-K.C. Bindu

The context in which we write today is the context of mass urban mobilizations around cases of rape that are aired incessantly in the electronic media, with an endless parade of “perpetrators” with covered faces.  The spectre that was raised from our own (in a sense, feminist) incessant chanting of sexual violence seems to have actually flooded the streets of Delhi (and now Bombay), crying for blood (or, at least castration) of the “brutes” who could violate a person so.
For a feminist movement, it is difficult to be dismissive of these mobilizations.  Yet, it is equally difficult not to be wary of them. How does one not simultaneously welcome and at the same time be suspicious of the (otherwise lethargic) legal apparatus lashing swiftly out?  How does one not deal with problems of masculinity?  Yet, how does one not problematize the fact that the only masculinity in question here, iconized in its pure and “brutish” form seems to be lower class?  How does one not stand with the victim?  Then again, how can we escape the observation that the femininity in “fearless” confrontation (Nirbhaya), normativized increasingly in English media narratives at least, is the “agential” urban, savarna woman (not always empirically, but very often in media constructions)?
Arundhati Roy, speaking against the general euphoria around the “mass mobilisations” around gender, pricks the bubble with an introduction of the structure which she sees as framing the problem. Without taking into account large scale migration into cities and the indignities faced by the lower classes in the hands of institutionalized economic and community onslaughts over them, she feels, one cannot even understand the problem of “these” rapes.

Basically, that idea of criminalizing the lower classes immediately comes up, that these are the violent people. Whereas actually they are the ones against whom tremendous violence is perpetrated in the cities . . . They are the victims of slowly having the oxygen pressed out of their lungs, of having lower and lower wages, of having to pay more and more because prices are rising so fast1.

One has to read the violent masculinity of the lower classes unleashed against the innocent, helpless upper classes (this indeed is the subtext of most of the English newspaper reports) against the background of masculinities of the powerful, which rape and kill with impunity, and use the legal system to justify these.

In addition, I would add to Roy’s formulation of “violence”, the systematic absorption of large groups of people into governmental welfare programmes (like reservations, for instance), that actually bring different worlds into contact in particular institutional spaces such as an urban university.  In various discourses, such meetings are sexualized, and sexualized violently alone.

Reviewing Sexual Harassment in Workspace:  The Context of the Campus in 2013

This is also perhaps the right moment to review the law against sexual harassment in workplace—not the written law, but the practice of it, especially in educational institutions.  Hailed as a symbolic victory for the feminist movement, Vishakha vs State of Rajasthan stands as a testimony to the feminist struggles against the erasure of gendered violence in institutions of work.  The Committees against Sexual Harassment which were subsequently instituted in many educational institutions at least circulated the term ‘sexual harassment’ thus naming and giving form to a hitherto largely nameless malady.
Today, what do we do in practical terms if, as feminists, we are called upon to adjudicate cases of sexual harassment in workplaces? Increasingly, we are “not ready” to deal with the contradictions that very often confront us as feminists: what has the notion of intersectionality (a useful, though, increasingly inadequate theoretical concept) done, empirically, to understand situations of sexual harassment? A sweeping change in demography on campuses has made a situation—always already existing— stand out in relief: i.e., the almost equal number of men and women in most campuses.  Also evident now are the huge differences in caste-class compositions between the women and men in Humanities and Social Sciences that have also been noted by so many ‘watchers and interpreters of social change’.
Such shifts have opened newer opportunities for interactions between “different” young people.  However, the only tools and skills of interaction available to them seem to be the ones provided by the media: urban media globalizing in a particular way and regional media in another. These opportunities and inadequacies are paralleled and multiplied in the differing modes of interaction of youth with families; and also between the increasingly globalized, mall-trotting urban youth and the aspiring mofussil and rural youth who might be excluded from this march of consumerism yet are affected by it. There is a meeting firsthand, of urban and rural India, along with the dominant and dominating castes, on Indian campuses. In the Humanities and Social Sciences streams, it increasingly seems to be a gendered meeting—in this heterosexist world staged necessarily as “(hetero)sexualized.”
In the context of sexual harassment, why are we, as feminists, so paralyzed by this particular encounter?  Is it because we, coming mostly from urban and upper caste locations, feel theoretically powerless to deal with the institutional ways in which lower class/caste women from the margins are getting written into such a narrative? In fact, sometimes we seem to contribute passively to their invisibility and the violence that happens on their bodies, through our blindness or silence. When sexual harassment is reported from these marginalized locations, not read as either “agential” or “feminist,” there is a general distrust of the savarna feminist voice.  Reciprocally, the latter does not know how to handle “community sentiments” which we read as expressing sexism and cannot deal with the complexity of negotiations that marginalized identities have to go through. How does one speak without hearing our own enemies of decades ago, the sexist groups, speaking?
What is also interesting is the extreme silence into which we all fall when “true” power raises its head. We do know that if the male (read dominant caste) higher echelons of power are involved in harassment of “woman” faculty/student/non-teaching staff, committees themselves can never work without sustained student or staff protests to support them. This also proves that there is no “pure” institutional solution through committees.  The emptiness of the sexual harassment committee’s mandate of “consciousness raising” in the face of massive institutional silence around powerful men harassing/demanding sexual submission2  from powerless “women” (and sometimes, men) is quite disturbing. In case after case, we have seen the “autonomy” of sexual harassment committees torn apart when the top person holding power is directly involved. Finally, punitive measures work only when there is institutional dissent within offices or when there are political mobilizations around issues, rather than just having a ‘Committee Against Sexual Harassment’, which might or might not contain politically sensitive persons.
Due to all this and much more, our response to sexual harassment in the workplace seems to be paralysis, as a group, or silence.  In committees, even when feminists chair them, the limits of rights-based punitive actions are revealed.  What might be happening under the garb of feminist experience is that hated and condescending act of ‘counselling’, i.e., of looking down upon human beings, with an “I-know-better-than-you-about-yourselves” expert attitude!
Given all of the above I can only conclude with another set of questions that come up for me: is there a “feminist counselling” possible within institutions? Is there a politics of simultaneous privilege and victimisation that is even articulable?  What are its contours?  What is the language which is not righteous yet moves towards action?  Is there a language of care possible which patriarchy has not appropriated?  What is the challenge of doing a politics of difference yet of understanding standpoints? How can a universalizing law even contain this?  Yet, how can one leave it to the right wing, castiest ideologues who now occupy feminist spaces?  Can we only occupy the space of the specifics, and the everyday, that is increasingly experienced as fragmented?  Is there even a politics of hope in these confusing times?

    K.C. Bindu teaches at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

Notes:

1. Arundhati Roy interviewed by David Barsamian.  “Corporate power, women, and resistance in India today.” http://isreview.org/issue/90/corporate-power-women-and-resistance-india-today accessed on 17 August 2013.
2. Sexual submission can include and range across the following: the actual demand for sex, a taken-for-granted demand that you be submissive intellectually, having to accept passively informal situations where sexist jokes circulate, being silenced in public, being laughed at, being compared for bodily “assets” (or lack thereof), never being allowed to expect to be treated “seriously” like your male colleagues etc.