Gender Studies - Page 5

The Phenomenon of Social Invisibility of Certain Ukrainian Citizens Categories during Crisis Periods

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Oksana Zhuravska1 & Olena Rosinska2
1Assoc. Prof., Faculty of Journalism, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Ukraine.
ORCID: 0000-0002-4623-8933. Email: o.zhuravska@kubg.edu.ua
2Assoc. Prof., Faculty of Journalism, Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University, Ukraine.
ORCID: 0000-0003-4460-0668. Email: o.rosinska@kubg.edu.ua

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.09 
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Abstract

Social invisibility is a complicated psychological and social phenomenon reflected by particular strategies of the society’s attitude to individual groups, their marginalization or “invisibility”, which is especially noticeable in the periods of crises. Ukraine has experienced revolutions, a partial territorial occupation, a pandemic and a large-scale invasion since 2013. The crises of these years influenced society’s life, its readiness or unreadiness to tolerate particular social issues. The analysis of the tendency in covering the issues concerning the LGBT community in the Ukrainian online media of Ukrayinska Pravda (UP), Gazeta.ua (G), Obozrevatel.com (Ob) during 2010 – the first part of 2022 based on statistical and content-analysis of publications gives a chance to prove that.

The research findings demonstrated that, in general, publication activities of the media do not demonstrate tendencies to increased amount of media content devoted to the problems of the LGBT community. The thematic range of publications is also relatively limited, its core is the issues of the Equality March organization and holding, social reaction to this event, world’s news and activity of local politicians.

The serious analytical publications concerning the problems of the LGBT-community are at the periphery of the themes. Stories of the LGBT-community representatives, including media persons who demonstrate positive examples of social adaptation, an issue of gender-based tolerance in the society, etc., remain beyond the attention of the editorial staff, observation of human rights, issues of the queer culture. The reasons for such a situation can relate to the editorial staff’s policy and influence on formation of the narrative in the country concerning the rights of the LGBT-community representatives.

The research of other top-rated media publications is also prospective not only with regard to quantity and themes, but also quality; in particular, compliance with journalist standards and ethical norms by the authors. That will allow reception of a more complete picture concerning the representativeness of the LGBT community’s problems in the country’s media environment and the specification of the indicators influencing their formation, as well as understanding mechanisms of social invisibility in media.

Keywords: LGBT, gender, media studies, social invisibility.

Women in Disasters: Unfolding the Struggles of Displaced Mothers in Talisay, Batangas during the Taal Volcano Eruption and the Pandemic

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Jeffrey Rosario Ancheta1 & George Vincent Gamayo2
1Faculty Researcher and Assistant Professor, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Manila, Philippines. ORCID: 0000-0001-5831-8204. Email: jrancheta@pup.edu.ph
2Communication Management Officer and Assistant Professor, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Manila, Philippines. ORCID: 0000-0001-7223-6993. Email: gvgamayo@pup.edu.ph

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.01 
Abstract Full-Text PDF Issue Access

Abstract

Disasters strike globally, but their impacts are often more severe on socially and economically marginalized sectors like women. This is one of the main justifications behind the 2010 Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act, which promotes gender equality and inclusivity in all strategies to combat the adverse effects of natural hazards, especially on underrepresented populations. However, gender-based discrimination during disasters is still prevalent in local communities of the Philippines. Thus, this study attempts to unfold the struggles of displaced mothers in Talisay, Batangas, because of the Taal Volcano’s eruption in January 2020 and worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic that began in March 2020. Specifically, this study identifies the direct impacts that impede survivors’ capacity to recover from the disruptions brought about by the aforementioned catastrophes. Findings, through mothers’ narratives, reveal six (6) key themes that reveal insecurity in livelihood, shelter, education of their children, food, health and nutrition, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). This only proves that displaced mothers face socio-economic issues aggravated by the changing climate that the local government of Talisay needs to address towards a gender-inclusive DRRM.

Keywords: Women, disaster, struggle, displaced mother, volcanic eruption, pandemic

Dual Identity and Self-assertion: A Study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

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Sultan Alghofaili

Department of English Language and Translation, College of Sciences and Arts in Ar Rass, Qassim University, Saudi Arabia. Email: ssgfiely@qu.edu.sa

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 3, September-October 2022, Pages 1–13. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n3.20

First published: October 24, 2022 | Area: American Literature| License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number 3, 2022)
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Dual Identity and Self-assertion: A Study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

Abstract

The Scarlet Letter serves as both a critique of society and a window into Hawthorne’s thoughts. In opposition to a patriarchal depiction, he wants to allow women’s individuality some room. He does not advocate setting rules and imposing them on the individual to be governed by them. Thus, he created the character of Hester Prynne who appears as commenting upon the situation of women in the 19thand century of New England society. She struggles to win a place in society and she succeeds in winning it in her revolt against the very order that at the first stage humiliates and condemns her, and accepts and honours her later on. The article traces Hester’s individual rebellion in an alien land against an artificially created corrupt religious and moral order which exploits her body and denies her humanity at first and ultimately bows down to her consistent individual morality and actions. In doing so, the article tries to show certain feminist approaches adopted by the author long before feminism would come to the mainstream of literary thoughts.

Keywords: 19th-century New England society, Feminism, puritan, badge of shame.

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History, Memory and Trauma in Selected Works of Arupa Patangia Kalita

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Manashi Bora

Department of English, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam. Email: manashibora@gauhati.ac.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages 1-9. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne30

First published: June 30, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Abstract

India’s North East, including Assam, has a history of militancy arising from various socio-political causes. Writers have responded to this aspect of the history of this region by producing works that record and commemorate particular events and experiences for posterity. Of particular significance in these works is the record of the impact of the disturbances on the everyday lives of people, many of whom, though unaware of the main issues being debated, are affected beyond measure by the turn of the events. Arupa Patangia Kalita’s short stories collected in Written in Tears (2015), The Musk and Other Stories (2017), and The Loneliness of Hira Barua (2020) document a momentous phase in the recent history of the North-Eastern region of India especially Assam, marked by student agitation and militancy which mobilized the people around particular issues on the one hand and inflicted sufferings of various kinds on innocent people on the other. A writer is, among other things, a recorder of the experiences of a region who investigates in the form of a narrative the fallout of social upheavals on the everyday lives of people. The proposed paper will look into the aspects of the recent history of the North East touched on by the writer in her short stories using insights from studies on history, postcoloniality, memory and trauma. It will focus especially on the documentation of women’s experiences during that phase from a woman’s perspective.

Keywords: agitation, militancy, poststructuralism, postcolonial feminism

Introduction

Engaging with the events in the history of a region has been a major concern of literature in recent times. There has been a historical turn in fiction writing especially, an exercise in memorialization since the Second World War. The past has been delved into to unearth little-known aspects of it, record individual memories, and find out the genesis of particular problems so as to shape the future. The past, the present, and the future are now seen as inextricably intertwined as a continuum. Alan Robinson (2011) talks about “the present past” (4) and argues that “at any given moment several dimensions of time coexist in present consciousness” (4).

Like other regions of the world, the North-eastern region of India has its own unique history; militancy and violence rooted in various geographical, socio-economic and cultural factors constitute a significant feature of the histories of many of the states of the region. With the signing of various accords, the normalcy of a sort has returned to the region, but the events of the past are stored in the individual and collective memories of the inhabitants of the region and provide the background to much of the literature produced here. As Anne Whitehead remarks, “The desire among various cultural groups to represent or make visible specific historical instances of trauma has given rise to numerous important works of contemporary fiction” (3). A number of writers from Assam writing in English and the regional language Assamese, have recorded the experience of agitation and militancy in Assam in the 1970s and 1980s. Mention may be made of Mitra Phukan (The Collector’s Wife, 2005), Arun Sharma (Sankalpa, 2008), Aruni Kashyap (A House with a Thousand Stories, 2013) and Rita Choudhury (AbirotoJatra, 1981) and Ei Samay Sei Samay, 2007). Arupa Patangia Kalita has carved a niche for herself in the echelon of Assamese writers with her strong portrayals of the social-cultural life of Assam in her works like Felanee (2003), Oyonanta (1994), Written in Tears (2015), and The Loneliness of Hira Barua and Other Stories (2020). She has first-hand experience of the days of agitation and militancy in Assam. In an interview, she has talked about how as a teacher of Tangla College she saw insurgency from close quarters; she was affected by the shooting down of the Principal in front of the college and the death of many students, and the money that the teachers and other government employees were forced to pay to the militants1.Among the works of Patangia Kalita which look back on the happenings of the past in the North-Eastern region, especially Assam, are the stories included in the collections Written in Tears (2015), The Musk and other Stories(2017), and The Loneliness of Hira Baruah and other Stories (2020). Originally written in Assamese, many of the stories in the collections were translated into English by Ranjita Biswas. The stories throw light on different aspects of militancy in the region, especially its impact on the everyday lives of the common man. Arupa Patangia Kalita is known for her belief in the connection between literature and life as it is lived, and her concern for the underdogs as she was influenced by the Marxist thought of the 1970s. Many of the characters in her novels are people she had met in real life and she articulates the voice of the silent and the strength of the neglected mostly women and the oppressed. This paper aims to analyze how a woman writer looks back on the events of the past, what aspects of agitation and militancy are remembered and recorded for posterity, and what individual and collective trauma people suffered. The focus will be on the experiences of women during times of unrest.

                                                                        I

Historiography has attracted a lot of attention from scholars in recent times. Dominick LaCapra (2014) talks about two approaches to historiography; one is the documentary research model which involves collecting evidence and making truth claims based on that. Capra claims that, as opposed to the documentary method, “narratives in fiction may also involve truth claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into phenomena such as slavery or the Holocaust by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving at least a plausible ‘feel’ for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods” (2014, p. 13). Toni Morrison’s Beloved on the aftermath of slavery falls in this category. In other words, fictional narratives also provide useful insights into the history of a period by making creative use of individuals and collective memories. Although history and memory are seen as binary opposites and history is valorized as the realm of critical rational inquiry and memory is regarded as simplistic and confused, a critically tested memory can serve a useful purpose and light up many dark alleys of the past.

Poststructuralist ideas which have swept across academia have emphasized the histories of the margins —women, blacks, and ethnic minorities. “History from below” has become the buzzword. Postcolonial feminism too lays stress on the stories and experiences of women in the developing or the third world. Ours has been termed the catastrophic age. The field of Trauma Studies which developed in the 1980 and 1990s focused on studying trauma associated with catastrophic events like the World Wars, the Holocaust, anti-colonial movements, civil wars, and militancy in different parts of the world. Dominick LaCapra observes, “Trauma and its causes may indeed be a prominent feature of history, notably modern history which should not be airbrushed or denied” (LaCapra, 2014, p.xi). There is a growing realization that there has been too much focus on studying the experiences of the white western world and that the events of the non-western world need to be recorded so that some link can be established between cultures. Craps and Buelens (2008) talk about “the risk of ignoring or marginalizing non-western traumatic events and histories and non-western theoretical work which may “assist in the perpetuation of Eurocentric views and structures that maintain or widen the gap between West and the rest of the world”(2). The colonial experience and the movements for national independence, for instance, thus got to be written about and the cultures and histories of the non-western world were inscribed. There is an increasing recourse to the anecdote or the story to recover the voice of the marginalized and the abject. Mass movements which often give rise to militancy have weighty causes, but most often the toll that they take on the lives of the people, especially the vulnerable sections, is overlooked. Literature is one of the ways in which the sacrifices and sufferings of communities like women and ethnic minorities can be commemorated and resistance to acts of terrorism and brutality can be built up and this is what Arupa Patangia Kalita does in her collection of stories.

                                                                        II

A distinctive feature of the largely patriarchal societies of the third world is women’s association with home, with the inner space. The stories in the collection Written in Tears by Patangia show how the inner space is destroyed by the outside conflicts which leave women lonely and destitute. A number of stories in the collection deal with the destruction of the home. The story “Arunima’s Motherland” is a narrative of how a family pays the price of having a son as a member of an outlawed organization. Not only is a wedding engagement of a daughter of the family cancelled because of this, but the entire family is annihilated by a bomb hurled at their house with the daughter-in-law and her infant son having a providential escape because they happened to be elsewhere at the time of the blast. In the span of a few moments, a wife loses her husband and the protection he provides to the family, an infant loses his father and the love of the doting paternal grandparents, uncles, and aunts. What is very poignant here is the picture of cozy domesticity in the early part of the story —the endearing relationship of the members of the family, their everyday life as they go about cooking, tending to the flowers and vegetable gardens, and preparing the bride’s trousseau in anticipation of a wedding —all of which give way to a gruesome picture of a burnt house with the mangled remains of bodies strewn all over as the daughter-in-law comes back with her newly born son to be welcomed by her husband’s household. Preceding this catastrophe is a phase of acute fear and anxiety as the younger brother of the sought-after militant, who is pursuing his studies in a college, is picked up for questioning and the house seems to be haunted by strange people who have their faces covered with black clothes even as a series of secret killings, bomb blasts, derailments of trains, demands for food and money by the outlaws, and constant army surveillance induce a fear psychosis among the people. The family becomes the butt of caustic remarks by the neighbours who blame them for the army’s presence in the locality. Arunima is pitied by a neighbour for marrying into a family of criminals—“What bad luck that you have to live with this family of criminals!” (28). They are not invited to social functions and no doctor agrees to come to their house to examine Arunima’s aged father-in-law. What is seen in the end is the uncertain future before the daughter-in-law with an infant in her arms. She had ceased to be welcome in her mother’s house as quite some time had passed after the birth of her son and she sensed that her sisters-in-law would be happy to see her gone. What she faces when she returns to her in-law’s house is something she could not have imagined in her wildest nightmares. The author deftly uses contrasts — pitting the warmth of family relationships against the chilling devastation of militancy. Metaphors are also used -of bees building their comb when Arunima enters the house as a daughter-in-law and then of them flying away from the honeycomb before the destruction of the home that Arunima cherished. Women are the givers of life as is put forth by the image of Arunima and her newly born child; it is the cult of violence mostly perpetrated by men that destroys life and relationships.

The other stories in the collection deal with the different ways in which women suffer during times of unrest. Almost all the stories talk about hard-earned money and resources taken away by the militants or the army. The simple villagers are caught in the crossfire between the army and the militants and are unable to decide whom to obey. Teachers are served notices to pay huge amounts from their salaries. There are gruesome acts of violence —the hurling of bombs, blowing up of bridges and vehicles full of people, molestations of women, stillbirths due to the stressful lives of expectant mothers, army atrocities on the villagers who are herded into open fields and punished for helping the militants, and an overall fear psychosis which permeates into the everyday life. “They could not breathe, they could not eat, they could not sleep” (29). It is as though they were suffering a death-in-life existence, an aspect discussed by Amit Baishya in his Contemporary Literature from Northeast India (2019) where he considers the representations of the effects of political terror in the contemporary necropolitical literature from the North-Eastern region.

