And She Is Like That (aval appadithan)

What is feminism? The term, especially in South Asia, conjures up a rabble rousing, unwashed, shrill, masses of women protesting for equal rights, enforcement of existing laws promoting equality, - protesting against religious and sexual norms that subjugate women; - protesting for pro-choice (and the ability to have a safe abortion), equality of inheritance, political representation, recognition in the eyes of the law (the police), security and safety, the right to enter the workforce at par with men (something that is lacking even in the West), the right not to be stigmatized for independent choices...

Then after this, might come a total re-conceptualization. These are after all norms that are defined by men, and by a political/social contract that privileged men and their ideas. So women are left in the position, as someone pointed out, of having to struggle for parity for laws that are inherently conceptualized by somebody else (laws both domestic and international that have all sorts of tendencies built in, not the least of which is the primary role assigned to violence).

When I was younger, my eyes would glaze over at the above litany. After all, I was a product of an affluent, seemingly-female-liberated society. Choice was available to me, in nearly all senses of the word, at face value. And then I grew up and realized the struggles that a generation prior to me had undergone, the battles left to fight, the responsibility to help those weaker than me (something which I have abrogated at the moment, to my own disappointment) - and realized how far I personally had left to go, in this struggle for 'feminism'. I used to dismiss the term, and now I feel that it has begun to define me. Even the smallest instances of hypocrisy, I re-frame now in the lens of feminism. Perhaps it is not useful to do so, probably not all the time. But the tradition and political history of feminism has made me sensitive now to perceived slights, hypocrisies, small violences.

Anyway. We are all a long way off of that. As women, we are yet to recast the world in the image of ourselves and it is enormously difficult to escape the 'lock'; to be truly original; to see the world the way we want to see it, and not in a way that we have been taught to (by men, and by other women).

And to change the perceptions of other women too. In this i am hesitant. Nobody wants to be evangelical; to proselytize; to preach from a pulpit with a bullhorn. Indeed, this method does not allow the message to get through even; all it will do is propagate dogma (which liberals are equally capable of, as anyone else). - Yet it is important to change other women too; to be role models, to live the message in everything we do, at sometimes, the cost of contentment, and happiness.

I saw this movie the other day. I don't think it is a paean to feminism; rather; there are a few scenes I especially like in it (Aval Appadithan). First, it shows the subtle effects of living in a society (where one has superficial choice, to get a job, to live independently, etc.etc., but ultimately one is at the mercy of men who are cruel, who use women for sexual pleasure, who dominate women and repress their capacity to express themselves, - a society where one has to be an extreme, one has to be contrarian in order to live at all; one is pushed to the furthest edges in order to survive (in fact, there is an entirely realistic episode where the heroine is almost overcome by exhaustion, fear, anxiety and apprehension and becomes delirious, only at the end, for the moment to end in sexual ambiguity as she is saved by a man, and she faints. Then comes a very real dialogue between 2 men, as they discuss the plight of women; pulled in one end to be dependent (on a father, on a husband, not only financially, but that the state of the family is emotionally, physically and psychologically structured as such) - and pulled in the other end by this urge to be free, to be INdependent, but what does that look like? Can one really live with a man and be independent? (A question to which there is no textbook answer). - and the man goes; this is the state of woman. It is true, and yet, what a terrible tension, a contradiction at the heart of women, to live with everyday. One way lies extreme isolation and despair, on the other end, lies subjugation. And then the final scene, where she asks another woman; (the woman who marries the man she has finally found, who she thinks she can live with, resolve this contradiction within herself, be herself AND be happy- and in the end, he abandons her because he cannot live with her cruelty to herself and the jaggedness of her dichotomies) - do you know women's liberation? And the other woman, says no. And she says, and that is why you are happy.

Bleak perhaps, but true.