Centre for Internet and Society

Pleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law

namita — 2011-08-02T08:37:23Z

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.

This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.

In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.

Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.

Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.

Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes (7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).

In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.

'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.

Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter. There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The placement of the Ashoka Chakra or the States in the painting is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of the arguments advanced.

It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' (9)

A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.

Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.

Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.

Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.

I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television).

Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane

In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography.

'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".

However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'

The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.

The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into Secret Games 3 and Dark Dancers is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be classified hard or near-hard'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.

Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all.

Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane

In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as Dev.D does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.

After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.

The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself).

Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.

*****
Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?

Endnotes:

1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'.
2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005
3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity
4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp
5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms
6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.
7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc.
8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.
9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008

10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989
11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999
12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996
13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.
14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography

Pleasure and Pornography: Initial Encounters with the Unknown

namita — 2011-08-02T08:37:27Z

This blog entry is the first in a series by Namita Malhotra on her CIS-RAW project that is about pornography, Internet, sexuality, law, new media and technology. She aims for this to be a multi media and research project/journey which is able to cite and draw on various sources including legal studies, film studies and philosophy, academic and historical work on sexuality, art, film and pornography itself.

There are few dilemmas that one is faced with when working on the vague and over extended category of pornography. The first is the very familiar feminist dilemma over pornography, and the position of radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon--pornography is violence or sexually explicit subordination of women. This is more popularly encapsulated in Robin Morgan’s words--pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. Even if this can be collapsed into the positions of pro-sex and anti-sex feminists, it does initially haunt any research agenda on pornography, especially for a guilty quasi-feminist like myself.

However, some of my previous writings have attempted to deal with the position of the women’s movement, specifically in India, on pornography (the details are given below) and here I hope to move beyond either the moral or feminist positions on pornography, to examine what the pervasive phenomenon does. One of the strands that I hope to continue to explore is the relation of body to film. Though film studies is mostly focused on the visual sense, few scholars have looked on film as a bodily experience and attempted to understand the mimetic relation between the body of the 'viewer' and the body of the film. A more tactile understanding of the experience of film and media would be a useful place to start exploring pornography.

The second has arisen from many conversations that I have had – when I say I’m working on pornography, the response is either a withdrawal or over-enthusiasm bordering on insistence to share personal collections of erotica and pornography. Though these conversations are often insightful, I have now realized that it is hard for me to actually examine pornography in all its totality – from spliced moments in mainstream films in shady theatres to specificities of hentaii and tentacle porn. Personal tastes, preferences, and access make it hard to be able to be interested in everything. Which is precisely my fascination with pornography – that it is in fact an intensely personal relation or rather a space in which different people have kept very varied and specific material, words, and media--that it also is not entirely about the media/words themselves, but also about how and in what setting they are consumed, how they are bought, downloaded or searched for.

The third is the legal conundrum posed by pornography – that it is not recognized in Indian law as a specific category but that there exist, nonetheless, stringent conditions for obscenity. Obscenity is determined on the basis of the Hicklin test, which originated in England in 1868 and has continued as an integral part of Indian law though it has been discredited in English common law and American law. Here, the legal scholarship of Nussbaum is an interesting starting point as it sets up a useful framework that refuses to look at the law as a rational system of rules that is devoid of emotions. Nussbaum analyses the cognitive content of emotions that work within law – in the case of determining obscenity, she points to how emotions of disgust and revulsion play a significant role (the other emotions that she examines in detail are shame, fear and anger in the law). In Nussbaum’s analysis of the cognitive content of disgust, she remarks that in most cultures, disgust is about discomfort humans have with 'our own bodies and decaying selves', and concludes that disgust is an unreliable indicator for obscenity. She refers to McKinnon’s and Dworkin’s work to state that the indicator should be harm done by the material, rather than disgust. I would disagree with Nussbaum on whether harm can be a useful indicator to determine whether something is obscene, but before that it is necessary to examine whether Indian case law actually relies on the notion of disgust. Within Indian law, there seem to be other factors at work including notions of cultural purity vis-à-vis contamination from Western culture. An interesting and rather progressive judgment to look at is the recent High Court judgment on Hussain’s painting of nude Mother India that held that the painting is not obscene.

These are a few of the scattered aspects of this project and some of the strands that it will explore. I would also like to share two comics on internet pornography. The first is from the famou xkcd comic series and the second from the relatively new comic series Brown Girls. Both capture how lusty desires will find their objects anywhere – in the explosion of the polymorphous perverse on the internet or presidential debates on television.

Previous material
The World Wide Web of Desire: Content Regulation on the Internet
This article attempts to understand the dynamics of pushing the child pornography question to the forefront of any debate around censorship and pornography, especially in contexts of internet regulation, both nationally and in international forums such as the Internet Governance Forum. This is often done at the expense of a more nuanced understanding that would be possible if the focus were on issues related to gender, the prevalence of draconian censorship regimes in most countries in Asia and concerns related to free speech.

Do Not Look at Porn
This is a short video titled "Do not look at porn" which is a remix video or a collage of different materials taken from television and other videos, famous art works, photographs and books. The video is almost boringly pedagogic in its attempt to illustrate the slippery-slope argument which is that obscenity laws generally lead to the ban of progressive material rather than only offensive material. The video features Sarah Jones' song 'Your revolution will not happen between these thighs', and the popular Warcraft character based machinema video 'The internet is for porn'.

Search History: Examining Pornography on the Internet
This article explores some of the dilemmas of the women's movement in India when faced with the question of pornography. It also is a very basic historical look at the category of pornography itself, as it emerged to describe the array of objects and artefacts discovered in the ancient city of Pompeii. These finds were kept at the Secret Museum; only men of a certain upper class were allowed and ‘trusted’ to have access to these objects, and not the ‘easily corruptible rabble or women’. Such distinctions would often arise in the case of pornography and be the reasoning behind censorship and regulation of many media in the next few centuries. Whether it was the birth of photography, cinema, video, and in recent times the internet and new media (CD,VCD, DVD), each technology has been greeted with suspicion of its possible harm to society.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/xxx-files-initial-encounters-with-the-unknown

Pleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects

namita — 2011-08-02T08:35:20Z

In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn.