Women often bear the brunt of militancy and the diktats of the agitationists. They issue instructions regarding women’s dress and Mainao in the story “The Girl with Long Hair” has her hair cut off when she defies the instructions in order to have some fun with her friends. As a result, not only is her beautiful hair chopped off in public view but she is also forced to marry the boy who cut her hair as it is a tribal custom for a girl to marry a person who touches her in any manner. It is the most drastic punishment meted out to a fun-loving girl. Women are compelled to be the bearers of the culture of the community as there seems to be no strict dress code for the males.

The story “Surabhi Barua and the Rhythm of Hooves” deals with the way people who opposed the Assam andolan were harassed. Surabhi Baruah, who works in a college and has leftist leanings, writes articles opposing the movement. She and another of her colleagues, Professor Bordoloi, have to bear the brunt of the students’ ire for opposing the andolan. Students walk out of their classes, there is hooting, and Professor Bordoloi is attacked and injured. Surabhi Barua’s engagement is called off by her fiancé’s family and she is forced to apply for a fellowship and move out of the town. She becomes a liability even to her own family so much so that her own mother does not try to dissuade her from moving out of town. Her story bears testimony to the ways people who opposed the movement were harassed and became socially ostracized.

“Kunu’s mother” is another story that testifies to the vulnerability of women especially women who are without the support of men. After the death of her husband, Kunu becomes the centre of her mother’s world. Kunu grows up to be a beautiful young woman who begins to attract the attention of young men. A particular young man, a militant, enamoured by her beauty starts visiting her house and demands that he be allowed to marry her, sending alarm signals to her mother. She decides to send the girl away to live with relatives. When she returns after leaving her daughter at a relative’s house, she faces the anger of the young man and all the people of the village who told her that if she wishes to live in the village and retain her plot of land there, she will have to abide by the wishes of the community and in this case, that means marrying her daughter off to the young man who wanted her. Kunu’s mother finds herself alone and absolutely helpless, unable to decide on a course of action.

The last story “Ayengla of the Blue Hills” bears testimony to the trauma induced by army atrocities on women. Cathy Caruth (1995) defines trauma as “The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (4-5). The story is a tragic narrative of a young woman who is happy with her family and who does not understand much about the happenings in the outside world, but as fate would have it, she is raped by the army and the trauma of the incident leaves her crippled for the rest of her life. She becomes frozen in time and is unable to assign the incident to her past and to move on with her life in the present. In spite of the efforts by her husband and the other members of the family, Ayengla does not recover. Her husband marries another woman and starts a new life, and Ayengla lapses into gloom, loneliness, and finally death. Her story shows the damaging psychological effects of oppression, especially when it involves the violation of the body in case of a woman. Another story, “The Face in the Mirror” deals with the impact of an aunt’s rape on a little girl from Nagaland named Zungmila. The rape left her disturbed for the rest of her life so much so that she suffered from periodic fits when she would pour out her hatred for the Indians who occupied their land and could go to sleep only with the help of injections, “mumbling about her aunt and her distended breast” (131).

The stories are based on characters who belong to different communities —Assamese, Bodo, and Naga. The customs, beliefs, and everyday lives of these communities differ as also the problems which give rise to militancy in different places. What holds the stories together are the similarities in the experience of militancy and the sad plightof women in times of unrest. As a woman writer, Arupa Patangia Kalitahas given us a collection of tales that are to a great extent women-centered and represent the myriad ways in which militancy affects women. While women are, by and large, left destitute, helpless, and in a state of mental and emotional shock, there are also positive developments that help them to be self-reliant and earn an income. Mainao in the story “The Cursed Fields of Golden Rice” is forced by circumstances to learn to make snacks, weave shawls etc. and sell them in the market to earn a living. She is helped in her endeavour by women’s cooperatives which supply her yarn and help her to sell her products. Women thus adopt various survival strategies to pull out of difficult situations.

The cultural distinctiveness of the non-western world is also inscribed in the stories even as they record the experience of agitation and militancy. The women belong to different communities and locales— hills, plains, tribal and non-tribal— are part of various customs of the community. “Arunima’s Motherland” shows a typically Assamese household with a kitchen, flower garden and Assamese food cooked with great care by the women of the house. The landscape of the hills is celebrated in “Ayengla of the Blue Hills”. In the story, “The Girl with Long Hair”, the tribal custom of a girl having to marry the man who happens to touch her is alluded to. Names of the characters (Arunima, Zumgmila, Alari), food items and drinks (zumai), articles of clothing (dokhana), kinship terms (mami, bou, khuri), names of places (botabari chowk), ceremonies (ghargochoka) gods and goddesses, beliefs like the belief in spirits and witches, in the afterlife, and a number of songs (e.g. names) locate the stories in the cultural landscape of the North-East. The centrality of western culture is thus undercut by the inscription of the local modes. The patriarchal structure of these societies is borne out by the fact that all the women, whether they are literate and employed or not, are alike victims of different kinds of oppression. Women are associated not with the outer world but with the inner space — the home — which is destroyed by the violence of militancy: “They had helped Mainao set up home. Those evil men had destroyed it within one year. Only a woman understood how much effort it took to set up a home, and now in front of their eyes the beautiful house had disappeared” (“The Cursed Fields of Golden Rice” p.116). It was the ‘jungle party’ that destroyed the house (“The Cursed Fields of Golden Rice” p. 113). After Mainao left for Delhi where her husband had found work, her house was taken over by the outlaws who finished off everything there was in the house. They kept abducted people in the house till they were driven out by the military, but by then there was no trace of the beautiful house that Mainao had set up.

Insurgency and the common people’s miseries resulting from it is a theme that Patangia Kalita keeps returning to in her works. “Two Days from a Phantom’s Diary,” a story included in The Musk and Other Stories (2017) deals with the predicament of individuals suffering untold hardships owing to extortion and exorbitant demands for money by the militant organizations which target the passengers of the buses, as also people making both ends meet with great difficulty. People refusing to pay would be gunned down mercilessly. On the other hand, people paying the terrorists like Chandan Saikia would also be in danger of getting arrested for helping the insurgents. There is mention of residents having to keep a vigil in certain strategic spots like bridges; they are treated by the military as “bonded slaves” (21) who could be slapped and subjected to other abuses by military men. “A Precarious Link” is another story that deals with the miseries of a fruit vendor named Manohar who faces serious economic hardships as the fruits he wants to sell are spoilt due to disturbances related to insurgency and counter-insurgency operations. There are references to bandhs, killings of army men as well as the extremists, bomb explosions, and the difficulties faced by a family in getting medical help following disturbances that turned a “sweet, fresh, fragrant and colorful”(58) town into something “totally putrid”(58) and into a “valley of death,”(64) with the well-to-do escaping to trouble-free places.

The Loneliness of hira barua (2020) is another collection of stories by Arupa Patangia Kalita. Some of the stories here deal with insurgency. The story “The House of Nibha-bou” for instance, narrates what befalls an otherwise happy household because one family member happened to join an insurgent outfit. Much of the story deals with the description of the life of a household centred on Nibha bou, who enters the household as a bride, gives birth to two children, and wins everybody’s admiration because of her skills in running the household with meticulous care. Nibha bou’s qualities are traced back to her childhood – even as a child, she had exhibited great acumen in the orderly arrangement of things and in taking charge of the family matters in case of a mishap like her mother’s ill-health.

The family’s life moved on at the usual pace. The only thing that was disturbing was Nibha’s brother-in-law Bijit’s joining the ULFA when he was sent to study at the university. He used to visit the family after his joining under cover of darkness. Dressed in fatigues and carrying a haversack with a heavy gun, he had become unrecognizable even to his family. There was a rumour that he had become a dreaded militant leader involved in a few killings and was carrying a huge price on his head. His visits stopped after some time and the family members moved ahead with their lives. Nobody could imagine in their wildest of dreams that Bijit’s being in the ULFA would one day spell disasters for the family though they were used to being visited by the security personnel now and then looking for the outlawed.

All of a sudden, on a certain day the family was surprised to see a group of men getting down from two vehicles in front of their house and asking them how much money their outlawed son had hidden in the house. They were asked to hand over the money immediately. When they said that they had no money, the men themselves set about the task of searching every nook and corner —dismantling things and turning the house upside down. The family sits in a corner, terrified and pained by the way their cherished objects were thrown asunder by the unfeeling strangers. The house wore a picture of devastation when the men left. Nibhabou’s father-in-law was in danger of suffering a collapse under the strain and his son had to go out in search of a doctor.

The story “Scream” is a different kind of narrative where the hill functions as a symbol that obstructs the light that metaphorically represents goodness, happiness, kindness, and other positive sentiments: “Who doesn’t want the warm rays of the sun? But the cruel hillock shuts it out and casts a shadow over all” (100). The hill is different in different sections of the story. In the first section of the story, it is the heap of newspapers carrying the news of massacres, bomb blasts, dowry deaths, floods, bandhs, and rape. The narrator says that newspapers, TV, and the radio conspire to build up the hill in front of him and he desperately looks for sunlight. Sometimes, the hill takes the form of extortion threats, of young men swooping down and misbehaving with girls out on a picnic with their professor, or of unfeeling men felling trees to construct buildings. The last snapshot is of the people of a village observing a fast every uruka because on that day the terrorists swooped down on the village and killed innocent people preparing to have the customary feast on uruka night in the month of Magh after a good harvest. While the rest of Assam celebrates, the people of that particular village fast in memory of those killed: “their resentment, their grief, slowly create a dark hill. An angry hill bereft of water, lacking a cool shade under which to rest” (116).

In “The Half-Burnt Bus at Midnight”, a half-burnt bus is being dragged to a garage by a truck — “this terrible bus, destroying everything on its way” (127) becomes the symbol of the destruction that terrorism unleashes. The bus full of passengers had entered an area where a bandh was in force, which resulted in the supporters of the bandh setting it ablaze and killing everybody inside.

III

The short stories in the three collections Written in Tears, The Musk and other Stories and The Loneliness of hira barua look back on a tumultuous phase in the history of the North- East India and record the myriad ways in which agitation and militancy affected everyday life and the coping mechanisms adopted by the people. Many works coming from the postcolonial world, commemorate the strengths of women—their participation in movements for national independence and other causes. But “Written in Tears”, the collection which has the largest number of stories centred on women, focuses largely on the victimhood of women; women are sufferers not only when they keep to the boundaries set for them, but also when they are bold and speak their minds out as in the case of Surabhi Baruah. It emerges that while chalking out programmes of action for various causes, the fallout on different sections of people, especially women and other subalterns, is not considered that resulting in tragic consequences in their lives. Patangia Kalita’s language is lucid and sometimes poetic in its use of images, metaphors, and symbols as the image of the hill in “Scream” which has symbolic significance. Patangia Kalita does not experiment much with style confining herself to the social realist, omniscient narrator mode combining it with descriptive felicity and an eye for detail, but occasionally, in stories like “Scream” and “A Precarious Link” there are some attempts at narrative innovation and the use of the anecdotal, fragmentary, and snapshot mode. The stories are, on the whole, stories of dispossession, economic hardship, forced migration from one place to another, segregation and isolation, destruction of family relationships, loneliness and unforgettable violence to the body and mind especially of the womenfolk. Inscribing human agony in words can be seen as the writer’s attempt to raise voice against brutality in the name of different causes. LaCapra and Cathy Caruth, in their studies of traumatic experience, offer valuable frameworks for analyzing such experience in different parts of the world in different periods of history, while the importance of integrating such analysis with the peculiarities of the local context shall always remain. Third world experience can offer valuable insights into studies of history, memory and trauma.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

Notes:

1See Bedabrat Bora’s interview with ArupaPatangiaKalita, June 10,2017.youtube. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FItY1cOw_fM >

References:

Baishya. Amit R. (2019) Contemporary Literature from North East India: Deathworlds, Terror and survival. Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series, 2019

Caruth, Cathy. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Caruth, Cathy. (1995) Ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. The John Hopkins University Press.

Craps, Stef. & Gert Buelens. (2008) “Introduction: Postcolonial Trauma Novels” in Studies in  the Novel.Vol.40,No.1/2,Postcolonial Trauma Novels(spring and summer) pp 1-12 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533856. Accessed on 16.12.2018

Kalita, Arupa Patangia. (2015) Written in Tears. Translated by Ranjita Biswas. Harper Perennial,  

Kalita, ArupavPatangia. (2020) The loneliness of hirabarua. Translated byRanjita Biswas.        Macmillan, 2020

Kalita, Arupa Patangia. (2017) The Musk and Other Stories. Niyogi Books. New Delhi, 2017

LaCapra, Dominick. (2014) Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins       University Press.

Robinson, Alan. (2011) Narrating the Past: History, Memory and the ContemporaryNovel.        Palgrave Macmillan.

Whitehead, Anne. (2004) Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

Work Consulted:

Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. New York and London: W W Norton and Company, 2000.

Manashi Bora is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Gauhati University. Her doctoral dissertation was on the French feminist writer Luce Irigaray. Her translations of folk narratives of Assam are included in the book Mothers, Daughters and Others: Representation of Women in the Folk Narratives of Assam. She has edited the anthology, A Treasury of English Poetry: From William Blake to Seamus Heaney. She has written critical introductions to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer for DC Books and EC Media, Bengaluru. She has worked extensively in the areas of translation, literary theory, women’s studies, and the literature of North-East India.

The Construction of Performative Identities in Patriarchal Religious Institutions: A Study of Annie Besant’s An Autobiography with Special Reference to “Atheism as I Knew and Taught it”

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Tanu Gupta

Professor, Department of English. Chandigarh University, Mohali, Punjab, India. ORCID id: 0000-0002-6969-5504. Email: tanu.e9349@cumail.in

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages  https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.22

First published: June 26, 2022 | Area: Gender Studies  | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number 2, 2022)
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Abstract

Annie Besant was a Victorian radical whose outspoken views included advocacy of women’s rights and atheism. In her mid-forties she went to live in India. Her An Autobiography (1893) charts her dramatic political and ethical awakenings, up to the point where she joined the Theosophical movement. It describes how she was unhappily married to a clergyman, contemplated suicide, embraced atheism, and legally separated from her husband. The present paper is an attempt to explore Annie Besant’s rebellion against patriarchal and religious institutions through an in-depth study of her autobiography with special reference to the chapter “Atheism as I Knew and Taught It”. The paper will analyze how Annie Besant revolted against the performative construction of identity which is the result of the patriarchal religious discourses, and how breaking the binary of theist/atheist gave her strength to further deconstruct the male/female binary.

