“Should I call myself feminist? Do I still need a term to describe my right to do things as I want and be what I want?”
Waking up with a thought like that where I question what it means to be a woman in contemporary times that are highly charged with sexual politics and neoliberal digital economics is a challenge and privilege that many face today. In a world where structure and architectures have been made by men, the question of being, becoming and existing as a woman is itself political. Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote “one is not born but becomes a woman” proposes that stylized repetition of the acts — gestures, movements and enactments form a gendered self. Living in a hypermediated reality that has co-opted the women’s movement and made it into popular feminism where it has become an identity marker of sorts, it’s impossible to be just be without reflecting on those questions. Changing technologies that have given more agency, mobility, independence to women than ever before and have made possible to do things that were earlier inaccessible to them, have brought forth a new woman who is not afraid to experiment with sexuality, work, lifestyle and do things the way she wants. Cyberfeminism and new media has given women new ways of being with fluid identities and anonymous subjectivities. The denominators of gender, class, race, nation (intersectionality) still exist in terms of defining individual identity and determining experiences and how much this new liberalism applies.
The strangeness of neoliberalism is that it can converge both with fascism and emancipatory politics. Young women then become the ideal neoliberal subjects who are entrepreneurial and full of confidence and hope to create a better future for themselves by postponing child bearing and focusing on self-development. What this is really doing is turning them too into human capital by the multinational corporates. This pop-feminism that has emerged in the West is posed as an ideal form of development and progress and is then spread to other parts of the world. While there is a wide range of feminist thought and all deal with their emancipatory potential, the normalization of one form in one part of the world as opposed to exploring an alternate form is problematic. There are certain brands of feminism that women of colour, disability or working class does not identify with. Judith Butler says that feminist politics transcends identity politics. But I’d argue that the ability and freedom to find one’s identity doesn’t happen without political subjectivity. The freedom to have alternate identities like queer, LGBT and so on doesn’t exist without socio-political-economic context.
Media and Politics
Media is at the center of constructing gender relations, masculinity and femininity. Audio visuals have the most impact because of physical representation of bodies and places and high affective value. Films, advertisements, music videos, TV shows, news and now social media not only occupy time-space-identity but also create them. In a hypermediated situation that we’re living in today, John Fiske (1996) asks “Can we separate media events from non-media events, or are all events today, or at least the ones that matter, necessarily media events?”
Fenton (2016) explains that politics has to do with how we as individuals view our own positions in the world and how we relate to others both far and near. In dealing with differences, it has to with the difficulties of living together locally, nationally and on this planet. In a globalized world where all the nations and economies are related to each other, the power of media to create or represent events and set the agenda for the transnational publics gives its creators immense responsibility and political power. Race, gender and class positions of the creators point to the way they define the relationship between visibility, power, identity and liberation. For eg, the Russian feminist protest punk group — Pussy Riot who performed anti- Putin lyrics in front of the Orthodox church and were arrested and put to jail were in the media so often that they’ve now become celebrities who protest against Donald Trump. Their images challenge the traditional image of a woman as housewife or low status worker to the feisty, successful “girl power” icon.
In the case of moving image work, who makes films for whom, what the aesthetics are, the production budget, content and chronology and where it’s shown all comment on the politics of it. Since the advent of cinema hundred years ago, there have always been less women than men making films. In the recent years however, more and more women are picking up the camera and expressing their view of the world. Feminist filmmaking usually works towards a productive social change but films made by women that represent men have been rare and usually come from the West.
Rape
“Our space has strange effects. For one thing, it unleashes desire” Henri Lefebvre (1997)
One of the main areas in film representation is the relation between space and body. At the moment when almost 70% of the world’s population lives in urban centers and more are migrating, the body is contantly transformed, ‘citified’, urbanized as a distinctive metropolitan body. The built environment provides the context and coordinates for corporeality in most economic, social, cultural, political activities. This space inhabited by millions of people of both sexes from all walks of life and background also is rife with all sorts of crime, oppression and power relations.
Rape — the violation of sexual and physical integrity in public or personal space is a crime that has a pervasive effect on the workings of the community and points at gender relations and body politics. It is the entry point for feminism and because of its visual and primal nature, instantly becomes the topic for cultural debates around which narratives are formed.
As a case study, I’d like to critically analyze a documentary called ‘India’s Daughter’ (2015) made by Leslee Udwin on the 2012 gangrape and murder that happened in New Delhi, India. This film was very controversial when it was released and even banned by the Indian government due to the tarnished image it created of Indian society. But, it was released on social media and then went viral. (now removed) Despite this it was shown on BBC Channel 4 and in the US as part of Women’s Film Festival. The film starts with reenactment of the day’s event where Jyoti Singh (the victim) boards the bus and is followed by a series of interviews with the guiltless and shameless rapists in the prison, the girl’s parents, the family of the rapist, the girl’s friend, the lawyers and the police. It’s interesting to note how the characters were framed to create a gripping narrative contrasting intense emotions of grief from the parent’s side with careless and sexist remarks of men. There is a long take of the rapist’s comment with small shots of the protests that followed. Poverty of the rapist’s family is juxtaposed with tears of the parents and horrifying details of the crime in the rapist’s confession. Made highly affective through editing and dramatization, the fact that a British woman is trying to portray women’s sexuality in another culture through a rape narrative should be contested. Here, the political question of representation of oppressed groups (coloured women and men) by those in positions of control and power (western woman) comes into play. Her justifications that the film wants to be a part of transnational feminist movement is valid because it does show blatant attitudes of men, but the gaze of the camera and the representation reflects a similarity with other narratives created of India by the Western media.
