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Let's be `outlaws'
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It's time we learnt to say a few unrespectable things, says Nivedita Menon
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— Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.
Nivedita Menon: `Our laws on dowry, sexual violence or obscenity and pornography haven't really helped us.'
OUR RULES on sexual conduct, argues Nivedita Menon, are as arbitrary as the rules on traffic. They may both create a sense of order. But it's absurd to assume that there is anything "natural" about either of them, says the reader in political science, Delhi University, on the recent episode of a lesbian couple in Kerala having to seek court intervention to stop police persecution. "If `normal' behaviour were so natural, it would not require such a vast network of controls to keep it in place... Are there laws forcing people to eat or sleep? But there is a law forcing people to have sex in a particular way!"
We're defined by the law and the state machinery, whether or not we like it. And so, we constantly need to address them: work, in this case, towards the repeal of Section 377 that insists on creating "Mr. and Mrs. Normal".
But Nandita believes there are limits to how far one can take the route of legal reform to bring about changes. Her recent book, Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law, talks about the limits of this route. While in Bangalore for a discussion around the book organised by Mahila Okkoota, a women's collective, she spoke about how feminist movement has addressed every issue through the law, be it domestic violence, sexual violence, or foeticide. "It's increasingly felt, even within the feminist movement, that law is seen as a short cut to social transformation."
What's more, law is often not just inadequate, but also counter-productive. Nivedita, who combines academic arguments with an activist edge, comes up with another example.
"Look at the cases where there have been convictions for rape. They are based on some patriarchal assumption or the other. Chances of conviction are higher if the victim is a young, virgin woman. All the better if she belongs to the upper class." In some cases judges have ruled in favour of the victim saying that unlike in the West, Indian women would not make false claims of rape. "That's a highly reactionary way to get conviction! It's a successful case, but in net result, it has reinforced patriarchal norms."
What the feminist movement needs to do now, as the title of her book says, is to "recover its subversive potential" to challenge dominant common sense. "Many of us came to feminism because of this potential. Not because it helps us change the law, but because it help us change ourselves. We have lost that. I think feminism has now become institutionalised, contained, and domesticated. All it does is legal reform and a certain kind of developmental work." Nivedita asks, for instance, why we need a special law to address the question of domestic violence. "There is already a law against violence," she says. "What we need is a strong movement that helps women get out of abusive relationships. A law on domestic violence is necessitated because we don't have a thoroughgoing critique of the patriarchal family."
But would these abstract notions of change, without a concrete framework of law — a police station, a trial court, and so on — work for an on-the-ground activist. Nivedita says that they need a larger vision all the more because they are exhausted by the daily grind of individual cases, at the end of which they rarely achieve anything. "It's like sticking several band aids and several new wounds erupting." Her point, she reiterates, is not that we don't need the law.
"If there is a communal violence, for instance, I would expect the police to act. But these are fire-fighting exercises and not those that change the basic structures."
Activists on the ground have to do these exercises, but the vision of the movement should not be simply rescuing individual in specific cases.
Nivedita does believe that there was a point in history when laws were emancipatory. For instance, when women won voting rights. But the gains of the feminist movement within the legal, constitutional framework stopped around the mid-20th Century. "Why do we imagine that a law made 400 years ago will have the same currency and value? Laws on dowry, sexual violence, obscenity and pornography, none of these have really helped us." Making the laws tighter isn't an answer either, she says and cites our abortion laws to illustrate the point. If we begin to tighten them as a measure against female foeticide, we may, at another level, be harming a woman's reproductive rights. Only a nuanced, feminist perspective and not a law that renders everything in flat, universalist, uniform framework would work. "The law is incapable of bearing the feminist vision we are trying to embody in it. The vision is far too complex," she says.
The real gains of feminist movement today have to do with transformation of family structures, public spaces and so on. We continue hang on to the legal framework, she adds, because it seems "doable and tangible".
We presume that once we debate, change, and put a law in place, it becomes simply accessible to women, which is rarely how it works on the ground.
It's time, Nivedita feels, we got out of this framework and started saying a few "unrespectable things". (A personal aside: when the principal of a college where she taught suggested that teachers should wear traditional clothes, Nivedita riposted that women in her community traditionally wore no upper garment. That instantly marked the end of the debate!) She says that we need to, for instance, address the charge always hurled at feminists that they are home breakers.
"We have always said no, no, we're not. Let's face it; feminists do want to break family as it exists. But we never say that. We say we just want to mend it and make it look nice."
Internal churnings
But the minute we say the laws aren't good enough, aren't we more or less condemned to go underground? Not necessarily, says Nivedita. The barrage of K serials on television itself, for her, is an indicator of the churning within the family structure.
"Why is there so such desperation to reinforce these values if they're doing well? I think there is a real sense of crisis and we can tap it." Look at the profile of the maker of all these family soaps herself: a single woman in her late 20s running a business empire!
BAGESHREE S.
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