Keywords: atheism, free thought, gender roles, women liberation, performativity, discourses, patriarchy, religion

  1. Introduction:

Nonconformity to religion results in proclivity for free thought i.e. a commitment to question everything and to give priority to the reason above all. The same nonconformity gives strength to the idea that gender differences are the product of social and cultural discourses. The present paper based on the study of Annie Besant’s “Atheism: As I Knew and Taught It”, taken from her autobiography, is an attempt to explore her rational and radical opinions about religious teachings and their impact on developing a sense of rebellion against all patriarchal institutions. The analysis is done by applying the views and results of Judith Bultler’s notion of performativity and Michel Foucault’s idea of normalization of power.

  1. Annie Besant’s Conversions:

Annie Besant wrote An Autobiography after her conversion into Theosophy which is a spiritualist philosophy influenced by Eastern religion. She is a woman who lived multiple lives—First, as a devout Christian who married a clergyman, then refused to take communion at church, eventually resulting in her legal separation, converted into “a free thinker, then a scientific materialist, then an atheist, finally into the most prominent female advocate for secularism and a woman activist” (Miller, 2009, p. 248). She emigrated to India in 1898, and became the first woman President of Indian National Congress. Her multiplicity of self as represented in her autobiography seems to be the result of her various conversions. Her shift from staunch Christian to free thought to Theosophy to atheism to feminist individualism represent an ongoing search for identity and a rebel against the performative construction of identity. Thus, when people later attacked her atheism as negative, she replied that humans should live in accord with truth, not superstition: ‘it is an error,’ she explained, ‘to regard my truth as negative and barren, for all truth is positive and fruitful’. (Besant, 1877, p. 7)

  1. Construction of Performative Identities in Religious Institutions:

Atheists are the individuals who do not believe in the existence of God or gods. They “tend to be less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less racist, less authoritarian, less ethnocentric, and less dogmatic than religious individuals” (Stinson, 2013, p.40). According to Christine Overall, there are many reasons to support this argument that feminists should be atheists. She posited that feminists should be atheists because religion perpetuates gender inequity.

“Historically, women have been excluded from education, including religious and theological education; hence they have not been involved in shaping religions or theologies. Women have also been denied leadership positions as priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams and have had only a subordinate participation in the life of many religions.” (Overall, 2007, p.235)

The roles based on gender are further institutionalized through religious beliefs. Atheists, however, are somewhat free to support women’s independence and equality as is seen in Annie Besant’s proclamations. Though the argument that atheists support gender equality is still under debate, atheists can realize how gender is constructed in the garb of religious systems as in education, family and social system. According to Judith Butler:

“. . . we often describe ourselves as having identities as if those identities exist in the real world whereas, in fact, the phrases which refer to those identities create them. Identity talk is a performance in which its objects are conjured up as much as it is analysis of things that exist out there – and it’s just one of the performances in which gender identities are maintained.” (Butler, 2001, p.341)

Religion plays a major role in maintaining these identities. Annie Besant declaring herself outright an atheist advocated and voiced for women’s rights in India along with other social reformers. “Known as Red Annie, she was a militant atheist, socialist, and trade union organizer, as well as women’s rights advocate.” (Nancy, 1994, p.563). Chastity for women has always been considered of having the utmost importance in most of the religions of the world.  It is considered one of the human virtues. Holy Mary, because of her being pure and virgin, is considered a perfect woman.

“According to the teachings of Quran and the New Testament, chastity and avoiding infection of moral and sexual deviations have been considered as outstanding characteristics of believers in community for having Communal pathways to sustainable and health living; especially leaders and leadership authority have no stability without emancipation of lusts and desires. Importance of modesty; that is the state of controlling against lust, has been repeatedly mentioned in Quran.” (Moosavi, 2016)

Annie Besant in her fervor for atheism “glorified human passion, and regarded sexual intercourse as perfecting the union of heart and mind.” (Nancy, 1994, p.565) In the essay taken up for study she puts forward:

“Virtue is an indispensable part of all true and solid happiness…. But it is, after all, only reasonable that happiness should be the ultimate test of right and wrong . . .” (Besant, 2018, p. 96).

The relationship between being virtuous and being chaste is highly debatable as it has always led to a negotiable performative identity rather than a stable state of sexual virtue. At the same time the relation between chastity and social reputation is also more complex as in the case of Annie Besant. Though Annie Besant herself was convicted for obscenity along with Charles Bradlaugh during her controversial campaign against birth control, yet her public proclamations about human passions did not lead to that much of social disgrace as these got compensated through other performative means.

Annie propounded her belief in Hinduism also:

“You have not only the Vedas and the Upanishads showing a mighty intellect…You find the very foundation of modern science laid down as part of the Hindu philosophy.” (Pillai, 2017)

However,

“Neither Hinduism nor women are stable, unified categories with one specific meaning, for each comprises complex, sometimes even contradictory, realities.” (King, p.523)

Annie Besant could easily recognize how spoken discourses operate within each institution and performativity here becomes an important factor to influence the identities of both the individuals and organizations in order to maintain market position.

Annie Besant observed the condition of Indian women closely and decried their restricted lives. While questioning Indian patriarchal discourse, she stumped her radical causes. In her first public lecture, Besant openly debated on the issue of women’s emancipation. In the journal National Reformer, she has regularly expressed her feminist ideals.

“. . . men restrict women’s action to the home? I can understand that, in Eastern lands, where the husband rules his wives with despotic authority, and woman is but the plaything and the slave of man, woman’s sphere is the home, for the very simple reason that she cannot get outside it … Shut any living creature up, and its prison becomes its sphere.” (Besant, 1885, pp. 10, 12)  

Annie Besant who was a woman of dreams and was always willing to use new ideas in place of the old ones could easily grasp the complexities of the situation. Her unorthodox religious views and her inclination towards atheism made her believe:

“Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.” (Qtd. in Lewis)

During her twenties, she started developing serious doubts about her religious beliefs and eventually, she became anti-Church. She lost her faith in Christianity so much so that she refused to attend communion. She even got legally separated from her husband who used to order her to follow Christianity.

“I resolved to take Christianity as it had been taught in the Churches, and carefully and thoroughly examine its dogmas one by one, so that I should never again say “I believe” where I had not proved, and that, however diminished my area of belief, what was left of it might at least be firm under my feet. . . . that I lost all faith in Christianity.” (Besant, 2018, pp 58-59)

She got notoriety when she along with Charles Bradlaugh published Charles Knowlton’s ‘Fruits of Philosophy’, a pamphlet that advocated birth control. Her husband, Frank Besant, who was a clergyman and had always believed in the notion of husband’s authority and the wife’s submission.

“It is not your duty to ascertain the truth,” he told me, sternly. “It is your duty to accept and believe the truth as laid down by the Church. At your peril you reject it” (Besant, 2018, p. 67)

He even appointed a detective to see if she was sleeping with Charles Bradlaugh. Annie always revolted against the conditions imposed upon her. Rebelling against her marriage and being against the denial of a woman’s independence, she left her so-called religious husband and the secure life at home and ventured on a new path carving a niche for herself. For Foucault, the subject is constructed not only in language, as Lacan would have it, but through many different types of practices. Religion is one such practice through which power-knowledge effects are applied. Foucault rejected any notion of an essence of being, asserting that self and identities are constructed in particular contexts affected by non-discursive institutions, texts and discourses:

“. . . discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is thing for which or by which there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized.” (Foucault, 1970, pp 52-53)

Annie Besant, who began her life immersed in religiosity, got transformed into an atheist and championed women’s cause. When she embraced atheism, she was charged with obscenity.

“Contraception was used as the convenient excuse to expose atheists as obscene and immoral. With this justification, the defenders of the Christian state could send atheist propagators to prison.” (Conrad, 2009, 59)

She was called a deranged female too. She couldn’t join any of the women’s rights organizations because of her controversial reputation but wrote widely on women’s emancipation and gender equality.  Once free not only from Frank Besant, her husband, but also from her orthodox views, she challenged the whole of conventional thinking:

“Having demonstrated, as I hope to do, that the orthodox idea of God is unreasonable and absurd, we will endeavour to ascertain whether any idea of God, worthy to be called an idea, is attainable in the present state of our faculties.” (Besant, 2018, p.88)

Her atheism made her believe strongly in human brotherhood. Instead of having warmth in showing reverence to God, she found more warmth in helping the poor people and improving their lot. By being an atheist, she started developing feelings for the sad ones.

“. . . where the cry of ‘Atheist’ is raised there may we be sure that another step is being taken towards the redemption of humanity. The saviours of the world are too often howled at as Atheists, and then worshipped as Deities.” (Besant, 2018, p. 94)

Her atheism can be compared to Protestantism which was once considered as selfish and subversive of all order, leading to a dangerous kind of equality.  The idea of “free examination” propounded by Protestants was seen as encouraging a sinful form of individualism that invariably led to the disrespect for community and tradition. However, for Annie Besant, this idea of free thinking can brighten sadness, can reform abuses and can be helpful in establishing equal justice for rich and poor:

 “There is no warmth in brightening the lot of the sad, in reforming abuses, in establishing equal justice for rich and poor? You find warmth in the church, but none in the home? Warmth in imagining the cloud glories of heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?”  (Besant, 2018, p.99)

She realized that priesthood had become a profession and religious rule a prize for ambition. Her protestant spirit is quite evident here.

This made her approach more logical and scientific and made her think about equality at all levels, including gender equality. She raises her voice against all political structures. She evolved a system in which emancipation of women will not be “self-defeating” (Butler 342). She spoke against creating the “gendered subjects”, having a differential axis of domination as nowhere in the autobiography she presumed to be masculine. Eventually, she proclaimed her vision of the world which has women who are liberated and free thinkers. When she denies the existence of spirit or soul, she at the same time refuses to believe in God and religiosity. According to her:

“. . . that there can be only one eternal and underived substance, and that matter and spirit must, therefore, only be varying manifestations of this one substance.” (Besant, 2018, p.88)

The underlying notion is to free oneself from becoming a gendered being. Annie Besant asserts that there is no evidence to prove the existence of God or spirit. She spread the gospel of free thoughts:

“. . . we will spread the Gospel of Freethought among men, until the sad minor melodies of Christianity have sobbed out their last mournful notes on the dying evening breeze, and on the fresh morning winds shall ring out the chorus of hope and joyfulness, from the glad lips of men whom the Truth has at last set free.” (Besant, 2018, p. 102)

According to her, men and women are too made up of different sets of matter only and gender in itself does not have any essence or intrinsic reality. There is nothing like predefined roles and responsibilities. The effect of science, which continuously started overwhelming her, made her believe only in biologists and chemists to seek the explanation of all problems of life and existence. When, in the chapter “Atheism as I Knew and Taught it” focused for research, she defines life which according to her is just the result of the arrangement of matter, it is evidently drawn that she could talk about women’s liberation and gender equality so openly because she considered that biologically and chemically male and female bodies are just the arrangement of different sets of matter.  She appears to be very close to Simone de Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” when she says:

“There is no sign here of an intelligent spirit controlling a mechanism; there is every sign of a learning and developing intelligence, developing paripassu with the organism of which it is a function.” (Besant, 2018, p. 93)

According to Besant, a human being is just the result of what his parents were and what his circumstances were. There is nothing inborn. He can change the circumstances, make them good or bad, lead a happy and healthy life or a criminal’s life as per his own will. This again reflects Butler’s idea of performativity according to which gender is mainly the performative repetition. The concept of gender is not natural or innate. Besant while advocating that everything is the process of learning is entering into the realm of rejecting the traditional and religious definitions of gender roles. She considers that the crimes against women are sometimes perpetuated by religion:

“Another bestial tendency is the lust of the male for the female apart from love, duty, and loyalty; this again has been encouraged by religion, as witness the polygamy and concubinage of the Hebrews—as in Abraham, David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic laws—the bands of male and female prostitutes in connection with Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in connection with religious revivals and missions.” (Besant, 2018, p. 103)

Many bestial tendencies among human beings are the result of blindly following the religious teachings. She is speaking contrary to the general beliefs of the people that during adversities even the atheists turn towards religion, “For troubles and adversities do more bow men’s minds to religion” (Francis Bacon’s Of Atheism).

Her atheism and the rejection of the idea of God gave her the strength to believe that it is science and not religion that can eradicate such evils by tracing them to their source in the brute ancestry. Human beings can evolve without any discrimination only by losing faith in religion and gaining faith in science. Moreover, a theist can yearn for personal perfection but that will be a self-centered desire. As various religions have divided the people on the basis of class, colour, and gender, a theist will never be able to think scientifically. On the contrary, an atheist desires personal perfection not for his selfish motives but rather because science has taught him the unity of the race and gender too.

  1. Conclusion:

Annie Besant, thus, grasping the complexities of the situation of women tried the idea of atheism as a religion in itself. It is her continuous rejection of the religion — as is evident in the chapter taken up for study — gave her the strength to work for the poor and oppressed women of the country. Making humanity, not religiosity as her surging passion, she could easily attack the prevailing system of injustice and hardships. She organized trade unions, campaigned for birth control, helped in rising the age of marriage, abolishing Pardah system, and educating girls and women. She left her imprints on the sands of time. Her journey from a devout Christian to a free thinker gave her the necessary strength to fight against the patriarchal religious discourses constructing the performative identities and making them appear innate and natural.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

References:

Bacon, Francis. (1908). Of Atheism. The Essays of Francis Bacon. Ed. Mary Augusta Scott. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 71-75

Beauvoir, Simone de. (2010). The Second Sex. New York: Vintage.

Besant, Annie. (2018).  Atheism As I Knew and Taught It. An Autobiography. London: Global Grey. 88-110. 

Besant, Annie.  (1877). The Gospel of Atheism. London: Freethought.

Besant, Annie.  (1885). Political Status of Women, 1874, 2nd edition. London: C. Watts.

Besant, Annie. (2011). My Path to Atheism. 3rd edition. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37234/37234-h/37234-h.htm

Butler, Judith. (2001). Subjects of Sex/ Gender/ Desire. The Cultural Studies. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge.  340-354

Conrad, Nickolas G. (May 2009). Marginalization of Atheism in Victorian Britain: The Trials of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. Washington State University, Department of History. Retrieved from https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.427.6882&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Foucault, Michel. (1970). The Order of Discourse. Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, Ed. Robert Young, Boston: Routledge, pp 52-53

Gupta, Tanu. (2021). Pure/Fallen: Understanding the Discursive Construction of Identity in Binodini Dasi’s My Story and My Life as an Actress. Literary Voice. 13(1). 219-214.