The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book Imperial Leather (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies. The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment (iii) .

On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.

“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety.

McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.

Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.

The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.

Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.

For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn.

Soap in these strange days: fetish objects

“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”
Dana Polan (iv)

Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’.

Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone.

That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable.

Looking at MMS porn
“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”
Mace, Strange Days

When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie Strange Days, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.

Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)

In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same.

i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties.
ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.
iii. Ibid
iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20.

v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish

of doctors and maps - Snippet two

asha — 2011-08-03T09:45:22Z

This may seem like a careless swipe at the volumes of critique of technology. And yet ... I need to know ...

Where am I with respect to technology? Represented in it? Protected from it? Accessing it? And is my doctor the knower who will use the instrument of technology to heal me?

Why then does he feel like an apologetic outsider, unnecessary to this process, merely the public relations man as I lie here, surrounded by the linear accelerator? Why do the women in the planning room, wired through their scans with the accelerator, smiling benevolently at him, seem more at home, more with me, within me?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps-snippet-two

of doctors and maps - Snippet one

asha — 2011-08-03T09:44:43Z

The clinic is not what it was. It is highly technologized, flooded with information systems. But what of the relationships it traditionally supported, between patient and doctor?

She was in the eye of technology. Cocooned in the simulator. Surrounded by the linear accelerator.

While each act of swallowing became more conscious, more painful, each act of devising mathemes became more precise, more focal.

Yes, this is mathematicized medicine. This is where she was, while re-writing technology, mathematicization, mapping. Not ‘under’ the ‘gaze’ as she understood it.

She was one with the simulator.

The doctor did not even figure; the 'godhead', the 'male knower', the butt of criticism, had become irrelevant, an anachronism.

Now what in the world does that mean?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/of-doctors-and-maps

Justice and Difference - the first talk in 'the monster album of feminist stories'

asha — 2011-08-03T09:43:24Z

CIS and 'the monster album of feminist stories', in relation to the Rewiring Bodies project by Asha Achuthan, hosted the first of a series of talks on cognizing feminism at the CIS premises on Cunningham Road on 14th November, 2008.

To give a brief introduction and explain why we call this the monster album, we could repeat the tired old truism that feminism is being crowded out, today, by ‘gender talk’, and, ironically, by the visibility now available to women. While truisms cannot be challenged, the sense of denial of space that this statement carries has today, perhaps, more to do with notions of irrelevance or the anachronistic nature of the word ‘feminism’ rather than the “backlash against women” so popularly and persuasively argued by Susan Faludi at another point in time. In response to this sense of denial, those of us who remain the irremediably converted have moved between defiance, defensiveness, apologia, and, now a decisive, if quiet, digging in of heels, based on a re-cognition of feminism itself--that is the work of the monster album.

Feminism as that liberatory, shade-giving mother, that warm place of refuge, is not a workable thesis, and the question then is – was it ever so? Or is feminism that monster, that unhappy moment of possession (not of an identity but by a vision), that grows larger and larger, demands more and more, not simply of the dominant but of the interrogator of the dominant? Does this not render unstable each time what had seemed the ultimately radical, interrupt each time a consolidation of identity under its own name, so that in response to the rhetorical question “Who’s afraid of feminism?” the feminist’s answer would be – “I am”? At such a re-cognition of feminism is where we are, with this talk as the first step in that exercise; it is perhaps a place that will host instability and unpalatable porosities between categories of “dominant” and “critical”. The monster album is related in indirect but hopefully productive ways to the work of the "Rewiring Bodies" project that is, in a nutshell, attempting to rework critical boundaries between women and the technological.

Prof Shefali Moitra's talk on “Justice and Difference” offered a reading of the mainstream monologic model of justice that follows the principle of impartiality, and that seeks to incorporate context through representation. This was followed by a discussion of the “ad-hoc” model that responds heavily to context, to the extent of rejecting the monologic model altogether. Finally Prof Moitra spoke of what she called a “hybrid model” – one that takes into account the principles of impartiality and objectivity, and yet also takes into account context. A version of the paper that formed the basis for the talk is put up here for those wish to read it.

The talk threw up a lot of speculation, particularly regarding the ‘hybrid’ model. Considering that the prevailing climate of critique – of justice, as also in other areas – seems more comfortable with versions of the ‘ad hoc’ model as alternative, and any notion of impartiality seems infected by sameness, violence, or exclusion, a model such as the hybrid was bound to throw up such speculation and some confusion as well. But it is the possibility of such a model, that continues to talk of impartiality and objectivity, but that fails the normative claims of the homogenous system, that was most interesting. We hope to hear more from philosophers-practitioners on this. As for the monster album, this could perhaps be one of the ways in which liaisons between knowledge and critique might be explored.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/justice-and-difference-the-first-talk-in-the-monster-album-of-feminist-stories

Histories of the Internet

nishant — 2015-03-30T14:15:10Z

For the first two years, the CIS-RAW Programme shall focus on producing diverse multidisciplinary histories of the internet in India.

Histories of internets in India

The CIS-RAW programme is designed around two-year thematics. Every two years, we shall, looking at our engagement and the questions that are emerging around us, come up with new themes that we would like to commission, enable and encourage research on.

