism because there
are useful essentialisms
– Feminists
fight everywhere and march out to conquer everything but women remain at the
heart of their project
– Women have a world to win, but they must keep
their own emancipation as their first objective and their central aim
Autonomous Women’s Movement- Vasudha Katju, Ph.D Research
Scholar, JNU
The session on the
autonomous women’s movement began with a brief presentation on the emergence of
this movement in the 1970s. The need for autonomous women’s organizing arose
from the need to break free from the hegemony of men and male-dominated
organizations and political parties, and create a space where women activists
could priorities women’s issues. The nature of the autonomous collective, as
non-hierarchical, informal groups, was also discussed. Changes, over time, to
the definition of autonomy and to autonomous politics (in the form of the
growing significance of NGOs and funding, and formal, closed organizations
respectively) were highlighted.
One important issue is the
relative weight given to the autonomous movement in the history of women’s
activism in India, especially compared to party-affiliated women’s
organisations. While there is a variety of published material on all types of
women’s activism, the autonomous movement has a certain prominence. NGOisation
and the relationship between autonomous collectives and funded organisations
were also discussed. The understandings of feminism and women’s issues, and the
activities and ways of working of collectives, were also highlighted.
The discussion which followed the presentation focused on various issues. One was the presence of informal and hidden hierarchies in all types of organizations and collectives, regardless of size. Many members discussed the difficulty in sustaining large organizations without any structure, and the need to balance hierarchy with a robust internal democracy, transparency and accountability. The issue of the development of an autonomous politics was also discussed with a lot of interest. Here, the need to sustain activists without prescribing a single, dominant, ‘superior’ form of activism was empahasised; of not having a hierarchy of activism. The question of why the women’s movement was not able to sustain fulltime activists was also raised, and how women who lack personal resources could be able to take leadership roles within the women’s movement.
Pinjratod: Break the
cages. A presentation on the movement- Pinjra Tod Team
Pinjratod defines itself as an autonomous collective effort and a
movement to ensure secure, affordable and not gender-discriminatory
accommodation for women students across Delhi broadly.
The movement was triggered off by an angry anonymous letter that was
written to the VC of Jamia University by a woman hosteler in August last year,
when the hostel administration arbitrarily canceled the two meager
'late-nights' 'granted' to her in a month. This powerful letter had
passionately captured the humiliation, frustration, discrimination and rage
that women students across universities in the country faced. The open letter
eventually led to a petition addressed to the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW),
marking the inception of Pinjra Tod's journey as a movement of women students
across campuses in the country. A Jan Sunwai was conducted in the month of
October last year where women from various colleges and universities spoke of
their experiences of discrimination and harassment, a charter of demand was then submitted to DCW
along with a detailed report of experiences of women students in university
spaces. We came together with a common understanding that there exists a
diverse range of discriminatory rules and regulations that seek to restrict the
access and mobility of young women who come to study, work and live in this
city. And our demands center on this understanding.
Night marches have been an important form to make visible to other women
the coming together of women on campus. We have repeatedly seen that this has
opened up a space for women of different colleges to walk together and
contribute and derive strength from a collective in these marches. We see a new
connection being built in this one year of women students across the country
who are taking up the issues like humiliation by warden or provost, dress code
in colleges and universities, curfew timings and many other similar issues with
Pinjratod and opens up a possibility of having some common basis for all women
students to connect with each.
During the course of the movement that is talking and connecting women
students fighting for changing the structures which cage women, we are also
constantly engaging with and emphasizing on creating a different social reality
through a collective struggle.
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