Against Purity

Rethinking Identity with Indian and Western Feminisms

Irene Gedalof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415215879
• eBook ISBN: 9781134607426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Against Purity confronts the difficulties that white Western feminism has in balancing issues of gender with other forms of difference, such as race, ethnicity and nation. This pioneering study places recent feminist theory from India in critical conversation with the work of key Western thinkers such as Butler, haraway and Irigaray and argues that, through such postcolonial encounters, contemporary feminist thought can begin to work 'against purity' in order to develop more complex models of power, identity and the self, ultimately to redefine 'women' as the subject of feminism.
Theoretically grounded yet written in an accessible style, this is a unique contribution to ongoing feminist debates about identity, power and difference.

Part I
Indian complications

Chapter 1
Women and community identities in Indian feminisms

Returning home to India after several years studying feminist theory in the US, feminist scholar Mary John ends her 1996 book with a call for Western feminists to see the East as something more than an object of their inquiries:

Western feminists need to reconsider what they are out to learn from the distant places they visit. Instead of developing ever more theoretically sophisticated twists on the cross-cultural construction of gender, why not attend also to feminist voices from elsewhere?

(John 1996:144, emphasis in the original)

In Part I of this book, I will be taking Mary John’s advice to heart, although I would also want to rephrase her formulation. This project is about developing a theoretically more sophisticated understanding of women’s identity, by attending to feminist voices from elsewhere. Nevertheless, attending to feminist voices from anywhere is not a simple process, and I want first to clarify which Indian feminist voices I am using, what I am listening for and how I propose to put those voices together with the white Western feminist theoretical projects which are the principal object of this inquiry.

This project aims to consider how postcolonial feminisms, such as those being developed in India, can productively complicate theoretical approaches to identity prevalent in Western feminisms. The Indian feminist voices I engage with are, therefore, limited by a number of factors. They are limited, first, to Indian feminists who are interested in engaging in this particular process, who locate themselves in an intellectual space of taking up ideas that may have originated in Western feminist movements, but which they are now in the process of changing to suit a different context. For me, this is part of the multidirectional process of theorising in a postcolonial mode. It is important that white Western feminists make the effort to notice how the theories they work with can be changed and complicated when put to use outside a white Western framework.

Second, I have selected material in which I have been able to identify either an explicit or implicit engagement with theoretical models of identity. This means that I am using some material which is not self-consciously ‘doing theory’ together with some that is, and that I will be putting different theoretical approaches together and taking them in directions their authors might not have intended, and may well disagree with. I draw on feminist historical studies of India’s nationalist movement for independence from Britain, and on studies of representations of women in literature from and about the nationalist period. I also look at political and cultural analyses of women’s place in contemporary Indian society, particularly in the context of the recent rise of right-wing communalist movements in the Hindu and Muslim communities. What holds these disparate texts together for me is that they all speak to questions of identity and, more particularly, they focus on identity-constituting sites where intersections between gender, nation and race identities are highlighted. This is a self-consciously selective engagement that is animated by a Western feminist location and a recognition that white Western feminism has had difficulty in dealing adequately with just these intersections.

Third, I have tended to privilege work that is interested both in questions of representation and in material practices and activities that affect women’s identities. In my interpretations of the material I have selected, therefore, I try to identify distinctions between ‘Woman’ and ‘women’, and between the female and the feminine. Building on the Foucauldian framework established in the Introduction, I work with a sense of multiple discursive systems, rather than a single Symbolic order; thus I am also concerned to identify the different versions of ‘Woman’ and ‘women’ at play in identity-constitution processes.

I am, therefore, interested in showing how (specific and limited) groups of women are being discursively and strategically positioned. By discursive positioning, I mean their location in a variety of cultural, political and historical narratives. By strategic positioning, I mean how women’s activities, as filtered through those discourses, are located within particular networks of power relations and produce material effects. At the same time I recognise that none of these positionings is ever fully stable, complete or closed, their effects are not always as intended, nor are they homogeneous.

Respecting the complexity and specificity of work produced in another context is always difficult. The material I engage with in these two chapters is, quite rightly, more concerned to speak to the complexities of Indian society than to Western feminists, and recognising and respecting that space is part of what postcolonial theory is about. As Donna Haraway has noted, there is always a ‘very fine line between appropriation of another’s (never innocent) experience and the delicate construction of the just-barely-possible affinities, the just-barely- possible connections that might actually make a difference in local and global histories’ (Haraway 1991: 113). It is difficult to imagine completely avoiding the risk of a Western feminist constructing yet another East to serve Western purposes, and my engagement with Indian feminisms remains open-ended in recognition of this.

But another part of what the postcolonial mode means is that there are no pure spaces called ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, and this inevitable impurity and intermingling is what makes those connections ‘just-barely-possible’. I think it also means that the changes and complications effected on feminist theory in a place like India can help make more visible the questions that have not been asked, and that still need to be asked, by white Western feminists in our own impure spaces.