Janssen, Flore. (27 November 2017). Talking about Birth Control in 1877: Gender, Class, and Ideology in the Knowlton Trial. Open Cultural Studies, 1(1). 281-290

Jeffrey, Bob and Geoff Troman.  (2011). The Construction of Performative Identities. European Educational Research Journal, 10(4). 484-501

Kamrath, Mark L. (September 2018). Early America, American Theosophy, Modernity—and India. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 7(2). 9-20. Retrieved from http://rupkatha.com/V7/n2/02_American_Theosophy_India.pdf

King, Ursula. Hinduism and Women: Uses and Abuses of Religious Freedom. Facilitating Freedom of Religion or Belief: A Deskbook. 523-543. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-5616-7_22

Lewis, Jone Johnson. Annie Besant, Heretic: The Story of Annie Besant: Minister’s Wife to Atheist to Theosophist. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/annie-besant-heretic-3529122

Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. (Summer 2009). The Radical Autobiographies of Annie Besant and Helen and Olivia Rossetti.  Feminist Studies, 35(2).  243-273. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/40607966

Miquel-Baldellou, Marta. (noviembre 2009). Annie Besant’s Sexual Politics of Marriage in Victorian England. Clepsydra, 8. 91-110

Moosavi, Zohreh. (2016). The Importance of Chastity and Modesty in Leader Women in the New Testament and Quran. Retrieved from SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2882423

Nancy, Anderson Fix. (1994) Bridging Cross-Cultural Feminisms: Annie Besant and Women’s Rights in England and India, 1874-1933. Women’s History Review, 3(4). New York: Routledge. 563-580. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029400200070

Overall, C. (2007). Feminism and Atheism. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Ed. M. Martin. New York: Cambridge University Press. 233-249

Pillai, Manu S. (Oct. 6, 2017.). Annie Besant: An inconvenient woman. Retrieved from https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/dgXf29xjFPwLz9gYAJotDN/Annie-Besant-An-inconvenient-woman.html

Prabhakaran, A. (June-2019). Role of Annie Besant in Women’s Indian Association (WIA) – A Study. Research Review International Journal of Multidisciplinary, 4(6). Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333867281_Role_of_Annie_Besant_in_Women’s_Indian_Association_WIA_-A_Study

Singh, C.L. (2018). Making “ideal” Indian women: Annie Besant’s engagement with the issue of female education in early twentieth-century India. International Journal of the History of Education, 54(5). 606-625

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Dr. Tanu Gupta is Professor of English in University Institute of Liberal Arts and Humanities at Chandigarh University. She received Ph.D. from Punjabi University, Patiala. Her research interests include Gender, Psychoanalytic and Postcolonial studies. She is the author of more than 80 research articles and 7 books.

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Identity in Consumption: Reading Food and Intersectionality in Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting

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Nayana George1 & Arya Parakkate Vijayaraghavan2

1Research Scholar, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru, India. Email: nayanageorge295@gmail.com/ nayana.george@res.christuniversity.in, ORCID ID: 0000-0003-0002-5024

2Assistant Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru, India. Email: aryavijayaraghavan@gmail.com/ arya.pv@christuniversity.in, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9682-6074

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages  https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.20

First published: June 26, 2022 | Area: Gender Studies | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number 2, 2022)
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 Abstract

With the resurging interest in Food Studies, this rapidly emerging field of study has seen multiple disciplines adding in their distinct flavours that truly make this an area to savour. Literary food studies, in particular, has become a relevant field of study with the understanding that food in literature always plays a symbolic role, as food in literature is never depicted for the sustenance of the literary characters. This paper seeks to explore the novel Fasting, Feasting (1999) by Anita Desai through the lens of food and foodways to explicate how the characters interact with the culinary arena, and ultimately, interact with each other and themselves. These interactions will serve as crucial insights into their identities, particularly their intersectional gender identities considering the facets of nationality, class, and the like. A special focus will also be rendered on the notion of marginalisation seen in the text, of which gender is a crucial deciding factor. The title of the novel hints at consumption—at both its presence and absence—which will prove as the gateway to the interactions of the characters with food in the novel to examine who it is that gets to feast while who are forced to starve.

Keywords: literary food studies, food in literature, gender, intersectionality

1. Introduction

Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999) has been the subject of immense critical inquiry due to the varied themes that Desai explores in the novel. The text is a fertile ground wherein discourses regarding the diasporic concerns of alienation and belonging (Amo, 2016, p. 138), gender (Choubey, 2004; Volná, 2005), the psychological insights into the oppressed central characters (Narayan & Mee, 2003, p. 227)—an aspect reflected in Desai’s other works as well and is often considered reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s literary oeuvre (Kanwar, 1991)—and the like, thrive and flourish.

The foray of food studies into literary studies has invited more nuanced introspections into Desai’s text through the lens of food. Its multidisciplinary background lends to innovative analyses that add to the existing critical literature surrounding this crucial contribution to world literature. One such notable work is the conception of viewing the material culture depicted in the novel as politically charged, a perception that is primarily shaped by post coloniality and post liberalism (Wiegandt, 2019). These “post” conceptions have further invited migration and transnationalism. It is here that studies on food and its associated practices can “make a significant contribution not just to the anthropology of food, but also to our understanding of the ways in which the globalized movement of people, objects, narratives and ideas is experienced and negotiated” (Abbots, 2016, p. 115). Food is “endlessly meaningful,” writes Carole Counihan (1999, p. 6), for among its many other functions, it also serves as a marker of ethnic identity (Counihan, 2004; Vallianatos & Raine, 2008, p. 365). The multiplicity of identities takes on intricate nuances due to intersectionality in the globalised contemporary world. Initially, the term “intersectionality,” introduced by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989), was primarily related to the issue of race in feminism, especially concerning “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences” (p. 140). During the third wave of feminism, the term has developed to give rise to a subjectivity influenced by race, gender, class, sexuality, and more such classifiers (Cooper, 2016, p. 391; Nash, 2008, p. 2).

This subjectivity is visible in the chosen text’s food practices which “form the material nexus of class, gender, and political distinctions between individual characters and between India and the United States” (Wiegandt, 2019, p. 123). The title of the novel hints at consumption—at both its presence and absence—which will prove as the gateway to the interactions of the characters with food in the novel to examine who it is that gets to feast while who are forced to starve.

2. Feasting and Fasting—the Gender Divide

Rana Dasgupta, in her introduction to Desai’s novel (1999/2008), states that the book is an “excruciating account of how society can seize control of individuals—especially women—through such practices as eating, and remove them from everything they intended to be” (p. viii). Carole Counihan (1998) asserts that there is a “clear significance of food-centered activities and meanings to the constitution of gender relations and identities across cultures” (p. 2). Furthermore, food and food practices are often taken for granted due to their association with women (D’Sylva & Beagan, 2011, p. 280).

Kumkum Sangari (1993) observes that a household’s politics are seemingly dictated according to the degree of access women have to power (p. 871). An instance that demonstrates this fleeting supremacy of the woman over the man in the matters of the kitchen is seen in the exercise of deciding on the meals of the day by “MamaPapa,” the conjoined entity that they are referred to as in the book (Desai, 1999/2008, p. 5). The dining table was a “fertile ground” for “discussion and debate.” However, the narrator observes that “it was impossible not to see that the verdict would be the same as at the outset”—it would be Mama’s suggestions and “no other” (p. 14). Only Mama reserved the right to control the cook in the household. While the family’s economic and social status afforded the family cooks and servants, this exercise shows that it is the mother who is essentially cooking through the kitchen help.

The image of the ideal woman that has been created and perpetuated shows a being that is inferior to the male figure in every way. Pitted against masculinity, femininity is always considered as the weaker counterpart and as a member of “disadvantaged and devalued social categories” (Counihan, 1999, p. 8). While women are often entrusted with providing food for the family, notions of the ideal woman being submissive and sacrificing factors in this scenario present the ideal provider as one who creates and distributes but never consumes what she makes. “Many studies demonstrate that men eat first, best, and most” (Counihan, 1998, p. 2). Class, caste, race, and gender hierarchies are partly maintained and sustained through differential control over food and the varying levels of access to the same (Counihan, 1998, p. 2; 1999, p. 2). The rich distinguish themselves from the poor through food and foodways, and a similar correlation is perceived in the way men are distinguishable from women (Counihan, 1999, p. 8).

Desai’s work provides numerous examples of the way people are treated differently based on their gender identities (Karam, Khan, & Ahmad, 2022). What, how much, and when they can eat are dependent on their gender (Counihan 1999, p. 8). This creates an unequal footing between them as one is clearly favoured over the other in the prevailing heteronormative worldview. In the family that the first part of the novel revolves around, the dominance and supremacy that the father has are clearly exhibited through the way he behaves and how the rest of the family behaves towards him, especially on matters related to food and consumption. While it is the mother who takes decisions regarding the kitchen, as was established before, it can also be seen that the mother merely functions as a puppet that moves along to the father’s whims and fancies.

Additionally, the father’s supremacy is explicitly expressed through how he is considered akin to royalty and is often treated as such. The special attention that he garners is solely because he is a man. According to the norm propagated by the traditional society, the rest of the women have to take it upon themselves as their duty to serve him, regardless of whether they are willing to do so. This can be seen in the way the mother asks the elder daughter Uma to serve some fruit for her father, and she comes to the realisation that she “can no longer pretend to be ignorant of Papa’s needs, of Papa’s ways.” They make a whole ritual of the process of preparing the fruit to be fit for his consumption—wherein each orange segment is painstakingly peeled and rid of the pips—and “everyone waits while he repeats the gesture” of eating the pieces. When the whole process is completed, what remains are the peels and seeds on the mother’s plate and smears of orange juice on the father’s (1999/2008, pp. 23-24). With the depiction of the scene here, it is evident that the father was the only one to eat the fruit. The meals end with a flourishing presentation of “a napkin and a finger bowl” to the father and “he is the only one in the family who is given” these “emblems of his status.” The feeling of grandeur that his meal evokes is further exemplified when the narrator signals the end of the meal with the statement: “the ceremony is over” (p. 24).

The mother is used to being treated as inferior to the men, and she cultivates this idea in the minds of her daughters as well:

In my day, girls in the family were not given sweets, nuts, good things to eat. If something special had been bought in the market, like sweets or nuts, it was given to the boys in the family. (p. 5).

As she recounts this, she adds that her family did not belong to “such an orthodox home” and that her mother and her other female relatives often slipped her some “good things to eat…on the sly” (p. 6). While the mother remembers these situations so fondly, the pleasant feelings here do not take away from the fact that she was forbidden from eating certain food items solely because she was a female. The idea that these women, controllers of the kitchen space in their homes, still had to abide by the rules drawn up by the family’s men and had to hide what they had consumed shows the injustice in this scenario. The perceived notion of feminine control over the domestic space is just that—a false perception far away from reality. Other instances further express this sentiment of a man having control over a female’s eating and consumption patterns and preferences (Counihan, 1999, p. 8). The father disapproves of the mother playing rummy with her friends and eating betel nuts and leaves as he sees them as sinful indulgences that he dislikes. Still, when he indulges himself “in a little whisky and water,” the “little” being an understatement when he goes overboard and becomes an embarrassment in a social gathering, he hardly sees any of it to be his fault. He never deigns to apologise to anyone (pp. 7-10). An interesting alimentary image that makes its appearance numerous times in the novel is that of the glass of lemonade served to the father. The mother frets and worries herself to the extent that it pointedly draws the reader’s attention in the process of her ensuring that the father’s glass of lemonade is always ready for him to drink when he reaches home. It suggests that perhaps the mother had neglected to perform that particular task once and the repercussions were probably not so forgiving. It may be due to this fear that Uma always “decides to say nothing” (p. 12) when it comes to expressing her desire for food (Swarnakala & Kirubakaran, 2021, p. 423).

While she is never free to consume what she wishes nor that she creates, a woman’s self-worth is dependent on her abilities in the culinary space, her culinary prowess, and her ability to manage a kitchen. These are considered to be the only factors that impact her self-esteem, as illustrated through the mother forcing Uma to take credit for all the culinary delights served to the guests to increase her prospects of acceptance by the visiting family in the chances of a marriage match (pp. 75-78). Even the approval from the future family-in-law is expressed through a reference to the tea that she had served; “very nice tea,” says the prospective mother-in-law (p. 78).

However, Uma’s marriage plans do not come to fruition. The multiple failures at being wedded result in her parents giving up on those prospects for her, deigning themselves to an obligated maidservant in the form of their unmarried daughter (Chandel, 2018, p. 33).  This situation provides a glimpse “into the fate of the women who remain single in this society” (Nandan, 2002, p. 171), always remaining bereft of autonomy (Jackson, 2018, p. 168). The younger daughter, Aruna, finds herself even more burdened to succeed where her sister had failed. Hence, she ends up in a marriage upheld merely out of obligation and not by choice.

On the other hand, Arun—the only son of the family—gets a radically different treatment than his sisters as he is greatly favoured over them (Jackson, 2018, p. 164). His mother feels that her status as a wife has been elevated once she birthed a son after numerous failed pregnancies. “What honour, what status. Mama’s chin was lifted a little higher in the air.… She might have been wearing a medal” (Desai, 1999/2008, p. 31). Papa insists on “proper attention” (p. 30) for his son with the assurance of “the best, the most, [and] the highest” (p. 121) for him, not just regarding education, but other needs as well. Papa believes that consuming meat is necessary to develop Arun’s strength (Poon, 2006, pp. 35–37).  This reflects Counihan’s (1998) assertion that “food symbolically connote maleness and femaleness and establish the social value of men and women” (p. 2). This notion is also seen in “the practical philosophy of the male body as a sort of power, big and strong, with enormous, imperative, brutal needs…asserted in every male posture, especially when eating,” thereby functioning as “the principle of the division of foods between the sexes, a division which both sexes recognize in their practices and their language” (Bourdieu, 1979/2013, p. 35). However, all this attention works to culminate in the opposite of the desired effect in Arun, for he ends up burdened by expectations and scrutiny, and instead yearns for freedom. Moreover, ironically enough, the force-feeding of meat causes his body to unconsciously reject it entirely, and hence he relies solely on vegetarian food for his sustenance.

3. Beyond Boundaries—the Transnational Experience

In the second part of the book, Arun is in the USA, where the culture is very different from India. What remains almost constant is perhaps the gendered differential treatment of food. Arun stays as a guest with the Pattons, a seemingly conventional white American family. Mr. Patton cooks in the stereotypical overtly masculine way by cooking an enormous amount of meat out in the patio, for it “is a man’s thing” (Parasecoli, 2005/2013, p. 292). Arun is highly displeased with it, as evidenced by the choice of words that he uses to describe it— the “pervasive odour” of “raw meat being charred over the fire” (Desai, 1999/2008, p. 166), and the images of “grease and blood” (p. 169) — all of which are far from appetising thoughts.