The selection of the theme of the History of Internet and Society is a unanimous decision made by our researchers in-house, the members of the Society, distinguished fellows, supporters, and peers who all gathered for a launch workshop for the CIS. There is a severe dearth of material on the histories of Internet and Society in India and we find it necessary to contextualise and historicise the contemporary in order to fruitfully and critically engage with the questions and concerns we are committed to. In the first two years of its programme, the CIS-RAW hopes to come up with alternative histories of the Internet and Society, which chart a wide terrain of the field that we are engaging with and produce one of the first such resources for researchers working in this field.

Scope of the Theme:

We are looking at a wide range of accounts of the different forms, imaginations, materialities and interactions of the internets in India. As we excavate its three-decade growth in India, it becomes increasingly clear that there is no homogenised Internet that has evolved in the country; Instead, what we have is a technology, which, through its interactions and intersections with various objects, people, contexts and regulation, has emerged in many different ways. The theme of 'Histories of internets in India' hopes to address these pluralities of the internets and how they have been shaped in the unfolding of these technologies.

We have collaborated on the following histories with different researchers in India:

Rewiring Bodies - Asha Achuthan, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore.
Archive and Access - Rochelle Pinto (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; and Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for Sudies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
Porn: Law, Video & Technology - Namita Malhotra, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Transparency and Politics - Zainab Bawa, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
The Last Cultural Mile - Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
Using the Net for Social Change - Anja Kovacs, (Research) Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Queer Histories of the Internet - Nitya Vasudevan, Centre for Study of Culture and Society and Nithin Manayath, Mount Carmel College
Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities - Pratyush Shankar, Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad
Gaming and Gold - Arun Menon, Centre for Internet & Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/histories-of-the-internets-main

Analysis on the strategies of Mozilla and Wiki communities on gender gap aspects

bhuvana — 2019-10-03T11:56:37Z

There is a need for research on how Open Source communities are trying to balance the gender ratio and how they provide the safe space environment to its contributors. With this in mind I have come up with this blog as I am an active contributor of Mozilla since 5 years and also got myself recently introduced to Wikimedia and its sister projects, have interacted with few Indian women contributors in both of these communities and came out with a few observations on how I see them in India and what could be improved in both communities.

Opening note

Wikipedia community

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of articles where many users can edit it freely and it has become so large that you run across it all the time in Google. It is so popular that it is now one of the Top 5 websites in the world! The reason behind the growth is because the articles are simple and useful.

Wikipedians are the contributors who do a communal work to improve the content by editing bits of text and cluster them to the large database. Beyond this there are other sister projects of Wikimedia which interest the audience on whichever they are expertise about. The main motivation for these contributors is their freedom to contribute in their own native language which they are more passionate about. This is a great social cause they are contributing towards.

Mozilla community

Mozilla makes browsers, apps, code and tools that put people before profit. In fact, there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of the enterprise.Their mission is to keep the internet open and accessible to all. Hope everyone uses or had at least at some point seen Firefox browser/logo, so this is the prime product of Mozilla. There are various projects to support the Firefox browser and they are mostly Open Source.

Mozillians are the volunteers who contribute in the improvement of these projects thus helping the world to access the internet and the Open web.Mozilla Volunteers are passionate to learn,collaborate and knowledge share among a large world-wide community and the crew is a mix of coder, non-coders, policy makers and anyone who supports Open Web. The point that drives everyone to contribute is that the community creates a vibe to contribute and to create a safe and better experience in accessing the digital world.

WikiProject Women

This a group of editors who aim to improve Wikipedia's coverage of women's topics. It brings Wikipedia users of all genders, sexual orientations, geographic locations, and personal backgrounds together to discuss and collaborate on coverage of women's content across Wikipedia.There are various streams in which women can be part of the larger mission for instance:

Art and Feminism

Women in Red

Wiki loves women

Womoz

Women & Mozilla ("WoMoz") a community composed of members from different Open Source projects.It is mainly dedicated to improving women's visibility and involvement in Free/Open Source and Mozilla, and to increase the number of women contributors. Anyone can participate in this project, regardless of sex, age, job, etc. We are united by the common goal of promoting women's visibility and involvement in open source communities. They also believe that the Internet, FLOSS projects and computing must remain open and participatory. This also means accessible in the same way to all - women and men alike.

It also believe solutions should continuously be proposed in order to improve the visibility of all minorities, who for various reasons might not have equal access to computers or the Internet. This project is an example of this, as it aims at ameliorating women's presence and participation in Mozilla and open source. But currently this group is not very active, except for a few regional contributors where they find massive necessity to focus on the women participation.

Overview of the strategies used for increasing women participation

Methodologies used

Both the communities are great supporters of the Free Softwares and licenses and so the methods that is used in addressing the gender gap issues is as follows:

Conduct gender neutral events like hack-a-thons/ edit-a-thons where the tutor is a woman or there is a large ratio of under represented community in the event.
Host monthly offline/online meetups.
Work on projects which are gender neutral based.
Following up special protocols like CoCs strictly at these events.
Days like “International Women’s Day” and on similar significant occasions some unique events will be hosted and contributors will be appreciated.

Impact on Indian communities

The WikiProject woman and WoMoz programs play a very important role among the Indian communities. Although I do not see a single or uniform progress there is always a good scale-up among the regional communities. For a country like India where there is still necessity for uplifting the presence and awareness of these type of FOSS programs I feel that most of these programs are extensively hosted in urban or developed phases of the country. Recently, the internet access has spread across but then the basic knowledge of contributing to Open Source is still abandoned. The end result and the what the contributors shall get on contributing to these communities must be emphasised more.