It should be clear by now that this project is not about representing India, or even Indian feminisms, to the West. My purpose is not to attempt a ‘complete picture’ of the many women’s movements in India, nor to argue that such and such a theoretical approach best suits Indian conditions. I recognise that many other intellectual currents, which I do not discuss, exist among Indian women scholars and activists. Thus, for example, I am not engaging with those who argue in different ways for a sharp demarcation from what they identify as ‘Western feminism’. While Western feminists no doubt have much to learn from the challenges these women present to our knowledge-claims, they have in a sense placed themselves outside the particular conversation this project is interested in.

Also, I have tried to make clear that when I write about ‘Woman’, or ‘women’, I am doing it in relation to a particular discourse under discussion, or a particular feminist’s take on a specific group of women’s activities, and am not making any universalised claims about (all Indian) women or a singular construct of ‘the Indian Woman’. Nevertheless, whilst I am not making any claims to represent the situation of Indian women or the state of Indian feminism, I am seeking to generalise from the selective work I have engaged with. I have tried to identify certain commonalities and connections between these materials, relating to women’s discursive and strategic positionings across the categories of social identity such as sex, gender, race and nation, in order to suggest the contours of a more generalised ‘economy’ or ‘logic’ with which women need to contend, if always in specific ways, and which feminist theoretical models need to make space for. Finally, I want to note that, whilst I refer to all the feminists discussed in this chapter as Indian, I recognise that they are not all located in India. There is, however, a steady intellectual flow between work produced by ‘diasporic’ Indian academics and those ‘at home’, which is yet another condition of the ‘postcolonial mode’.

Part I is divided into two chapters. In this first chapter I focus on Indian feminist discussions of the relationship between sex, gender, nation and race in identity-constitution. I begin in the first section by looking at how different Indian feminists take the intersection of these identity categories as a starting point for examining a two-way process: on the one hand, what these different identity categories ‘do’ to produce women’s sense of self; but also, on the other hand, what women do to help produce those categories of identity. Women’s productive role in constituting national and raced identities at legal and discursive levels is discussed, as is the importance of the specifically female body. In the second and third sections of this chapter I look in more detail at Indian feminist discussions of how and why the female body becomes a ‘useful body’ to identity-constituting processes. The second section considers appropriations of birth and the mother-figure, while the third looks at women’s positioning in time and space.

Throughout Chapter 1 I suggest a tension in Indian feminisms between tendencies to limit women’s ‘usefulness’ in the emergence of community identities to a passive role, and other approaches that suggest a more active productivity of ‘women’ at both strategic and discursive levels. In Chapter 2 , I discuss these differences of approach more explicitly, when I turn to Indian feminist work on questions of women’s agency, and feminist alternative models of the self and collective identities.

Women and identities: sex, gender, nation, race

My reading of Indian feminisms focuses on the question of ‘Woman’s’ and ‘women’s’ discursive and strategic location in the emergence of national, racial, religious and other community identities. Much of the work I have examined from India suggests an approach to identity that keeps women central to the analysis whilst also recognising that what is under analysis cannot be completely accommodated within a frame of gender or sexual difference. Discursive constructs and appropriations of ‘Woman’, the feminine and the female, as well as the material practices and activities of women, emerge and are put into play within a complex network of ‘games of truth’ that, while being necessarily and deeply gendered, are also, and at the same time, intimately concerned with national, racialised and community identities and relations of power.

In their introduction to one of the first collections of feminist historical studies of the nationalist movement, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid argued that underpinning ‘every attempt towards identity has been a redescription of women’ (Sangari and Vaid 1990:9). Many other Indian feminists have shared this interest in tracking the distinct ways in which ‘redescribing women’ has formed part of redefining national and other community identities. Two historical moments seem particularly significant to the Indian feminists I discuss here for highlighting women’s strategic and discursive locations across the apparently discrete categories of sex/gender, race, nation and community. The first of these is the nationalist opposition to British colonial rule through the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Women’s status and their participation in the pro-independence struggle became key issues shaping the politics of the anti-colonialist period. But equally, contestations over definitions of the feminine, over the norms and ideals invested in ‘Woman’, and over the meanings to be read into women’s activities and feminised spheres of social life were to bear enormous symbolic weight in the emerging versions of the postcolonial Indian nation.