Mrs. Patton, on the other hand, uses Arun as a crutch; she hides behind the excuse of Arun’s vegetarianism to avoid eating meat herself. Her domineering husband ignores her constant expressions, both verbal and otherwise, of being disgusted by meat. The choice of food is taken away from the woman in this situation and it is the man who decides for her. She is rendered insignificant in her household which she is supposed to run, and seen as suffering from “emotional and spiritual starvation” (Jain, 2014, p. 24). Arun sees a reflection of his mother in Mrs. Patton and her “bright plastic copy of a mother-smile…that is tight at the corners with pressure, the pressure to perform a role” (Desai, 1999/2008, p. 198).  This realisation is at once comforting and disturbing for Arun—the former for it serves as a reminder of home (Jackson, 2018, p. 168). The latter is due to the feelings of entrapment and stagnation that he associates with his family in India. Mrs. Patton experiences the same emotions within her own family (Jain, 2014, p. 24). “Mrs Patton is afraid, defeated, and no less a prisoner in her own home than Uma” (Desai, 1999/2008, introduction by Dasgupta, p. x). Even the Pattons’ daughter, Melanie, is adversely affected by the tensions in the family. Her mental afflictions result in her suffering from eating disorders, which hint at her need for some semblance of control in her turbulent life (O’Connor, 2013, p. 32). Her food consumption is seemingly the only aspect of her life that she can direct. Consequently, her eating disorders and hostile behaviour are cries for help that are constantly left unheard and ignored.

The idea of gender identity accompanies sexuality and how its perception has evolved and been rediscovered. Food and sex are seen to be “metaphorically overlapping” (Counihan, 1999, p. 9) as they are multisensorial experiences that excite similar responses within the body. By exploring the role that food plays in “enabling antinormative relationships to emerge within the sexualized, gendered, and classed domestic space,” Anita Mannur (2010) argues that “the relationship between food and queerness challenges the apparently seamless links between food, home, nation, and (hetero) sexuality.” And hence, “the culinary functions as a site of cultural negotiation: both disciplining subjects into gendered roles and buttressing an alternative rendering of sexuality and gendered performance that cannot be contained by the structures of heterosexual patriarchy” (p. 20).

Desai puts forth the contrast between the gender identities of Arun and the two father figures that he encounters: his father in India and Mr. Patton in the US. Arun is a vegetarian not under religious restrictions but by his own volition. This choice is a concept that neither of the older men can fathom. Arun’s father finds his decision to be “baffling,” for he considers vegetarian men as “meek and puny men who had got nowhere in life” (1999/2008, p. 33). Mr. Patton thinks of vegetarianism to be “not natural,” and he finds himself disappointed with “such moral feebleness” (p. 170), for men are supposed to be “the natural meat eaters” (Bourdieu, 1979/2013, p. 35). All these qualities that these men describe are precisely the opposite of those associated with masculinity, and it is to be noted here that they pride themselves on being men who embody the masculine nature. By referring to Arun as weak and frail, they associate him with the notions of being effeminate and subservient solely based on his food choices. While the men never explicitly mention any outright words about Arun’s sexual orientation, they may consider the possibility of him being a homosexual as well. Regardless, the thought of the formative men in his life thinking Arun to be weak indicate that they see him as soft and hence, not masculine in their binary oriented perception. This pushes Arun into a category that is neither here nor there of the narrow heteronormatively constructed gender identities, and into a state of uncertainty and confusion.

“Food consumption,” writes Tulasi Srinivas (2006), is the “narrative of affiliative desire” that affectively recreates social identity groupings for the “cosmopolitan Indian” (p. 193) by simultaneously functioning as a medium of showcasing assimilation as well as resistance to the dominant culture (Mannur, 2010, p. 7). Furthermore, “[t]he domestic arena…becomes a space to reproduce culture and national identity” (p. 30). Or in Arun’s case, it becomes a space for him to resist his old identity and reinvent himself. For Arun, India is a far cry from the central stage of the nostalgic reverie of other literary characters who usually make appearances in diasporic literature. He only sees India as the home of his overbearing parents, and he dreads the very thought of going back. And hence, he willingly suffers through the alienation he experiences at the Pattons’ place due to them reinforcing “the boundaries between Self and Other through appropriation of and emphasis on Arun’s Otherness” (Amo, 2016, p. 133). He would much rather make peace with the USA’s paltry contribution of sandwiches and salads to vegetarians than return to the place that was never his home. He has completely severed himself from the culinary performance of making food and always buys comestibles that are made in outlets by faceless strangers. He is apprehensive of the food that Mrs. Patton prepares for him, for she reminds him of his mother. He prefers the impersonal act of buying food from his college cafeteria instead. Even though Arun hardly pays attention to what he consumes while leading his busy life as a college student and as a part-time worker, his conscious avoidance of everything that may remind him of his life in India indicates his desire to leave that existence behind him. He never learned to cook the kind of food he ate throughout his childhood, and he does not exhibit a desire to do so in the future. He has no qualms in adhering to his new country’s food norms, and while he does not particularly enjoy his stay there, he still considers it much better than his life in India (Desai, 1999/2008, pp. 175-202).

4. The Potpourri of Marginalised Identities

Returning to the first part of the novel, Uma has various interactions with others who shape her life, presenting alternative ways of existence to her enslavement at home, and perhaps, the opportunity to live and experience life vicariously through them. Ramu, her traveling vagabond cousin, always provides her with good memories sprinkled with food, wine, dancing, and laughter (pp. 48-52). Though considered slightly lower than other men due to his club foot, his status as a man in society still grants him the sanction to be Uma’s protector on the short trips that they take. However, the understanding that Uma’s worth as a non-disabled woman being much lower than a disabled man is an undercurrent in their scenes together.

The gendered perception of life is also seen in the treatment of widows. “The life of the Hindu widow has always been the dark side of eating in India,” says Chitrita Banerji in Eating India (2007, p. 142). She writes about her grandmother whose identity as a widow has permeated her life so profoundly that even her eating habits have not been spared. The food that she now consumes indicates her identity as a woman who no longer has the support of her husband. The death of her husband is “traditionally attributed to her misdeeds and unnatural appetites; a common word of abuse in rural Bengal translates as ‘husband-eater’” (p. 142). A widow is considered guilty of “the sin of survival” (p. 142), and her presence is thought of as a bad omen. As punishment for her existence, she is forced into permanently giving up many food items and developing a culinary palate that is as bland and bleak as her life as a widow is supposed to be, even going so far as to be kept away from cooking in the kitchen during the occasions of feats and festivals (Lamb, 2000, p. 213-217; Patgiri, 2022, p. 152). The want for food beyond the measure of mere sustenance is seen as a reflection of lust and desire, and hence, abstinence from all pleasure is wielded as a way to control sensual desires. And a way of ensuring this control is seen in the way that some widows are only allowed one meal a day, leaving them in a state of almost fasting (Lamb, 2000, p. 213-217). As anticipated, only the desires of women need to be curbed, for there are no such restrictions for a widower to follow (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2009). Mira is Uma’s aunt who ascribes to the forced asceticism due to her status as a widow. She embraces religious devotion to escape from the marginalisation accompanying her status (Jain, 2014, p. 25). Uma, perhaps rebelliously enough, associates her aunt with her decadent ghee laden laddoos that she painstakingly prepares (Desai, 1999/2008, p. 38)—an exercise of Mira’s choice—instead of the forced austerity of widowhood.

Anamika, Uma’s cousin, is yet another victim of a forced social practice. Her marriage at the expense of her scholarship to Oxford is filled with trauma and physical abuse at the hands of her husband and her mother-in-law (p. 67-72). All she is reduced to now is a harried servant who cooks and cleans at her marriage home, relegated to days of service after her worth is tarnished beyond relief after a miscarriage brought about at the hands of her husband leaves her to identify as “damaged goods” (p. 72). In one stroke, all that she had achieved in life is disregarded, and her identity is solely defined based on her trauma.

5. Conclusion

The characters’ experiences “illustrate the interplay of individual and collective identity, the consequences of identification, and the magnitude of the historical themes that everyday situations may evoke” (Jenkins, 2008, p. 4). Desai initially seems to posit a gender-centric classification to the characters by drawing a defining line between the subservient female and the privileged male. However, the delicate nuances of identity come into play on further introspection, where the “differential control over and access to food” exhibits the various societal hierarchies (Counihan, 1999, p. 8). The evaluation of the characters’ lives and experiences gets flavoured by aspects such as their nationality, class, and notions of marginalisation. On viewing the text through the lens of food, the characters exhibit their various characteristics in their interactions with food. Additionally, food also serves as a medium that highlights the relationships among the characters—of kinship and otherwise—and ultimately, shapes and moulds their individual and collective identities. A more holistic view towards the characters invites the appreciation of the richness of Desai’s story world as being a true reflection of the real world.

The title of the novel is often thought to convey significant meaning as well, at first glance seemingly referring to the geographical backgrounds of the two parts of the novel— “fasting” associated with the regressive and poverty-stricken India and “feasting,” in turn, representing the dreams, hopes, and plenty in the USA (Amo, 2016, p. 134). However, on careful consideration, the fasting and feasting seen in the context of the characters are “relative and multiple at the same time” (Volná, 2005, p. 2). Each character experiences fasting and feasting in their separate ways with their experiences, thoughts, and memories creating bespoke blends that influence their identities—in how they perceive themselves, in the projection of their identities, and in the way, others perceive their identities.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

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Jackson, E. (2018). Responding to patriarchy in India: Resistance and complicity in Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days and Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 37(1), 157-171. https://doi.org/10.1353/tsw.2018.0007

Jain, B. (2014). Signifying corporeal-trauma in Anita Desai’s fictions. South Asian Review, 35(2), 13-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2014.11932968

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Nayana George is a Research Scholar at the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru, India. She is currently invested in the areas of literary food studies and South Asian narratives for her doctoral research.

Dr Arya Parakkate Vijayaraghavan is an Assistant Professor in English and Cultural Studies at Christ University, Bangalore, India. Her areas of research include Gender and Intersections, Food and Identity Discourse, Memory studies, Cultural Studies, Education and Curriculum Development. She was awarded her MPhil and PhD from The English and Foreign Language University, Hyderabad. She is particularly interested in understanding how the experience of the pandemic has shaped the practices of everyday life. Some of her recent works were published in various Scopus-indexed journals like Society (Springer Science), Smart Learning Environment (Springer Open), Journal of Computers in Education (Springer Nature), and Journal of English as an International Language (ELE Publications) among others.

Gay Subculture, AIDS, and Neo-Decadence: 1980s in Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002)

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Jyotirmoy Sil

Assistant Professor, Department of English. Malda College, Malda, West Bengal, India. E-Mail: siljyotirmoy@gmail.com

ORCID id: orcid.org/0000-0003-2470-2587

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages  https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.18

First published: June 26, 2022 | Area: Gender Studies | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number 2, 2022)
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Abstract

Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002) provides a glimpse to the gay subculture of 1980s’ London and New York, and contextualizes the issues like AIDS epidemic and gay liberation movement. The shown attributes of the gay subculture including the queer fashion trends, drug consumptions, and unprotected gay sex even at the risk of HIV transmission parallel the hedonistic and counter-normative ‘decadent’ aspects of Oscar Wilde’s source–text, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Cathode Narcissus, the video installation capturing the naked male beauty, makes Dorian the ‘dis-embodied’ model/emblem for gay pride in a digital era and marks the posthumanist shift in the new form of decadence or neo-decadence. This paper, with respect to Self’s Dorian: An Imitation, would engage to explore how the attributes of 1980s’ urban gay subculture and rapid transmission of HIV among gays come under the paradigm of neo-decadence in the fin de siècle (meaning, “end of the century”) of the twentieth century.

Keywords: gay subculture, homosexuality, AIDS, drugs, neo-decadence, decadence.

  1. Introduction

“[…] what if the whole giddy rondo had the air of the fin de siècle about it? Because it was the end of the twentieth century, […] a hundred years of willed decline.” (Self, 2002, p. 267)

In an interview with Robert McCrum for The Guardian (September 29, 2002), Will Self commented that his Dorian: An Imitation (2002), an “appropriation”[1] of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), will pursue the readers to trace the correlation between “the decadence of the 1880s and the decadence of 1980s” (McCrum, 2002). Decadence, reflecting the obsessive indulgence in pleasure and relative moral decline, ennui and counter-normative tendencies (MacLeod, 2006, p. 1, Charlesworth, 1965, p. xv), appeared as one of the counter cultural movements of the nineteenth century’s fin de siècle (meaning, in French, “end of the century”[2]). The gay subculture[3] of the 1980s’ London and New York in Self’s Dorian: An Imitation mirrors the decadent aspects like narcissism, cynicism, sexual perversity, hedonistic inclinations and artificiality perceived in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian: An Imitation gives the glimpses of the private lives of urban gay characters, their intoxicating drug consumptions, scenes of gay bars, gay village, and contextualizes the prevalent issues of eighties like rapid outbreak of HIV among gays, and gay liberation movement. Self’s narrative, set in the digital era, bestows a posthumanist scope as well for, here, a video installation capturing the appealing ‘gay’ beauty replaces the mysterious painting that seemingly consumed Dorian’s degeneration in Wilde’s source-text. This paper would attempt to explore how the constituents of West’s urban ‘gay subculture’, rapid transmission of HIV amongst gays, and the posthumanist purview, as presented in Self’s Dorian: An Imitation, come under the paradigm of the renovated form of decadence, or neo-decadence, in the twentieth century’s fin de siècle.