Closing note

My study and analysis on these two communities is drawn from personal interest and engagement with these communities since I have been contributing and interacting with the contributors for the last few years. The objective of this post is basically to bring about an awareness on the accessible resources on bridging the digital divide , and how these resources can be modified and taken further for a country like India. The efforts taken to improve the gender neutrality by the above communities is laudable but more light has to be thrown on improving the measures taken to sustain women contributors

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

http://www.womoz.org/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/analysis-on-the-strategies-of-mozilla-and-wiki-communities-on-gender-gap-aspects-1

Alternatives? From situated knowledges to standpoint epistemology

asha — 2011-08-03T09:42:03Z

The previous post explored, in detail, responses to science and technology in feminist and gender work in India. The idea was, more than anything else, to present an 'attitude' to technology, whether manifested in dams or obstetric technologies, that sees technology as a handmaiden of development, as instrument - good or evil, and as discrete from 'man'. Feminist and gender work in India has thereafter articulated approximately four responses to technology across state and civil society positions - presence, access, inclusion, resistance. The demand for presence of women as agents of technological change, the demand for improved access for women to the fruits of technology, the demand for inclusion of women as a constituency that must be specially provided for by technological amendments, and a need for recognition of technology’s ills particularly for women, and the consequent need for resistance to technology on the same count. Bearing in mind that women’s lived experiences have served as the vantage point for all four of the responses to technology in the Indian context, I will now suggest the need to revisit the idea of such experience itself, and the ways in which it might be made critical, rather than valorizing it as an official counterpoint to scientific knowledge, and by extension to technology. This post, while not addressing the 'technology question' in any direct sense, is an effort to begin that exploration.

One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries – and not on the integrity of natural objects.

(Haraway 1991: 163)

On the question of experience. This one statement subsumes several questions, on politics, on knowledge, that I have been trying to raise in this project. What I have been calling the old ideological model of critique – the possibility of critique from the vantage point of a coherent set of material interests – was also tied to a model of knowledge, a model that said – I know, you do. This constituted the rationale for the vanguard, this constituted the knowledge of oppression. For a feminism having drawn from Marxist legacies of politics, this then was the model to be adopted, and the politics around women’s lives that gave birth to this entity, feminism, and has nurtured it ever since, definitionally became that benevolent umbrella, that liberatory tool, that protects those lives and inserts itself into them (the personal must be politicized). Having identified the problems of vanguardism during the post-nationalist, subaltern turn, however, a portion of the rethinking Left and a global, universalist feminism may consider that what remains for us to do or think is a turn to experience. The slogan changed; it became – we all know, together. Both these moves were, however, hyphenated in the premise of ‘one knowledge’.

There were several moves critical of ‘one knowledge’. Those that took the ‘Third World’ route either proposed a ‘different reason’, a different canon, an alternative system (as postcolonial scholars sometimes did), or articulated a politics of complete heterogeneity that held knowledge as necessarily provisional and separate from a rationale for politics (as did those that took on the name ‘third world feminism’). A third position here was of I know mine, you know yours, there can be no dialogue. For this school of knowledge, the experience of oppression was necessary, and sufficient. The consciousness of oppression, which was ex-officio, offered knowledge. The community of knowers here was a closed community. Asserting that the ‘one knowledge’ claim rested on the active exclusion of other knowledges, it suggested a remaking of ‘low knowledge’ through the experience of oppression. This is the impulse that starts, and ends, with the embodied insider, speaking with[in] and for itself, a complete closed community. This impulse we have seen with respect to sexual minorities, women, the subaltern – an impulse also tied to the organic or pastoral as opposed to the technological, an impulse sometimes tracing direct connections with a cultural past, and often offering a choice between systems of knowledge. The above mentioned third worldist positions sometimes tied up with this third position, proposing a politics of coalition while keeping knowledge bases separate (as in third world feminisms), or realizing implicit connections between ‘low knowledge’ practices and an alternative system of knowledge.

While I have made no attempt here to directly examine the complex of phenomena often referred to by the short-hand ‘globalization’, I will now refer back to my first mention of development as a practice and to the gender work that involves itself with disaggregated description as part of this phenomenon. The reaction to the ideological has meant, in this frame, a shift from politics to self-help, from the ideological to the intuitive, where the intuitive is taken as a flat description of immediate reality as experience. While it might be tempting to read this immediate everyday reality as organic, whole, feminine, and often able to escape an overdetermination by patriarchal norms,[1] the new gender analyses do not necessarily rely on organicity. Rather, politics, or the politics of representation, have shifted, as Haraway notes with deadly precision, to a game of simulation in what she calls the “informatics of domination”, and the new gender analyses are as much part of it as any other (recall Van Hollen’s terms – culture-in-the-making, “processural”, etc). While none of this new critical scholarship addressing development or technology actually denies domination or power, it has contributed to making it so increasingly difficult to define or identify, as to make counter-hegemonic attempts appear very nearly anachronistic.

What, then, of alternatives? After a rejection of those feminist strands that seek to build a common, sometimes homogenous narrative of feminine experience, and of gender analysis that thrives on the heterogeneity of women’s experiences, but yet agreeing with the need to “speak from somewhere”, as against older models of one knowledge that offered a “view from nowhere”, a neutral view, what could be the nature of this critique?

I would suggest that it will have to be a re-turn to experience, a re-cognition, rather than a turn. That we pay attention not only, or not even so much, to the fractured narrative offered by the wide variety or heterogeneity of experience, as to its possible aporicity[2] in dominant frames, so as to enact such a re-turn treating the perspective of the excluded, aporetic experience as momentary resource – not authentic, fixed, or originary, but appropriate.[3] Drawing on Haraway’s suggestion of a gift of vision, of situation as a visual tool, this would mean a momentary cognizance, a momentary gift of ab-normal vision – abnormal by way of not making sense in dominant frames – that could describe the dominant in terms different than its own, as also point to other possibilities. This would mean, most importantly for a notion of the political, a shift from marginality to aporicity as a vantage point for critique.