The second moment of particular significance is the more recent rise of Hindu-Muslim communalism¹ in the 1980s and 1990s. Here again, both the political and the cultural focus are not directly, or not at first glance, on issues of gender or sexual difference. The games of truth emerging in the highly charged context of communal conflict turn around questions of both nationhood and race. On the one hand, the project of the Hindu right pivots around the purifying imperative of a Hindu rashtra (Hindu nation) that would reduce the postcolonial Indian sense of nation-ness—always a precarious balancing act between an officially secular state and a complex, multi-ethnic and multi-religious people—to a Hindu component alone. On the other hand, the physical, political and symbolic conflicts that characterise communalism are marked by rival attempts to fix unchanging truths about essential, birth-based differences between the religious groups. In this sense, communalism racialises religious difference, and religion is used as a racial denominator or dividing-line within the broader community of the Indian polis (Sarkar and Butalia 1995:6).

Complexity models

Clearly, neither of these historical moments can be approached adequately through the critical lens of gender or sexual difference alone. Nevertheless, ‘Woman’ and ‘women’ remain highly visible, and, some will argue, even central components of these identity-constituting processes. What Kumkum Roy has called this ‘curious visibility of women’ (Roy 1995:10) in colonial and postcolonial discourse and practice has led many Indian feminists to work with models of identity that privilege complexity, particularly in terms of the ways in which gender intersects with nation, race, class and caste. As Roy summarises it, there is:

an understanding that the concern with constructing and reconstructing women stems from a variety of agendas which are not necessarily women-centred, as a result of which women’s identities are constituted through processes which are complex and by no means bounded within the framework of a single logic.

(Roy 1995:10)

Roy suggests here one aspect of working with a complex model of identity, that is, the ways in which women’s identities emerge through these competing agendas and multiple categories of social identity. Kumkum Sangari makes a similar point in relation to understanding women as agents when she argues that ‘notions of femaleness, self or identity’ are so tied up with questions of family, class, religion and other forms of collectivity that they cannot be framed in terms of ‘a single unified axis’ (Sangari 1993:871). Sangari argues that it is necessary to work with a concept of ‘multiple identities’ that emerge ‘through several criss-crossing ideologies rather than a single one’, and that exist, not as atomised entities, but in close relation with each other (1993:871).

One of the practical reasons motivating Indian feminists to adopt a complex model of women’s identity is suggested by Gabriele Dietrich in her discussion of the impact of the recent rise in communalism on the women’s movement. For Dietrich, ‘[i]f one thing has become clearer over the past few years, it is the fact that caste and religious community are much stronger in women’s lives than gender, at least in situations of communal strife’ (Dietrich 1994:43–4). If feminism is to speak to women’s lived experience, then it must take this insight on board. But Dietrich’s discussion also suggests a second facet that can emerge when feminists take complexity as a starting point; it is not just a question of what various categories of identity ‘do’ to women, but also how women can be necessary to, and productive of, those categories at the same time. As Dietrich argues:

As women are crucial in the organisation of the home and the socialisation of children, cultural control over them is fundamental to the continuity, not only of the race, but of tradition and communal identity itself. […] The south Indian concept of karpu (chastity) is founded on the very real anxiety in men that if women’s sexuality is not controlled, actual identities will change in unimaginable ways.

(Dietrich 1994:44)

It is this second aspect of complexity models, of thinking through how and why ‘Woman’ and ‘women’ are key to the emergence of national, raced and other community identities, that provides some of the most distinctive work from Indian feminists and suggests some of the most productive complications that can come from theorising identity ‘in a postcolonial mode’.

‘Women’s work’ and community identities

For example, in her discussion of Muslim women in the context of the current rise of communalism in India, Zoya Hasan argues that when religious identities are heightened and gender loyalties subordinated in communal conflict, this doesn’t mean that women are less of a focus. They continue to be ‘important signifiers of differences between groups; community identities are often defined through the conduct of women’ (Hasan 1994a: viii). Hasan takes as her starting point one of the most hotly contested and debated events to focus directly on women in Indian politics in recent years, the ‘Shah Bano case’.²

The Indian legal system includes a separate sphere of ‘personal laws’ for each of the major religious communities, dealing mainly with issues of marriage, divorce, inheritance and family. For ten years, Shah Bano, a Muslim woman, had contested the inadequate maintenance terms of her divorce under the Muslim personal law. In 1985 the Indian Supreme Court ruled in her favour. But this ruling then sparked a complex and bitter struggle over the personal law system, the desirability of a uniform civil code that could override or replace the personal laws, and the ways in which the rights and distinctive identities of India’s different religious communities should be defined and recognised. The immediate controversy that followed the Supreme Court decision resulted in a compromise Muslim Women (Protection of Rights in Divorce) Act in 1986.

But the issues sparked by the Shah Bano case continue to inform communal conflict, and Hasan contends that Muslim women have remained at the very centre of the communal political imagination and of redefinitions of national identities. Indeed, she argues, in the post-independence perio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Gender, Racism, Ethnicity Series editors:
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Indian Complications
• Part II: White Western Feminisms and Identity
• Part III: Against Purity
• Bibliography