  1. “Air of the fin de siècle”: Decadence to Neo-Decadence

The term “decadence” was first used to connote the denial of the banal moral values, hedonistic perversity, and exploration of sensual passion as a subversive force by Theophile Gautier in his introduction to the 1868 version of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleur du Mal (Gilman, 1979, p. 89). In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray decadence is betrayed through the fascinating narcissism of Dorian Gray, Basil Hall’s homoerotic sensation for Dorian, influence of Henry’s toxic philosophy, Dorian’s opium addiction, his obsession with aesthetic perfection leading to abandon Sybil Vane, the stage actress, and his “spiritual and moral perversity” (Symons, 1893/1974, p. 72).  Although, homosexuality as a decadent yearn for “rare sensations” (MacLeod, 2006, p. 1) appeared in several French texts like Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897) and Monsieur de Phocus (1901) (Hawthorne, 2019, p. 203), Catulle Mendes’s Mephistophelia (1890), the memoir of the French lesbian woman Liane de Pougy (Anne Marie Chassaigne) Idylle saphique (Sapphic Idyll) (1901) (Hawthorne, 2019, p. 204), in English literature it was a rare aspect, perhaps, because of the Christian’s sacrilegious tag and England’s legal ban on homosexuality/sodomy. Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) presents male-male homosexual hints with sly implicitness. To cite one instance, Basil Hall’s “curious sensation of terror” (Wilde, 1891/2001, p.9) and sudden “crisis” (p.9) after meeting Dorian is analogous to Gustav Von Aschenbach’s nightmare where he yields himself to a phallic idol (Mann, 1912/2004, 45) and reckons his homosexual attraction for the boy Tadzio in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

The term “neo-decadent” was first used in aesthetic criticism by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), an Italian film director, in a review of Federico Fellini’s (1920-1993) films titled “The Catholic Irrationalism of Fellini” (1960/1984) to refer the “purposeful exaggeration of feeling and imagery” (Demers, 1984, p. 64), use of “the unusual and the morbid to shock our feelings and even to violate our sensibilities” (1984, p. 64), distortion of the “realism” (1984, p. 64), and the expression of cynicism (Padolini, 1960/1984, p. 72). Brain M. Reed, in exploring queerness and fashion consciousness in the poems of Djuna Barnes (The Book of Repulsive Women, 1915) and Hart Crane in his book Hart Crane: After His Lights (2006), mentions of “US neo-Decadence” (Reed, 2006, p. 52) of 1920s that sought extremity in queer representations (Reed, 2006, p. 52). Brendan Connell, in “The First Manifesto of Neo-Decadence” (2010/2018), puts that the neo-decadent writers resort artificiality and synthetic sensation in writing and seek to implore the “fragmented, the contorted, the unfinished” (Connell, 2010/2018) and often lousiness.  Colby Smith in his lecture titled “Neo-Decadence: A Very Brief Introduction” at Alden Library, Ohio University, Athens Campus on 29th January, 2018, points out the following tenets and demands of the post-2000 version of neo-decadence:

It is anti-Capitalist, anti-Consumerist […] against sincerity […] that seeks to tell a story from the heart. […] It promotes deeply experimental scenarios and prose including explicit endorsement of lack of character development and story arc. […] [I]t rejects the overtly fantastic.  (Smith, 2018, January 29, 00.02.39-00.03.56)

However, Daniel Corrick, in “Introduction” to Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology (2018), comments that neo-decadence is the “updated” version of the “content of the original Decadence” in “a contemporary setting and tackling or at least incorporating modern preoccupations” and both the decadences are “not merely styles but a mode of consciousness, dying, decaying, growing and mutating as its objects do” (Corrick, 2018). In Self’s Dorian: An Imitation “[s]treet fashion synergised with pop music, pop music energised politics” (Self, 2002/2003, p. 267), conceptual artists’ “distorted cartoons” (p. 267), televisions, internet, perplexing digitalized bodies, increasing number of drug addicts, homosexuals and homophobes, gay liberation movement created the neo-decadent “dying, decaying” (Corrick, 2018, p. 267), “fragmented” (Connell, 2010/2018, p. 15), “contorted” (p. 15)  and “queer” (Reed, 2006, p. 52) “air of the fin de siècle” (Self, 2002/2003, p. 267) in the 1980s’ London and New York.

  1. Gay Liberation, Cathode Narcissus and Neo-Decadence

The homophile protests during late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States had paved the way for the constructive gay liberation movement (D Emilio, 1983, p. 224). ‘Stonewall riot’ in June 27, 1969 marked the initiation of modern gay liberation movement in America and Europe (Cruikshank, 1992, p. 3). During 1980s, in America, the gay community manifested themselves as “powerful minority” (Cruikshank, 1992, p.72) and emphatically expressed their “pride” (p. 75) of being gay. Dorian is among—what Baz calls—the “first gay generation to come out of the shadows” (Self, 2002/2003, p. 12); “unashamed” (p. 12) to disclose their true sexual orientation in public. Cathode Narcissus is launched on internet for free by Dorian’s “The Gray Organization” to endorse “[m]ale beauty” (Self, 2002/2003, pp. 270-71) and contribute in instilling the sense of “a new mature pride in homosexual identity” (p. 271) among the members of gays. Cathode Narcissus functions in supporting the ‘gay liberation’ movement and strengthens the resistance against the social polarization of gay community’s as “an underclass, or a persecuted ethnic minority” (2002/2003, p. 271).

Dennis Denisoff, in his article “‘A Disembodied Voice’: The Posthuman Formlessness of Decadence” (2013), argues that the decadent poetics is not merely set of doctrines in the background of a particular era but this is about “formulation of a broader spiritualism exploring the boundaries of the self, the human, and the otherworldly” (p. 182), and the posthuman “shift” (p. 184) of decadence makes one recognize “human” as “fundamentally prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘non-human’” (p. 184) and “this ever-changing, multi-perspectival world is not an ideal toward which to strive, but a reality that already exists but still needs to be recognized” (184). Posthuman decadence is not about “capturing, but of playing most seriously with a transmutational, dis-embodied model of being” (Denisoff, 2013, p. 198). In Dorian: An Imitation, the wide circulation of Cathode Narcissus, the video installation created by Baz portraying the “gorgeous” (Self, 2002/2003, p. 42) nude body of Dorian through internet, functions to make Dorian a ‘dis-embodied’ model for gay pride. Hence, in Dorian: An Imitation, the role of Cathode Narcissus in gay liberation movement of 1980s, captures the posthumanist shift in the neo-decadence. The owner of The Gray Organization’s (Dorian) wishes to showcase his naked “perfection” to the public by affording the cost of Cathode Narcissus and its availability on internet with the self-indulgent inscription on its homepage, “Download Some Perfection Today” (Self, 2002/2003, p. 270), reflects neo-decadent narcissism as well.

At a “charity event” (Self, 2002, p. 34), “a classless John” (p. 34) describes Wotton as “fucking dodgy … like a junky as well as a toff” (p. 34). In response, as Dorian perceives that the comment is also meant for him, ‘“And a queer…you forgot to say queer”’ (p. 34). Queer’s primary meaning without any socio-traditional context is “strange; odd” (Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 1777). Etymologically, the word “queer” came from German “quer” meaning, “oblique, perverse” (Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 1777). As per Concise Oxford English Dictionary, word “queer”, from the early twentieth century, usually mean “homosexual”, basically, in a “deliberately derogatory” sense “when used by heterosexual people” (Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 1777). While the gay liberation movement was taking its peak in the 1990s (specifically in United States), the gay protestors resorted to consider the word “queer” with positive vibes. A leaflet titled Queers Read This: The Queer Nation Manifesto was distributed amongst people attending the New York Pride March in June, 1990. This leaflet declared that being “queer” is being “revolutionary” (1990, p. 1) and they deserve “same freedom of movement and sexuality, as straits” (1990, p. 1).

  1. Gay Subculture, Drugs and Neo-Decadence

West’s urban gay communities are often popularly associated with the following — drug (often illicit and arousing) addiction, excessive alcohol consumptions, effeminacy (of gay men), gay sex, queer make ups and attires, tattooed body, piercings, gay bars. In Self’s Dorian: An Imitation, too, Dorian, Baz, Henry Wotton and other gay characters are irrecoverably addicted to drugs, and, at times, their desire of sodomy seems to be drug-induced effect. Baz perceived New York to be full of “gay scene” (Self, 2002/2003, p. 89) and “saturated with drugs” (p. 89). Wotton’s monograph gives a glimpse to the sombre gay bar on 12th Street, Mineshaft, New York:

[W]onkily partitioned room succeeded warped vestibules, each filthier and ranker than the last with odour of faces and semen and poppers. All around was the thawalk of flesh on flesh, with its ragged accompaniment– the gaunts and groans of effortful coition. (p. 95)

Beatty, Geckle, Kapner, Lewis and Sandstorm, in “Gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals” (1999), has shown how “substance use and abuse” (Beatty et al., 1999, p. 545) are a common factor in gay communities. According to Meyer (2003), homosexuals, being driven by the “minority stress” (p. 676) and several subjective “proximal” (p. 676) stresses of which fear of “rejection” (p. 677), “concealment” (p. 677) of homosexual identity, “internalized homophobia” (p. 677), imbibe “distil” (p. 677) approach towards mainstream society. And, the homosexuals’ sense of being members of a “stigmatized” (Meyer, 2003, p. 677) community “with others who are like them rather than with members of the dominant [heteronormative] culture” (p. 677) and the urge of belongingness operate largely behind the subjective existence of ‘gay subculture’.  Soho, in London, is a quite well-known for the gay bars and its streets are favourite meeting spots for LGBTQ people (Haslop et al., 1998, p. 319). Dorian visits Soho “three afternoons a week” (Self, 2002/2003, p. 18) and he is seen attending clubs like Sealink Club (p. 200), Quo Vadis (p. 267) in Soho. Herman, in Self’s Dorian: An Imitation, a rent-boy who also supplies drugs to Dorian is also from Soho (p. 214). In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the youths’ opium addiction mirrors the decadent “seeking after rare sensations” (MacLeod, 2006, p. 1). “Blue-Gate Fields” (Wilde, 1891/2003, p. 112), referred to as one of the infamous places that Dorian frequently visited, was “notorious for opium houses and sailors’ brothels” (Drew, 2001, p. 192). Lord Henry is described to smoke “opium-tainted cigarette” (Wilde, 1891/2003, p. 6). The “opium dens” (Wilde, 1891/2003, p. 146) were visited by the opium addicts like Dorian seeking to experience opium induced momentary delusion and unique sensory numbness. As Barbara Charlesworth (1965) relates, ‘decadence’ sought to attain “as many moments as possible of heightened sensory experience, enjoyed within the mind outside the society” (p. xv). Significantly, in Foucault’s conception, drug inducement functions as a mode of counter-traditionalism that works through “sado-masochism” (Eribor, 1989/1991, p. 315). In Self’s text, the member of London and New York’s gay communities’ obsession for drug induced delusion and synesthesia conform to the neo-decadent urge to attain extremity as a mode of obsession.

Tattoos, piercings, and other unique ways of representing ‘body’, flamboyancy often are related to “queer” identity. In Self’s Dorian, there is also a brief glimpse of the gay village in Fitzrovia where the gays are seen wearing the fetish dresses willing to be spotted as queer:

Here, in Fitzrovia, close to both the hospital complex and the burgeoning gay village, there was a preponderance of homosexual men. They sported greased hair, pencil-like facial hair, earrings and white vests, the better to show off their easy-to-wipe skin tones. Some were gaunt-jawed and slope-shouldered, others were pumping up and overly active. (Self, 2002/2003, p. 74)

Justin Isis, in his blog, in introducing his book Neo-Decadent Manifesto of Women’s Fashion (2019) emphasizes on the necessity of depicting the absurdity and distinctiveness in the neo-decadence to afflict “our current age of sartorial stagnation and accelerated resource depletion” (Isis, 2019, March 11). Hence, the queer attires and make-ups that are often identified to the gay community’s common behavioural pattern do intersect with the neo-decadent decorum. In fact, neo-decadence seeks “ecstasy in extremes” (Corrick, 2018) and, in an “obscure” era of technological advancement, anything—clothes, trends in fashion, tattoos, recreational drugs, musical sub-cultures, cosmetics, photography or whatever— that becomes the “subject of obsessions, damnations and salvations” (Corrick, 2018) comes under the neo-decadent paradigm.

  1. Homosexuality, AIDS epidemic in the Eighties and Heteronormative Politics

In Self’s text, Dorian becomes the “Aids Mary, the malevolent and intentional transmitter of the virus” (Self, 2002/2003, p. 112) among gays.  However, the “Epilogue” section of the novel reveals that all the earlier pages, in fact, form the semi-delusional monograph of Wotton who recently died in AIDS.  The outbreak of AIDS epidemic in the eighties, as shown in Self’s Dorian: An Imitation, does not deter the gays to engage in the unprotected anal intercourses. As Wotton comments, “to die for the love of boys would be a beautiful death” (Self, 2002/2003, p. 59). However, Wotton’s fascination for imbibing “beautiful death” (Self, 2002, p. 59) in pursuing sensual pleasure gets disillusioned by the sufferings that AIDS caused,

I am saying we all need a heavily forested interior to maintain life on Planet Arse, but unfortunately antibiotics have completely logged my interior, and for months now, I’ve been subject to the most appalling flatulence. […] I can tell you my diarrhoea is the thing that keeps me fit. […] As I say, wrestling with Mr. Arse has been exhausting, but my sight has settled into a beneficent state of impairment. (Self, 2002, p. 182)

In fact, in the 1980s, gay sex was presumed to be the reason behind the spread of HIV virus. Numerous inauthentic articles published in various newspapers popularized this hype[4]. On May 11, 1982, The New York Times alternatively named AIDS as “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID)[5]. Unprotected sex and commonly seen drug addiction among the gay people were held responsible for the rapid spread of HIV virus among gay people in the nineties. The reason was not only the proven immunity disruptive functions of addictive substance and drugs in human body, but also because of the first suspected appearance of AIDS (in the name of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia or PCP) in December, 1981 in five men who used to engage in homosexual acts and took drug-injections (History of HIV and AIDS Overview, n.d). John L. Martin, in “Drug Use and Unprotected Anal Intercourse Among Gay Men” (1990) (published in Health Psychology journal (9(4)), based on a research survey carried out on gay men in 605, New York City, from 1984 to 1987, shows the gay men who engaged in “unprotected anal intercourse” (p. 451) and consumed the “substance” (p. 462) including “amphetamines” (p. 461), “cocaine”, (p. 461) “marijuana” (p. 461) in regular basis (which, most of them did) were more vulnerable to HIV infection during the nineties’ AIDS epidemic in America (p. 462). This AIDS outbreak in the 1980s and the rapid transmission of HIV amongst the gays became a reason for the governments and heterosexists to oppose gay empowerment and suppress ‘gay liberation’ movement. The leaflet (Queers Read This: The Queer Nation Manifesto) distributed in the New York Pride March in June, 1990 also claimed that the false accusation of spreading AIDS was being imposed on queers to “wipe [them] off” (1990, p. 2).