Perspective, here, would therefore take on the third of three possible meanings,[4] as the fantastic spur within the dominant, as a moment of seeing, of ‘possession’, that can be lost in the looking. In this sense, it is also not possible to map perspective onto identity or individual taste. Perspective as that moment of possession not only gives a completely different picture of things, it also gives a picture not available from anywhere else – that makes visible the dominant as such, as that which had rendered invalid other possibilities. This invalidation, this exclusion, could then be understood differently from a removal from circulation of that which is disobedient – “At my heel, or outside”, as Le Doueff puts it; it is better understood as a constitutive or primary exclusion with an entry later on the dominant’s terms. As Le Doueff puts it again, “Outside, or at my heel.”[5] Here I find useful, as a beginning, the model of the excluded available within feminist standpoint theory, of the woman as ‘outsider within’.[6] While this formulation evokes a degree of unease about whether this social location can be enough as a starting point (whether women then always have to be the outsiders within to be able to speak from this space), it offers, I think, valuable clues for working toward a possible model of feminist critique. To understand this, we need to understand, also, that the issue here is not only that of recognizing hierarchies, nor is it about building a stand-alone alternative system of knowledge that may be called feminist. The very first example I gave in this post, of the clinical consultation that turned into a conversation, tries to demonstrate this.

The very notion of a feminist standpoint would be then the act of interpretation that puts this positioning, this transient possession, to work, not a place already defined, as earlier understandings of standpoint would have; this process involves the production of an attached model of knowledge that begins from perspective, one that requires a speaking from somewhere.

Such a speaking from somewhere obviously requires a conceptualization of this ‘somewhere’; in other words, a fidelity to context. Here context, I would suggest, is not (only) about date-time-place, such that a concept of ‘one knowledge’ can be critiqued from a situation. It is most importantly about relationality, the space between you and me, both intra-community and inter-community. Once we take cognizance of this, we realize that that space does many things – it induces a porosity of boundaries (body, community), it creates attachment, it also creates separation. With this in mind, we then have to talk of building a story from perspective, where it is the turning from within outward (from attachment to separation) that does the work of building the story. Such a standpoint ‘is’ only in the constant interrogation of both dominant discourse – masculinist Marxist discourse, and of the category of resistance – feminism – within which it may be named. (This will have resonances with the monster album of feminist stories that we began writing last year).

What we may have to gain from an attention to either consultations or conversations, then, is not so much the shift in form that we have made in moving from one to another, but the recognition of the fantastic perspective as a visual tool. Perspectives are made fantastic by their positioning in an imbrication of power and meaning; and unless the position is required to be static through any counter-hegemonic exercise, they cannot be the source of a permanent identity, nor an alternative system. I present my report on the dai training programme, then, in a different detail and from a different perspective than as a look at indigenous systems of health or as a lesson to be learnt from women’s experiences, or indeed as an essentially feminine perspective. What I call the allegory of women’s lived experience serves, for me, as a test case, an example of the fantastic perspective that both helps provide a different picture of the dominant, and a glimpse of other possible worlds. I will attempt to delineate this in more detail now, but would like to put in a statutory warning prior to the attempt.

Min(d)ing the turn

Does this re-turn to experience that I have talked about show up in individual dai experience? Is this a concrete turn, something that can be applied in straightforward ways? We turn to the Bengali Marxist who tried to find a subaltern Lenin –

The concept of the outside as a theoretical category is rooted in the concept of abstract labour as opposed to concrete labour. Concrete labour, located within particular industries, is within the sphere of production; abstract labour is not. … It is situated where, as Lenin puts it, all classes meet – outside the sphere of production.

(Chaudhury 1987: 248)

Chaudhury is using the concept to gently remind the Subaltern School of the difficulty of positing a ‘subaltern consciousness’ as a separate domain, or the equal difficulty of speaking of inversion, in other words revolution, from this vantage point. For my purposes, the turn from within outward faces the same difficulty. It is a turn that has to be mined for its possibility, not one that offers, straightforwardly, the description of a different world.

Marking the turn: returning to the conversation

In what might perhaps be an unwarranted dissection of events, but one useful for our purposes nonetheless, let us go back to the dai training programme, mapping onto my narrative of it the paleonymies and possible difficulties of such a narrative. I have refrained from relating to this exercise as either participant observation (in anthropological mode) or as case study (the qualitative approach in medical parlance). Both of these, positioned at the same end of the methodological spectrum, were efforts that came up to serve a need for ‘qualitative’ analysis – the latter from within the scientific establishment, the former from within the social sciences. In its acting out, however, there is an effort to capture the microcosm that is a stepping away from earlier structural analyses; and a meshing of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’, a moving away from complete objectivity, that all self-respecting qualitative analyses undertake. These analyses are also an attempt to either expand or critique complete objectivity. This is what I have in mind when I refer to that time as ‘conversation’ rather than ‘consultation’. What I am attempting here is a further bracketing of that effort, a bringing to bear, on the conversations, the weight of my identification of the problems with existing frames of critique that I have identified in the project. This is so that what I have been laying down as a different contour of critique, finds its possibility. To perform such a bracketing, I use the narrative of my experience with the dais as a template within which I identify moments of the anthropological narrative, and from which I move towards a different possibility.

This exercise will involve, therefore, as I have stated, through a re-turn to experience, a re-examination both of dominant discourse and of the category of resistance within which it has been named. Such a re-turn will mean an attention to experience – not as narrative, resistant or otherwise, nor as fractured and unpredictable, but as aporetic – as affording a fantastic perspective on the dominant that had hitherto appeared as normal. An attention to the fantastic perspective will result in a turn from within (a community) outward – a different notion of the political from that of either organizational, organic, or individual responses. It is, however, a notion that is hardly structural, a notion of the political as interpretation, but one that will have to be done each time. With these telegraphic steps in order, let us proceed. We had started the classes from the dais’ voices – what they had written or what they had to say regarding their experiences with the births they had attended. The attendant presumption on both sides was that these voices were constituted by experience, the only prerogative of those uninitiated into method – mukkhu sukkhu manush (the unlearned people). I then set about introducing a gentle reworking of the boundaries of this category “experience” – till its quarrels with “method” had diminished to negligible levels.

