Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Feminisms Futures
The Limits and Ambitions
of Rokeyas Dream
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
EPW
1 Begum Rokeya
vol l no 41
PERSPECTIVES
We could say that feminism is primarily a form of critique rather than a programme. It has, variously, sought to
demystify difference, to isolate the
sources of womens subordination, to
identify patriarchy as a universal
regime of male domination, to analyse
its roots, and to deconstruct the sexgender system. Critique finds its limits in
an implicit reformism, the rectification
of the wrongs it uncovers.
Here is what I mean. Feminist analysis
of the condition of women has for the
most part been articulated in terms of
the following negative existential aspects:
discrimination; oppression; exploitation;
subordination; dispossession; powerlessness; violence (this is not a comprehensive list). Such a critique assumes the
implicit demand that the terms should
be altered if not reversed: thus equality
(in response to discrimination); emancipation (from forms of oppression); justice (freedom from exploitation); domination (as reversal of subordination);
ownership of property (as against dispossession); power (versus powerlessness); and counter-violence as the response to violence. And yet several of
these terms have hardly been pressed
into service in the context of feminism:
not domination; not power;2 not even
ownership of property; and certainly
not counter-violence.
Feminisms demands have for the
most part been coded instead in terms of
reform, to be achieved by legislative fiat
or mind-changing education or both.
Full-fledged opposition to the status quo
is rarely articulated and feminist futures
are not predicated on an overthrow of
existing economic, social or political
arrangements. It should be clear that my
critique here is not issued as a call for a
revolutionary feminism, which would be
merely glib. For we know only too well
why gendered antagonism on the model
of class antagonism is difficult if not
impossible to sustain: women are implicated with men in heterosexual relations
and in kinship structures (my father
was a man, as a character in Elizabeth
Gaskells novel Cranford observes [1851]),
and hence complicit with existing social
arrangements. The sex wars have always
been reductive as an explanation of
vol l no 41
EPW
PERSPECTIVES
what feminism stands for. And feminists, all too aware that power, domination, ownership of property and violence
are precisely the masculinist values that
underpin gender oppression and hierarchy, and confronted by the impossible
predicament of deploying these as the
means to overthrow patriarchy, have
had to rethink the goals as well as the
means of the feminism they espouse.
So, to sum up: feminism is non-teleological in its philosophy and praxis,
which is to say that its analysis is linked
to causes not outcomes; its function
is critical, rather than visionary; it is
ameliorative rather than oppositional in
its politics; and it questions established
value-systems rather than proposes alternative ones. But what might seem like
the limits of feminism and a constraint
on its politics is not necessarily so. To
bring about even one of the changes
mentioned above, however modest in
scope, would cause enough social
upheaval to be considered radical, if not
utopian in ambition.
All the same, an exploration of the
extent and kind of explicit feminist imagining, in theory and fiction, of positive
alternatives, an affirmative politics, and
constructive visions could provide
access to the realm of desire, while also
exposing its contradictions.
I identify two of the most radical
forms that such imagining has taken.
One is the vision of a separation of the
sexes resulting in a world without men,
a society exclusively of women, a Ladyland or Herland. And the other is the
destabilisation of gender, conceptualised
in terms both of an absence of gender
difference as well as of its opposite, the
proliferation of genders. The first form
of imagining identifies men as the source
of the problem and seeks to exclude
them; the second diagnoses gender as
the structural cause of the problem and
seeks to trouble the conceptual schema
of male and female. I shall return to
the implications of these ideas for
feminism, but for now I want to draw
attention to their utopian dimensions
utopian because they do not as yet exist
in pure form anywhere, although like
all utopias they have a prefigurative
dimension.
Economic & Political Weekly
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world, would liberate test-tube babies, babyfarms, big-brother control, from their confinement within the horrors of brave new
world and 1984, and guarantee that their
humane application would finally free mankind from the trap of painful biology. Thus
culture would at last overcome nature and
the ultimate revolution would be achieved.
PERSPECTIVES
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proven to be some of the most violent impositions on the collective human body and psyche,
and which have been distinctly gendered. In
other words, a genderless society might not
even be imaginable, let alone achievable or
desirable, at this stage in Western Lifeworlds.
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