Pratibha Parmar, a British filmmaker of Indian origin says, “Media representation of third world people today range from picturesque exotica, starving beggars, natives fighting each other, or as perpetual victims of calamities usually of their own making and incompetence and of spaces where poverty and under-development are a common state of affairs. While it can arouse emotions, it can also neutralize emotions and create stereotypes.” India is a very diverse and complicated society that has accepted modernity only recently and to show only one and biased aspect of it is politically not correct.
Although this was a documentary supposed to represent reality and show the truth, but any representation whether documented or fictionalized is manipulated and put together to show a reality that is already constructed in the director’s head. According to WJT Mitchell (1995:11), representation takes two forms: ‘aesthetic or semiotic’ (things that stand for other things) and political (persons who act for other persons) as a means of expressing ideological and political questions concerning the functioning of the body politic.
The title of the film “India’s daughter” defeats its own purpose by negating a woman’s identity independent of man, family or nation. The raped woman’s body is associated with the nation and the representation of the city is derived from the trope of violated femininity. In this case, her body was caught in ‘between two- deaths’ one at the time she was left on the road and the other when she passed away in a hospital. The narrative of identity, desire and death also amplifies the preconditioned perspective of a normative rape — that of woman being an innocent victim and rapists coming from a working class or low income depraved and marginalized group. It does not delve deeply into the political relationships in which people are enmeshed. There were reports that she also used some underhand unethical tactics like bribing the rapists. She also might have got access to the prison that an Indian filmmaker wouldn’t due to the postcolonial hangover that Indian people still have, thinking that white skin is better. Sure, she did it before any Indian feminists thought of doing it in true fashion of an exploring and prying independent filmmaker but she could have dealt a serious topic like this a little more sensitively. It fails to address the causes and solutions of the problem.
This also cannot be seen without the wider social, economic, moral and historical contexts of prostitution and pornography, bollywood movies and advertising images, where desire is built through sexualization of female bodies and commodification of land and labour. Newer mainstream cinema that’s coming out in India contain postfeminist narratives where the woman is shown as an independent young woman ready to fight and willingly deciding her sexuality while still confirming to the middle class narrative of love, heartbreak and marriage. The power relations of pornography, abortion, male violence, technology and science also make people’s opinions and behavior about gender. For eg, recently in the news, there was a minor glitch on the central station of Delhi metro where a porn clip was shown on the screens. While this might be an error, it shows the perversity and sexual repression the modern day cities are living in. Through these images femininity is constructed as locus of male desire and pleasure, and embedded in the photographed and commodified female body via a system of fetishized visual codes. It acts as an object of exchange along with other commodities like houses, TV and cars. Luce Irigaray puts it “The production of women, signs, and commodities is always referred back to men.. wives, daughters, and sisters have value only in that they serve as possibility of and in potential benefit in, relations among men.. the sexuality of men is played out through the bodies of women, matter or sign.” The woman can be a subject only by acting as a consumer, alienated from herself in her desire for commodities. Gender definitely shapes the way of looking and “the gaze” changes according to the ways of being, experiences and therefore representing the world. Laura Mulvey’s essay talks about pleasure of looking at human form and when most cameras are in the hands of straight men, the female body becomes a beautiful thing to look at, something to admire in a world full of ugliness and pain. While this normative look shared by most men has been reversed by female filmmakers, the numbers are still low.
Rape is a historical crime inflicted on women, men and sometimes metaphorically nations for land, labour, power and resources. Only in the recent years, has it been considered illegal and criminalized under the law. How rape is defined and how justice is acquired has historically been dependent on if the victim if married or not. In most societies, marital rape is still legal and doesn’t come under purveyance of media. Public rape however structures women’s relationship to space and agency, in dealing with love, family and the law, and to define property. While in war, it’s done for power and control, in the cities and towns it’s used to generate fear. Masculinity becomes performative and voyeuristic. Links have also been made between rape and men’s control over language and gaze through which myths are made like — women secretly fantasize about rape and that women are tempting seductresses who invite sexual encounters that they will eventually relax and enjoy, and that men have urgent sexual needs that prevent them from controlling their behavior (Berger 1986; Burt 1980).
In the age of mediatization, rape becomes a hypermediated spectacle. It is constantly in the news and newspapers juxtaposed with advertisements that it has become banal. Andrea Dworkin develops a causal link between representation of rape and the act of rape. For the uninitiated female spectator, watching rape is like a second hand rape of her being. Fear, agony and hatred of men run in the minds of women who watch it then. Because of its scandalous nature, rape becomes a perfect crime for films even for art cinema because its complexity and multiple truth positions and the combination of sex and violence. People watch all sorts of violence from a distance on their phone screens and even take pleasure in sharing and spreading it — mutilation, rape, torture and lynching have become such common media events that watching them on TV or social media is like watching animals fighting and killing.
Feminist filmmakers have a dual motive — the desire to end rape and a need to represent in order to challenge it. But for any of the films to have any real change in the society is asking for a change in the mindset and attitude towards women. What we need is a new way of looking and benign attitudes towards rape, women and people of colour.