How did I rework these boundaries? What were the contexts in which this was made possible? What were the terms of reference for the exchange between “experience” and “scientific method” that placed each, firmly, on a particular side of the divide between the untrained dai and the development expert, the body and the mind, the sensible and the transcendental? Several notions of the feminist political are at work here, working vis-à-vis dominant and other responses to the experience question. The responses may be charted in the following way. In the turn to experience as narrative, feminism has addressed the representation of the female body. The “female body”, we have seen, is the site for the understandings as well as operations of science (with its invisible qualifier Western). In its project of defining the form and delineating the workings of the female body, this body of knowledge enjoys the status of a value-neutral, objective method that purportedly bases itself on solid empirical evidence to produce impartial knowledge. In the case of the female body, it would then appear that science has found it exclusively and powerfully fashioned by nature to bear and nourish children; in the event, all it is doing is putting the facts before us.[7] Feminist engagements have sought to detect several disclaimers to the purported value-neutrality of science. For one, the standard body is that of the male, by which the female body is judged small, inferior, or deviant; and through this a subtle process of othering or exclusion of the woman is instituted within science. Further, accounts of the workings of the body, its organs, its reproductive processes, are strewn with gendered metaphors that privilege the male as decisive, strong, productive, and the female, as complementarily passive, wasteful, unreasoning.[8] In the event, this part of the feminist project has been to make explicit the hidden cultural weight of scientific knowledge. Further, in addressing the methods of science itself, feminism has pointed to the homogenization inherent in the manner in which the scientific concept of the “female body” is derived. It is somewhat against this authoritative, homogenising strain that women’s bodily experiences are posited[9] in feminism – as something that is not only missed in science’s project of objectivity but something that is excluded from or unable to articulate itself in and through science’s abstractions. In the event, the experience of the “woman” within science is seen as that which, through the explicit introduction of an apparently inassimilable, pre-discursive subjectivity, questions the explanatory potential of science, while also offering possibilities for agency.

There are certain collusions in the goals of these two projects, however, that bear looking at. Both are moving toward a single truth, whether derived from scientific theory or subjective experience, which they alone can represent. To this end, both homogenize and both declare the undisputed presence of this ‘reality out there’ that can be represented without mediations. And from here also flows a claim to objectivity. If science posits a naturalized universal female body, experience would posit the “woman” universalized through socialization. No experience can exist here outside narrative history, unless as aporia – the seemingly insoluble logical difficulty. One would then derive that if scientific theories are built on exclusions, so is the category “experience”. If science claims value-neutrality, a simple valorization of experience ignores the “historical processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experience”. In the process, both science and experience in turn achieve status as categories, homogenous and uniform in themselves. Both become discourses that have the right to regulate entry, so that what counts as science or experience becomes the qualifying question.

If we then conclude that there is in this separation a certain essentializing of categories that ignores their very constitutions by the other, as also their constructions through cultural intelligibility, several questions arise. Can experience be that essential outside of Science that can grant agency? Or would it be also explicable as reflective of hegemonic norms that grant the sensible body as “women’s generic identity in the symbolic” while retaining a masculine topology for Science? This brings us to another feminist cognition of experience as constituted by history, circumstance, and as circumscribed by the norm as outside it.

But, caught as I was between the conventional registers of science and feminism, I kept falling backwards into the question of results, and their reflection on validity. Experience, it would seem, was faulty by virtue of its very constitutivity, while science continued to look rigorous and unbiased. As critical courier of scientific knowledge, I thought I was trying to weave myself into the discourse of the dais with minimum damage to their framework, and to that end I had decided to keep the question marks alive throughout, directing them towards science as well. But as I sat down to look at the assessment sheets on the afternoon of the first day’s session, ‘I’ was fairly stunned. Of the ten questions put to the dais, one was worded as follows –

If the child does not cry soon after birth, we must –

a] say prayers over the baby

b] perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation

c] rush the baby to the nearest health centre

d] warm the placenta in a separate vessel.

Almost all 46 of the dais had affirmed the last answer. I remembered the asphyxiated babies that used to be rushed to the nursery in Medical College from the labour room that was on another floor. I remembered the bitter debates as to why the nursery was not stationed nearer the labour ward so that we could lose less time in resuscitating them. I decided this could not be allowed to pass. And I conducted the classes accordingly. When we repeated the written examination at the end, none had ticked the last answer, and I was both relieved and vindicated. Until I had come away, still thinking, and then I realised that I had succeeded only because I had adopted a more positivist, authoritarian approach – right and wrong – to get across. And why had I done that? I realized, again, that with all my criticality, I was very much a scientific subject, and not merely because of my disciplinary training. I had retained reflexivity and criticality for as long as there was non-contradiction. Beyond that, I stayed put – well within Science. I too had my experiences – I could look at them as inseparably constituted by my production as scientific subject. But I had been trained to look otherwise – at experience as empirical evidence of theory. And there I was.

In current development policy, though, there is not so much the suppression of subaltern voice as its making visible in extensions of scientific discourse. It has become part of development policy to include women’s voices in their own development; the ‘third world woman’ is no longer considered to have no voice. On the contrary, she has a specific voice that is apparently being heard now in development projects in the third world. In order to articulate this voice, however, she must have the capability to streamline it, make it universally understood as well as reasonable, and this is the cornerstone of the ‘capabilities approach’. Here the dai, once named as dependable repository of traditional knowledge, can now be appropriated by notions of development flowing from liberal theories, for she also represents, in this frame, the rigid face of patriarchal traditions that have not given the woman voice. Development here is taken to mean empowerment – a granting, or rather restoration, of voice to the woman hitherto suffocated by tradition – and it is to this end that the efficient model of scientific method may be adopted. The old order will indeed change, for the dais … Aage ek rakam chhilo … ebar anya rakam korte hobe^{^[10]}… but that is hardly an exchange of tradition for modernity, or of experience for science; it is an accommodation of one by the other. In the pluralism of current development discourse, the dai is a figure who exists before context, occupies an underprivileged class position, and has a voice that may be heard or streamlined into the mainstream.