  1. Conclusion

According to Alan Sinfield (1998), the hypothetically “alleged universal culture” (p. 81) of the gays that goes beyond “locality, gender, sexual orientation, race” seeking “to subordinate other cultures” (p. 81) is non-existent. Mark Simpson (1995) derogatorily tagged the gay subculture as delusional “Underwear Cult” (p. 2). Beatty, Geckle, Kapner, Lewis and Sandstorm, in “Gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals” (1999), argue that the term “gay”, itself, in “social, cultural, and affective dimensions” (p. 542), denotes “subculture” (p. 542). But spatially separate gay communities cannot be homogenized as part of a universal gay subculture or based on any shared behavioural commonalities (Beatty et al., 1999, p. 542). The term Post-gay emphasizes the necessity of dissociating the gay community’s behavioral patterns from the mass-media’s stereotypical portrayal of gays. Gay subculture can neither be considered as an umbrella concept that singularly covers every gay community, nor can be related to “sharply definable communities” (Beatty et al., 1999, p. 542) of gays and lesbians with common character, attitude and values. Even each gay subculture has non-intermixable “small subdivisions” (Beatty et al., 1999, p. 542). Yet, as Self’s Dorian: An Imitation suggests, in the 1980s, a heteronormative political discourse sought to tag AIDS as a gay-epidemic and identify the gay men with some reckless urban gay subculture that indulges in gaining extremity of sensual and sensuous pleasure. Undoubtedly, in Self’s novel, the semblance of 1980s urban gay subculture complies with the popular conjectures about the same, and somewhat, homogenizes the urban gay characters as alcoholics, drug addicts, and extreme sensual pleasure seekers who engage in unprotected sex even at the utmost risk of HIV contamination. Hence, within the narrative of Dorian: An Imitation, AIDS infected bodies of the gays signify the neo-decadent extremity and hedonism inherent in the gay subculture of eighties’ London and New York.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

Notes:

 [1] Self’s rewriting can be better explained as, in the terminology of Julie Sanders (2006), “appropriation” (p. 26) as even though Self’s storyline parallels that of Wilde’s, the recontextualization of the story in a different time setting and relative alteration make it an altogether ‘new’ one (Sanders, 2006, pp. 26-27).

[2] Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 512.

[3] West’s urban gay “culture” is referred here as gay “subculture” as this is a segment of broader cultural domain yet goes against the heterosexist and homophobic society’s traditional decorum of normativity (often undocumented).

[4] See Timothy E. Cook and David C. Colby, p. 95.

[5] See “A Timeline of HIV and AIDS”.

References

A Timeline of HIV and AIDS. (n.d.). HIV.gov. https://hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hivand-aids-timeline#year-1981

Anonymous. (1990, June). Queers Read This: The Queer Nation Manifesto.  https://qrd.org/qrd/misc/text/queers.read.this

Ashford, Chris. (2017, July 26). Buggery, bribery and a committee: The story of how gay sex was decriminalised in Britain. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long-reads/buggery-bribery-gay0-sex-decriminalised-britain-history-legal-sexual-offences-act-1967-a7858096.html

Bailey, Amanda and Trumbach, Randolph (2002). Welcome to Molly-House: An Interview with Randolph Trumbach. Cabinet (8 Pharmacopia). https://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/8/bailey_trumbach.php

Charlesworth, Barbara. (1965). Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature. The University of Wisconsin Press.

Cruikshank, Margaret. (1992). The Gay Liberation Movement. Routledge.

Connell, Brendan. (2018). The First Manifesto of Neo-Decadence. In Justin Isis and Daniel Corrick (Eds.), Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology.  Snuggly Books. (Original work published 2010, October 17)

Cook, Timothy E. and David C. Colby. (1991). The Mass-Mediated Epidemic: The Politics of AIDS on the Nightly Network News. In Elizabeth Lee and Daniel M. Fox (Eds.), AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease. University of California Press. UC Press E-Books Collection. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft9b69p35n;brand=ucpress

Corrick, Daniel. (2018). Introduction. In Justin Isis and Daniel Corrick (Eds.), Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology.  Snuggly Books.

Demers, Frank. (1964). Notes. In P. Pasolini’s The Catholic Irrationalism of Fellini (Demers, F., & Demers, P., Trans.). Film Criticism, 9(1), 63-64. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44018770

Denisoff, Dennis. (2002). Decadence and aestheticism. Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press.

Dennis Denisoff. (2013). ‘Disembodied Voice’: The Posthuman Formlessness of Decadence. In Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (pp. 181-200). Palgrave Macmillan.

Drew, John M.L. (2001). Introduction. In Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (pp. v-xxxi). Wordsworth Classics.

Drew, John M.L. (2001). Notes. In Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (pp. 178-191). Wordsworth Classics.

Emilio, John D. (1983). Forging a Group Identity: World War II and the Emergence of an Urban Gay Subculture. In Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940– 1970 (pp. 23–39). University of Chicago Press.

Eribon, Didier. (1991). Michel Foucault (Betsy Wing, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1989).

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Mr. Jyotirmoy Sil is serving as an Assistant Professor of English in Malda College, Malda, West Bengal. His research areas include neo-Victorianism, homosexual literature, and gay subculture.

 

 

Transgressive Spatialities: Mapping Identity and Liminality in Contemporary Queer Narratives from Assam

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1.6K views

Nizara Hazarika

Department of English, Sonapur College, (Gauhati University) Sonapur, Assam. ORCID id:0000-0002-5152-7553. Email id: nhazarika04@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022. Pages: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne24

First published: June 24, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Abstract

From Descartes’ cogito to the postmodern fluidity, the notion of identity has acquired newer dimensions. Identity remains an important rhetorical resource for non-heterosexual people. Butler’s notion of gender as performative has been fundamental in this discourse on the queer people who debunk compulsory heterosexuality as a given. An exploration of the spaces that the non-heteronormative people occupy is pertinent to understanding the lived realities of these people. Using the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia, this study tries to understand the liminal and all kinds of alternative spaces that they inhabit which is intense and disruptive. They are also sites of resistance and transgression. In Assamese literature, the heterosexual ideology dominates the hegemonic knowledge production spaces. The non-heteronormative people occupy the spaces in crevices, and peripheries and cannot claim a distinct positionality. Queer narratives from Assam reflect a new direction in this regard. The Narratives under study by Moushumi Kandali, Aruni Kashyap and Panchanan Hazarika present how these narratives from Assam present the lived realities of the queer population and how they explicate the spatial dimension of the same-sex desire, and in the process how they negotiate the ontological authenticity of the non-heteronormative people to form their identity.

Key words: Spatiality, identity, queer, gender fluidity, narrative

With the proliferation of the discourses on identity, the postmodern stance on it as something ‘in flux’, and the Butlerian notion of gendered fluidity and performativity, the queers have emerged with a malleable identity that exists beyond the gendered binary. The term ‘Queer’ has been used as an umbrella term to denote a range of sexual and gender identities that are not “straight” and do not conform to the dominant heterosexual practices. Queer studies emerged as an academic discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It brought in a political stand of both solidarity and defiance that challenged the mainstream heterosexual discourses and denied subjugation of the sexual minorities. In the initial years, the term ‘queer’ was used for the lesbian and gay populace; but over the years it has encompassed all the non-heterosexual people who expose and challenge normativity. The term ‘identity’ has been a rhetorical resource for these non-heterosexual people. Through these resources, they evoke some kind of discourse that questions the politics of power and dominance. As ‘queer’, each individual goes through different lived realities. However, recognition of one’s sexuality, coming out and making that sexual identity public, creating a bond with members of a similar community and facing societal pressure are some of the common experiences of the queer people. The queer identity is shaped by histories of rejection, abjection and subjugation by the dominant patriarchal power structure. Being pushed to the periphery, the queers prefer fluid possibilities of gender and sexuality by debunking the false notion of compulsory heterosexuality. They celebrate the fluidity of body and sexuality and challenge the hetero-patriarchal repression. However, the body of the queers becomes a potential site of negation of identity as per the norms imposed by the heterosexist society. Heteronormativity, with its repressive measures, forces the queer people to go through subjugation and exclusion. This in turn traumatises these marginalised people while negotiating their space within a homophobic society. Thus, for the queers, who inhabit outside the binary structure, their identity lies in the liminal space.

The liminal space provides its subjects opportunities to redefine their identity and also to subvert the dominant notions upheld by society. As the identity of the queers is not permeated with socially constructed norms, the liminal space provides them the necessary power to restructure and negotiate their identities. This brings forth the fluidity of the queer identity. Anzaldua (2002) posits, “This liminal space of identity can be ‘unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition . . . lacking clear boundaries —the person is in a constant state of displacement” (p.1) Thus, the queer people feel a sense of estrangement when they enter the structured spaces of gendered binary. They navigate their identities and due to this perpetual navigation, a permanent space cannot be realised. However, this movement into new spaces opens up a new epistemological horizon before them that empowers the queers and this new knowledge and power are distinctly their own. But the pertinent question here is, how is a queer space defined? In the words of Ebmeier and Bovermann (2018),

A queer space is any space that enables its occupants to perform queerness. Such a space allows for the visibility of queerness. . . Instead of inverting hierarchies and enacting a reversal of the normative order, these places attempt to negotiate and perform alternatives. (2018, p.288)

 Thus, the queer space is engraved by the sexual minorities and it “purportedly enables the visibility of sexual subcultures that resist and rupture the hegemonic heterosexuality that is the source of their marginality and exclusion” (Oswin, 2008, p.90). Giving a new dimension to the spatial discourse on the use of space in society, Foucault introduced his concept of heterotopias. In his 1967 lecture “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”, Foucault described heterotopias as a space both ‘existing’ and ‘non-existing’ that fall between real and utopian spaces. These are spaces that are “othered”, places that are outside and yet connected to all other places. In his The Order of Things (1966), Foucault described heterotopias as discursive, a space thinkable only in language; but in “Of Other Spaces”, heterotopia has been presented as a physical space for bodies to dwell, as “counter sites” such as asylums, prisons, gardens, colonies, cemeteries, brothels and boats. Heterotopias encourage a reordering of the social structure which is an essential counter-hegemonic locus of resistance. Angela Jones (2009), in her essay titled “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness” describes,

Queer heterotopias are material spaces where radical practices go unregulated. They are sites where actors, whether academics or activists, engage in what we might call a radical politics of subversion, where individuals attempt to dislocate the normative configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality through daily exploration and experimentation with crafting a queer identity. (p.2)

Thus, the queer heterotopias provide a space for the non-heteronormative individuals to create their own space where they can live, and walk about in an empowered state by being free from all kinds of marginalisation and dominance.

With the emergence of spatial literary studies, scholars have delved into the representation of spaces in the varied zones where fiction meets reality. Queer people have been denied representation and kept out of all kinds of documented space in history and literature. In most mainstream literature and other spaces like films, theatres etc, the queers are deliberately marginalised, made fun of, ridiculed and so on. Thus, these images of the queers dominate the mindset of the people of the heterosexist society. Through her notion of gender performativity, Butler subverts the ontological status of the heteronormative gendered regime and posits that such disciplinary power produces queerness as abnormal. But the pertinent question is what is normal or natural? Who decides what is normal or natural? This kind of idea needs to be addressed when we talk of queer people. And here comes the importance of the queer narratives, where issues on identity, spaces, and lived experiences are addressed. Therefore, an exploration of the spaces that the non-heteronormative people occupy and their literary representation is pertinent to understanding the lived realities of these people. Literature is nuanced and it can explore the complex experiential realities of queers and present the politics behind such experiences. But the point to ponder here is how are the queer spaces projected and reclaimed in the literary texts? Has there been any effort to construct alternative spaces for the queers as they are kept out of the ambit of the binary gendered spaces? To challenge the heteronormative construction of space, literary representation and reclamation of queer spaces are the need of the hour. In mainstream literature, the queer figure in the periphery, in the crevices. The naturalness of the dominant heteronormative discourses could be challenged by queer narratives by making spaces for a newer understanding of gender and sexuality. Queer narratives can bring these intangibilities into the social fabric and spread awareness for a positive change.

In Assamese literature, heterosexual ideology dominates the hegemonic knowledge production of spaces. The nonheteronormative people occupy the spaces in fissures and cannot claim a distinct positionality. Queer narratives from Assam are a timely intervention in this regard. They portray the lived realities of queer people. These narratives reflect a new direction in the process of an all-inclusive society. Thus, a proper study of these narratives is highly warranted. The queer narratives can challenge the heterosexual spatial deployment that is found in the mainstream narratives and prevalent dominant socio-cultural practices of a society. Instead of inverting hierarchies and enacting a reversal of the normative order, these places attempt to negotiate and perform alternatives. These narratives present how some kind of queer space and identity emerges as a site of contestation and resistance with an underlying awareness of divergence. The texts under study are the fictional narratives by Moushumi Kandali, Aruni Kashyap, and Panchanan Hazarika. In these narratives, the narrators project a queer dimension to one’s identity and the spaces that they occupy in society while presenting their experiential realities. The strife for visibility and societal acceptance is a perennial issue for these people living in the interstices of the social structure.

Moushumi Kandali’s story “Tritiyattar Golpo” (A Tale of Thirdness) published in 2007 is one of the finest narratives written with a queer theme. The story has a queer Professor as its protagonist and it narrates the trauma, the societal non-acceptance, the suffering, the loneliness that the protagonist goes through and the struggle he makes to challenge the societal norms and also his embarking on a journey to break the gender stereotype. All these issues are portrayed in a poignant tale where the professor is always attracted to the thirdness. This narrative presents how the queer persona is not accepted by society and is ridiculed, tortured, targeted, sidelined, marginalised and his very private space of a home is invaded. The narrator, narrating the living story, talks of the change in the Professor’s appearance when he internalises homophobia and behaves in a specific way desired by society and his face transforms:

. . . his face would look like the digital conversion of Tutankhamen’s death mask. Was it a face or death-in-wings? Faces change according to variations in context. And we have to wait for life to teach us this simple, common truth, practically known to everybody. (Phukan, 2021, p.284)

Through this facial transformation, the professor exposes the pain and humiliation that the queer folks undergo, and at the same time, it is also a kind of dissent at the overarching patriarchal metanarrative. It reflects how the non-heteronormative people are forced to follow the dictums of society. Butler’s notion of gender performativity, the “stylized repetition of acts”, that must be performed to achieve a particular gender is explored here. Specific socially constructed corporeal acts are to be performed continuously which create a certain gendered identity as per the socio-cultural norms. The Professor’s non-conformity has led to his wearing the metaphorical mask of Tutankhamen. This metaphorical mask of Tutankhamen that the Professor wears is a kind of resistance, a rigid blockage towards the multifarious norms prescribed by the heterosexual society. However, his inner being transformed him into his own self where he prefers to be a woman, a dancer, and a mother. His fluid identity gets reflected when the narrator finds him transformed into a seductress on stage and the narrator exclaims,

I saw a braid flow out of your head, two breasts bloom on your masculine chest, breasts firming in eager anticipation of touch. . . you had generated such an incredible phenomenon- three doors on three sides— on the right, door of the known, on the left, the door of the unknown, and in between, there was another door —  the door of perception- you had advanced, slowly, to the third door in the middle- on you walked—oh, that was the first time I had seen you — and on the same day, I had seen two of your faces….. (Phukan, 2021, p.285)

To this, the Professor replied, “One day you will see my third face”. This makes the narrator question his obsession with “thirdness”:

Third! Third again! Third —third— third— why was he so obsessed with the third number — the number three? He preferred a hotel room with the number 3. He was fond of cubism. His favourite story was “The Third Bank of the River”. Shivas’s third eye. The three dimensional representation — the reality of the third world. . .  (Phukan, 2021, p. 285)

Thus, the professor’s fluid self, transcending the societal space to a third space, is an act of transgression where he could perform his fluid gender. Chris Jenks has defined transgression as  “ to go beyond the bounds or limits set by commandment or law or convention, it is to violate or infringe…[a] reflexive act of denial and affirmation” (2003, p.2). Transgression, for the queers, is an act of challenging the heterosexual power structure and at the same time, reclaiming their own space. It is also a liminal space that encourages fundamental reordering.

