A delicious irony on the centenary of the International Women’s Day on March 8 is the number of free beauty and spa treatments being advertised in the run-up to celebrate the occasion.
The beauty blitzkrieg may signal the corporate hijack of yet another political event, but it also reflects the complex perceptions about feminism and gender in post-globalisation India. In the mass media’s reductionist jargon, many will refer to these perceptions as the “mainstreaming” of feminism. So, we have the founder-editor of Manushi, a journal on women and society, asserting that she doesn’t like to be called a feminist because she is not part of any “isms”. “I do not like the tag of being a feminist. I may believe in Gandhi, but I am not a Gandhian. It is true of all ‘isms’.
I don’t believe in any isms,” Madhu Kishwar says. There would be many who espouse the “I’m not a feminist” line, though not necessarily for the same reasons as Kishwar’s.
A primary factor in feminism being labeled ‘ugly’, before of course the beauty brigade seriously got down to prettifying one and all to commemorate the Women’s Day, is the propensity to downgrade any discourse that is political in nature.
“When an empowered woman says she is not a feminist, she is rejecting the political construct, although she has no qualms about enjoying the individual freedom that came with it,” says Manish Sethy, a member of the faculty of Jamia Millia Islamia.
“The fact is, no one has a problem if women’s empowerment can sell consumer goods. In fact, the Indian market recognised the potential too late. In the West, we’ve had cigarette brands being sold in the name of feminism. It is politics that challenges the status quo that people are opposed to,” he adds.
What Sethy is referring to is the 1978 Virginia Slims advertisement that had a photograph of a woman hanging laundry outside. The ad text read: “Back then, every man gave his wife at least one day a week out of the house. You’ve come a long way, baby. Virginia Slims — Slimmer than the fat cigarettes men smoke.”
The abhorrence for attracting labels such as ‘feminist’, according to some experts, may be symptomatic of the “depoliticisation” of a day that celebrates the journey to women’s empowerment. But such tendencies are not central to the new feminist discourse.
According to Anita Roy, who works for the feminist publishing house Zubaan, it may also signal gradual “mainstreaming” of what was once considered an exclusive, and peripheral, space to counter a largely patriarchal discourse. “In the 60s and the 70s there was a specific need to raise consciousness;
women needed to be engaged with a certain kind of politics. Things are different now and women’s responses are more layered and complex,” she says. The discourse now is much more nuanced and not overtly political, as was the case with the 60’s feminists.
Women have diversified and started engaging with a whole lot of other issues such as caste, environment and, of course, gender.
An important instance of this “diversification and mainstreaming” of feminism that resists labels is the political event that the much-derided Valentine’s Day has become. What started off as a corporate initiative to sell greeting cards is now widely recognised as an event that marks the assertion of sexuality by women, mostly in provincial India. “I am a great supporter of Valentine’s Day. It just proves we have evolved and diversified. The language of the new feminist discourse is radically different from all set notions,” says Kavita Srivastava of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties.
23 per cent girls in India discontinue studies due to inadequate sanitary facilities in schools. Delhi govt will soon make available sanitary napkins free in all its schools
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