And in feminism, despite, or after, the recognition of ‘women’s experience’ as constitutive of hegemonic norms, there is a renewed positing of experience as resistant, as the natural habitat, perhaps, of the woman …

This is of course clearly in evidence in what I have called the global feminist undertaking, which is most well argued for philosophically in Nussbaum’s work, and most tellingly represented in her examination and insertion of ‘Jayamma-the-brick-kiln-worker’ – who cannot not have a body that speaks – into the lexicon of development literature. As ‘third world women’s practices’ that contribute to culture-in-the-making, it is visible in the gender work that I have talked about.

What of my ‘conversations’ with the dai? As medical-professional-feminist-addressing-gendered-subaltern, I recognized and tried to steer clear of the various precipitations of such a binary; I ended, however, looking for a connection through experience between the ‘professional’ and the ‘unlearned’; for an essence to the feminine, perhaps, or to woman in the Symbolic. The earlier legacy of experience, then, inheres here; in asking questions of an epistemic status for experience, in the anxiety of not being able to accord it equal validity, in looking for a separation between feminist critical projects and dominant discourse through a recourse to a feminine difference which will be different from the place accorded to women in the patriarchal Symbolic.[11] Most telling, perhaps, it inheres in the anxiety over the similarity or otherwise of perspective between the (feminist) professional and the (woman) dai … one that presumed that the origins of an organic connectedness was to be found in the unspoilt dai who talked of meyeder meyeder katha.[12] So the first attempt that the dais made to connect with me was through abhigyata – experience. And the overwhelming feeling at the end of those 6 days amongst the dais, and in me, was of a solidarity that had perhaps been established. A solidarity across boundaries of authority (though not disruptive of it in any way), across science, across different experiences. But … where then are feminist projects going to differ from development initiatives? What do third world women want, if one may ask the blasphemous question, a question that gathers momentum, nevertheless, in the context of first world vanguardism. Can the solution be that we must give up on capability altogether as a universal? While accessing a connectedness that would not mean the place accorded to women in the patriarchal Symbolic would definitely be a move, where would this connectedness be situated? If not in family or traditional community, would it be in some other sense of being together? Will we seek to continue its residence in women? Will we travel from an erasure of experience, the feminine, the subjective, to an essentialising of the same? Will women be the “embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body, a finite point of view”? If so, are we still going to stay with the biological body as pre-discursive resource of experience? And if science is to remain the ultimate arbiter, is experiential agency then to be only the aporia, showing up as resistances through gaps in policy, that must let be, or can there be a feminist policy-framing that can work on the aporicity of experience?

What of collaboration? Caught between the conventional registers of science and feminism, where science is about knowledge and feminism about politics, not only is the dai’s experience waiting to be rehabilitated within science but also within feminism. While the mainstream policy dialogues with science remain at the level of “filling in gaps in manpower”, the philosophies of science attempt to talk about whether “midwives’ tales” might be justified – questions of validity. The politics of inclusion have operated to bring ‘low knowledges’ into circulation, and feminism must be the natural host to these politics in a frame where feminism is about politics and about women. Hence the whole debate about representation – institutional science versus the dai, the dai as gendered subaltern versus the third world feminist, that populate the space of critique of knowledge by politics, of science by feminism. The questions therefore continue to be – In frames where the dai as “gendered subaltern” has been appropriated into governmental apparatuses, and made to speak that language, are conscious tools of collaboration with the master’s discourse available to her? Or is this the tool lying there for the feminist to pick up, to create a discursive space of negotiation for ‘third world feminisms’? Is this, then, yet a battle for representation, a vanguardism, a speaking for that continues to slip into a speaking of, where third world feminists freeze their examinations of their own enmeshedness or location in their negotiations with global feminism and global development? Is such a freezing inevitable? Or is the dai as gendered subaltern as much outside third world-first world feminist negotiations as outside empire-nation exchanges?

But there is also a question here of the continuing separation of experience and knowledge. If these attempts to rehabilitate experience seem to be at the level of according it equivalent status to knowledge, thus actually keeping alive the binaries feminism has been straining to step out of, what of experience as condition of knowledge-making? The aporicity of experience I speak of might be a beginning.

Having identified these existing trajectories for feminist critiques of science in the Indian context, therefore, I pick up on the gaps in the quintessentially anthropological narrative, to bring back the question of aporicity. We have spoken extensively of the fractured narrative. Rather than the fractured narrative, however, it might be the fracture we need to speak of now. And rather than look at women as being essentially capable of mimetisme,[13] and therefore as the essential content of fracture, it might be useful to access the moment of fracture, using as allegory, not narrative resource, the responses of the dais to the reproductive health apparatus, or the bizarre consultation between the recalcitrant mother and the female physician. It might not be the connectedness between me and the dai as women, then, that will serve as my resource, but our very asymmetry of dialogue, our seeming separation. This might be the fantastic perspective that must be worked on, in feminism, to create the discursive space required to articulate the inversion – an overturning of the dialectic of one knowledge – that Chaudhury (2000) speaks of. Such a concentration on momentary fractures, disallowing as it does a final and fixed concentration on ‘woman’, or a continuing separation of registers between politics and knowledge on account of the ‘fantastic’ perspective opening up a fresh vantage point both of knowing and critique of possible worlds, I submit, would constitute what I have been calling a feminist standpoint epistemology.

[1] There is a wealth of theorizations on the feminine, not going for such a simplistic reading of experience or the everyday. Feminist work in India that looks at autobiographies, for example, has taken on the notion of the everyday as a fraught space, but also a liberating one, following on the re-reading of the personal as the political. Parallels with theorizing in western feminism may be found where the spectrum has, in talking of women’s experience, included a valorizing, as in Adrienne Rich’s description of the experience of motherhood in the Anglo-American second wave of feminism (1986), as also a speaking of the body, of corporeality, of embodiment, and of subjectivity as a foil to identity (as in the French feminist school, where notions of touch as against vision [Luce Irigaray], of ‘there being no place for woman’ in the patriarchal Symbolic’ and women needing a different Symbolic to ‘be’[Irigaray], have been suggested. The subjectivity-identity theorization also recalls the sati debates). This has proceeded to either pit experience against ‘abstract reason’, or to demonstrate, more interestingly, how reasonableness is itself infected by bias, in some cases a ‘male sexualization’ (Grosz 1994). Other powerful analyses could be made, following on Judith Butler’s concept of the ‘constitutive outside’, to show how Reason enacts its hegemony through a continuous production of experience as the constitutive outside to discourse. (This need not be construed as a structural model, as a detailed reading of Butler’s theorization of ‘politically salient exclusions’ will show (Butler 1993). Parallely, ‘experience’ has been articulated, in the work of Joan Scott, among others, not as an ‘out there’ but a historical production (Scott 1992).

[2] I have referred to the way in which I use aporia, in the introduction to the thesis. To recapitulate, aporia is referred to as a logical impasse or contradiction, that which is impassable, especially “a radical contradiction in the import of a text or theory that is seen in deconstruction as inevitable” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online).

[3] A clarification here. I am not saying that experience is always aporetic to a narrative, but I am asking for an attention to a particular perspective that might be so positioned as to be aporetic.

[4] The meaning that I activate here is of a perspective that appears fantastic, or absurd, except from a particular point of view.

[5] “Exclusion in principle seems to function as a formidable method of forcing dependence. And it is indeed a choice between “being on the outside or perhaps at my heel,” conveying first an exclusion in principle, and then conditions for secondary entry, rather than the reverse, “at my heel or on the outside,” which would indicate first a frank authoritarianism and then punishment for insubordination.” (Le Doueff 2003: 25)

[6] Feminist Standpoint theory talks of the possibility of a situated, perspectival form of knowing, of such a knowing as necessarily a communal project, and of this knowing as one where the community of knowers is necessarily shifting and overlapping with other communities. While Haraway would speak of ‘situated knowledges’ as against the ‘God trick’, as she calls it, of seeing from nowhere – a neutral perspective (Haraway 1992), Sandra Hardingwould go on, however, to propose a version of strong objectivity – a less false rather than a more true view; this, Harding would suggest, can come only from the viewpoint of particular communities, sometimes the marginalized, sometimes women. This is where Harding’s version of standpoint epistemology is still grappling with the question of whether the experience of oppression is a necessary route to knowledge. (Harding deals with this with this by treating women’s lives as resource to maximise objectivity, Haraway by treating these women as ironic subjects and seeing from below as only a visual tool). A related question is whether the very notion of standpoint epistemology requires a version, albeit a more robust one than in place now, of systems of domination, and it is here that a productive dialogue could be begun between Haraway’s more experimental version of “seeing from below” and Harding’s notion of strong objectivity.

[7] This would be stressing the empirical foundations of science, but human sciences have always been the area where the subjective is most easily detected – hence the name ‘soft sciences’. Things are changing, however, with the biological sciences rooting themselves in the ‘knowable’ gene – their accession to hard objectivity is now a reality.

[8] As would be evident in the models of sexual intercourse in the medical texts with the masculine/feminine metaphors for sperm/ovum – a model we used in the class as well, with a lively response, for it spoke to traditional languages of patriarchy as well. This has been discussed in some detail by Emily Martin (1991).

[9] Where experience is separate from the empirical.

[10] Things were different before … they will have to be done differently now …

[11] The place of women – in patriarchy, in a language outside patriarchy, has been a recurrent theme in the thought of Luce Irigaray. Interpreting Plato’s myth, she draws a picture of the analogies with the patriarchal arrangement, and proposes another topology. Plato’s Idea she designates as the realm of the Same – “the hom(m)osexual economy of men, in which women are simply objects of exchange. … The world is described as the ‘other of the same’, i.e. otherness, but … more or less adequate copy … woman is the material substratum for men’s theories, their language, and their transactions … the ‘other of the same’ … [or] women in patriarchy … [t]he ‘other of the other’ … is an as yet non-existent female homosexual economy, women-amongst-themselves … [I]n so far as she exists already, woman as the ‘other of the other’ exists in the interstices of the realm of the [Same]. Her accession to language, to the imaginary and symbolic processes of culture and society, is the condition for the coming-to-be of sexual difference.” See ‘The same, the semblance, and the other’ in Whitford (1991: 104).

[12] This is between us women – a common saying in Bengali that carries connotations both of an exclusivity – a woman’s domain – as well as insignificance – this is just something between us women.

[13] To travel from ‘mimesis imposed’ (Irigaray’s term for the mimesis imposed on woman as mirror of the phallic model) to ‘mimetisme’ – “an act of deliberate submission to phallic-symbolic categories in order to expose them”, where “[t]o play with mimesis is … to try to recover the place of … exploitation by discourse, without … simply [being] reduced to it … to resubmit … so as to make ‘visible’, by an effect of playful repetition [mimicry, mimetisme] what was supposed to remain invisible …” is the Irigarayan project (Irigaray 1991, quoted in Diamond 1997: 173).

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