Professing gender fluidity, the text critiques the stereotypical notions of gendered identity as per the patriarchal norms. The very notion of motherhood has been questioned. To be a mother, one does not need to be a woman. As the narrator opines,

Oh, how uselessly are we trapped in our stereotyped definitions— we think motherhood is only for women. But motherhood is only a concept— who says it is defined by gender, physicality? One does not require a womb to be a mother—all one needs is a womb of sensitivity and emotion. That is why that scrap of life sleeps in his lap—born to him—Mahadevi grows in his womb of emotion. (Phukan, 2021, p.289)

Here, the narrator projects mothering as an alternative to the oppressive institution of patriarchy. An intervention into the institution of motherhood needs to begin by questioning the very categories of experience and power (Kawash, 2011, p 979). Thus, the professor’s desire to conceive Akka Mahadevi and to have her as his child is fulfilled, albeit metaphorically.  And the last lines give the story its ultimate thrust,

One day, one day Mahadevi will tell the people around her–pour her heart out to the trees and earth and wind– “You see that man–sailing away in the boat in solitude on those deep water–he is my mother…. (Phukan, 2021, p.290)

The story tries to bring forth the very notion of gender fluidity and that through their performativity they can claim their own identity. Following Enders, Angella Okawa (2015) opines:

In a world that prefers binary identity, those whose identity lives in this in between space feel pressure to claim one end of polarity and reject the other. Rather than being a transitional space, the liminal is, for these individuals, a permanent home. (p.3)

Thus, the metaphor of sailing through the river towards the third bank is the protagonist’s journey to the queer space that is an emancipated, alternative space where the hegemonic heterosexist discourses cease to regulate bodies and identities. This is a queer heterotopia where individuals can explore and experiment with their desires. The boat, for Foucault, is the quintessential heterotopia as it is in a mobile state, it is real yet ephemeral and beyond surveillance. As Foucault (1986) postulates,

Boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea. . . The boat has been for our civilization the greatest reserve of the imagination. (p. 27)

Thus, Foucault indicates that heterotopia has the potential to generate alternatives to the existing spaces that regulate the societal structure. Only within the heterotopic space of the boat, the Professor can experience the imagined departure and the thrill of sailing away. Here, solitude is overlapped with a sense of companionship and the present becomes heterochronous with a projected future.      

Aruni Kashyap’s story “His Father’s Disease” (2019) narrates the tale of Anil, a gay persona who lives with his mother when the insurgency problems were at its height in Assam. At the beginning of the story, Anil is shown as indulging in a sexual union with his partner and when his mother Neerumoni comes to know about his gay identity, she could not accept it. She wept and thought that ‘he has acquired his father’s disease’. (p.118) She was a witness to this kind of gay sexual encounter of her bisexual husband Horokanto with her own brother Nilambor. Thus, she relates Anil’s gay sexual orientation to her husband’s bisexuality and opines that it is a disease. This is a common negative belief against the people of the queer community that affects their mental health to the extent that they isolate themselves and live within the closeted space. Anil’s construction of an outhouse for himself is some kind of architectural space, a heterotopia, that the queer people inhabit which is an intimate, comfortable space. Any kind of discrimination like homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, etc. is prohibited there. This is what Foucault talks of when he postulates that there is a transition from ‘heterotopia of crisis’ to ‘heterotopia of deviation’. (1986, p.25) Anil goes through a crisis situation within his home space where his mother nags him continuously and he finds the home space constricted and traumatised. Thus, he moves to the outhouse which stands for the heterotopia of deviation. The closeted space of the outhouse is an emancipated space for Anil. Home could be a place where they experience homophobia and this is evident when his mother does not accept his gay identity. Thus, this kind of narrative exposes the myth of a safe home. The queers experience the home space as a place of surveillance and discipline. Anil faces a dual paradigm, where he is familiar and close to the centre of power when he is politically involved and is going to be the future village headman. On the other hand, he is made to feel that he does not belong to the mainstream because of his sexual orientation. His gay identity has been exposed and made a weapon to force his absence within the public space. In the depiction of this queer space, the story explores the erotic dynamics, its potential for grappling with the mainstream spaces and the consequent liminality. Anil’s sexual relation with Promod, the effeminate young man and Anil’s sex partner, exhibits this erotic dynamics within the space of the outhouse. Again, Anil’s sexual experiences with Gurmail project his encounter with the mainstream space. The final burning of the outhouse and Anil’s suicide delineate the outhouse as a liminal space that is not fixed and a temporary abode. Anil carves a space for transaction in the context of his homoerotic desire played out within the enclosed locus of the outhouse. The outhouse becomes a metaphoric representation of the sexually hierarchized home space.

Anil’s straddling within these spaces makes his identity contingent, unfixed, and yet “there”. This societal non-acceptance comes in the way of the queer populace while they claim their queer identity. They feel alienated and strive for a positionality as they inhabit in the interstices. In the words of Shinsuke Eguchi (2011):

Prior to coming out, individuals must have access to information about homosexuality and gay identity. The social stigmatization of homosexuality is a barrier for individuals in the process of adopting homosexuality as a way of life.  (p. 40)

This social stigmatisation makes Anil hide his gay identity and he builds the outhouse as a space for liberation. This could be a strategy of resilience too at his disposal to cope with the challenge of heteronormativity and the social stigma attached to his gay identity. Though Anil never told his mother about his physical needs, towards the end he told her about it:

He had built that house to carve a space of his own. It had implicitly told his mother what his ‘male needs’ were. And now, in front of the burning house, he was telling her that he loved Gurmail. (2019, p.131)

Anil saw his mother howling and mumbling something he did not understand and at that spur of the moment he went inside the burning house and neighbours woke up to an unusual smell of burnt human flesh. This suicide or annihilation of the self under societal pressure is a sad yet harsh reality among the queers. Rod Cover (2012), citing the research carried out by various agencies like, Queer activist and medical professionals, opines that they

effectively re-figured sexuality-related suicide as a social fact in Durkheim’s terms by suggesting that social intolerance and homophobia were internalised, thereby leading to self-hatred and self-destructiveness . . . It brought an epistemic shift of opinion from the idea that homosexuality was essentially abnormal, instead introducing the ways in which a number of factors were causal in the suicides of gay men, including shame resulting from blackmail and exposure, pressures around coming out and closetedness, isolation and ostracism” (p. 38)

Thus, Anil’s suicide is a result of the social stigma associated with his gay identity. His revelation to his mother, who, as a representative of the heterosexual social structure, is never ready to accept his gay identity, and finally the burning down of the outhouse, an alternate space of all kinds of possibilities and experimentations. The outhouse is not a discursive site. Rather it is a physical one, a space both integral to and removed from the social order. And its demolition has crushed all his wishes to have his own space and his identity.

Anil’s disinterest in the election process and his constant fear of being killed made him stay within the house. Through this rejection of his entering into the pubic space, Anil addresses his liminality and challenges the propriety of the dominant social order. All the traumatising experiences like Anil’s imprisonment, and the attack on his life, have a deep impact on his interior landscape. And he enters into a heterotopia of crisis. His suicide might be termed as a heterotopia of deviation where he embarks on a journey beyond life and all kinds of bindings. Thus, in a way, his death is a way of resistance too. Anil chooses to resort to a radical way of subversion of the dominant and in the process, he kills himself.

Panchanan Hazarika’s short story collection Andharotkoi Udaax Botahotkoi Swadhin (Depressed than darkness, liberated than the wind) has several stories that portray the experiential realities of queer people. He tries to expose the societal pressure, stigma, violence inflicted on the queers, the politics of exclusion, loneliness, rejection that the queer people experience. In “Sironton”, he shows how Violina, a Lesbian girl is not accepted by her peers. Being students of Gender Studies, researching 3rd Wave Feminism, these friends yet cannot accept her. This exposes the hypocrisy of heterosexual society. Queer people have to face the politics of exclusion and cannot claim an equal space in the mainstream discourses. Their visibility is ridiculed and thus critics have vouched for a shift of the politics of visibility to the politics of recognition which acknowledges identity on the basis of gender, sexuality, and other markers.

 Hazarika’s story “Joloj Jibon” (Fluid Life) presents the fluidity of one’s identity. The narrator speaks about his fluid existence, the multiple selves that we carry within us, the body’s needs and desires, and his search for the truth of life. He feels he floats in these nuanced paradigms. When his friend says that not being able to publicly express one’s sexuality could also be a reason for committing suicide, he protests. And then he longs for a living river where his fluid life could clasp him. The water body is represented as an alternative space that both forms and challenges the protagonist’s sense of identity and belongingness. Thus, the space that he longs for is a queer space that would provide him solace as it might be a safe refuge to explore his sexuality and fluid identity. This space is an indefinable space, a temporary and yet fluctuating zone governed by lawless forces, where the protagonist can be in his elements.  This kind of performance reveals a kind of convergence of spatial and fluid identity formation.

The title story from the collection Andharotkoi Udaax Botahotkoi Swadhin(2020) narrates the story of Chandrabala, the educated, progressive mother and her three children, Uddipta, Lopa, and Ujjiban. The mother is very much involved in her children’s lives and she tries to help them solve their problems, and takes their side when they face any problem from their father or society at large. But when she comes to know about her son Ujjiban’s sexuality, who declares that he is gay, it was like a storm for her. She had to go through many phases of tests and tribulations. The mother introspects:

Ujjibon is attracted only towards men— she possesses the required sensitivity and awareness to accept this truth. But Ujjiban is not a character from a story or a film. He is her son, the son of her own flesh and blood. He is the son of her and Uttam’s. (2020, p. 90)

Ujjiban’s gay identity is evident in his gait and his behaviour. He is ridiculed by his friends and teachers at school. The public space of school does not provide him with a sense of belongingness. Even, the home space is not conducive for him. Uttam, his father curses him and commands him, “to behave like a boy as he is born a boy”. Thus, Uddipan was bereft of any comforting space where he could perform his sexuality. He always lives within the restrictive, disciplinary space. But his association with the Art teacher provides him with a liberated space, where he can come out of his shell and become his own self. As his mother states,

Uddipan became very close to this man who is double his age. She found it surprising. Yet, Debaparasad, the Art teacher could bring him out of the cocoon of loneliness-depression-self-absorption. And she is ever grateful to him. (2020, p. 92)

Thus, Uddipan’s experience in the metro city of Delhi gives him the much-required space of freedom and his whole personality undergoes a transformation. From a naive individual, he becomes self-reliant and courageous. He has understood the heterosexual power politics and he realises that his gay identity is as natural as any other gendered identity. This socially constructed notion of heterosexuality is critiqued by Binnie (1997) and she postulates: “Space is not naturally authentically “straight”, but rather actively produced and (hetero) sexualised.” (p.223)

The very notion of inclusion and acceptance is something that queer people are denied by society. As they do not conform to heteropatriarchal norms, they are singled out and positioned in the margins. These liminal spaces could be re-appropriated and restructured by creating a space where the queers can perform their sexuality and gender. The experiences of Urban Delhi provide Ujjiban with the required acceptance and space and he comes out of his closeted space and declares his sexuality even to his mother. This creation of a heterotopia helps the queers force the heteronormative society to recognise the queer bodies and sexualities as viable on their own terms. And Ujjiban’s mother accepts his sexuality with élan. She tells him:

Ujjiban! I belong to a different era. You belong to a new era. But who will understand you if not me? I am your mother…. Is there anything that a mother does not understand? However free, rebellious emancipated a time could be, is not the time born out of a womb of old time? Doesn’t the hand holding the progressive light that herald the new time born from the darkness of the womb? (2020, p. 94)

And Chandrabala shivers with a yearning to be free from the clutch of the age-old conventions and a love for the future where there will be equality of sexes. In this kind of social change, a change of mindset of people is needed. Social change occurs slowly. Literature can play a pivotal role by bringing awareness and arousing empathy and sensitivity among people.  These existential realities bring forth the nuances of the lives of the queer people and we can envision that a day will come which will open up a new vista where people belonging to all sexualities bask under the same sky.

The spatial deployment of the queer people within the framework of mainstream society has changed its trajectory in the contemporary discourses on queer studies. Scholars have come up with new perspectives on the notions of queer identity and space. Kath Browne (2006) argues that queer is more than the LGBT population and it ought to consider how queer can be something other than “an overarching term that describes sexual ‘dissidents’” (p. 886). Brown postulates that the ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ spaces normally do not transgress the normative sexual identity politics. It should extend the norm and not transgress or challenge it. Thus, by queer Brown means “operating beyond powers and controls that enforce normativity”. (p. 889). She goes on to state that queer inquiries should question the ideals of inclusion and “entail radical (re)thinkings, (re)drawings, (re)conceptualisations, (re)mappings that could (re)make bodies, spaces, and geographies” (p. 888). Thus, Brown opines that queer geographies should transgress boundaries such as hetero/homo, man/woman in order to go beyond normativity that will render space fluid. This fluid notion of space would surely be a harbinger of a new world order where the dominant power structure would cease to operate and a new dawn will usher in where the queers will have their own subjectivities. The spaces that they occupy will transgress all prevalent spatial boundaries and provide them with the identities that they envision in the days to come.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

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Nizara Hazarika is an Associate Professor at the Post Graduate Department of English in  Sonapur College, (Gauhati University) Assam. She did her PhD on Colonial Assam and Women’s Writing’from English and Foreign Languages University, (EFLU) Hyderabad. She is the author of the book Colonial Assam and Women’s Writing. She has also edited several books on women writing and English language teaching. She was a recipient of a Fellowship by the US Department of State in 2013, UGC travel grants to participate in IAFOR International Conference at Osaka, Japan in 2013, and in the Fifteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities for a Knowledge Society” at Imperial College, London in 2017.

“The forest is my wife”: The Ethno-political and Gendered Relationship of Land and the Indigene

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Karyir Riba
Department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India. ORCID: 0000-0001-8408-4464. Email: karyir.riba.ap@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages: 1-9. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne18

First published: June 24, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Abstract

The imperative presence of land as a personified being in Indigenous Literatures asserts the crucial connection between land and the native ‘self’ in defining ‘indigeneity’. While this ‘self’ is often reclaimed in a wrestle against the geo-political confines of the nation-state; an indigenous woman, however, navigates ‘self’ in ways non-identical. Women’s connection to land, as opposed to indigenous men, shapes ethno-political struggle of proprietorship and rather builds upon shared feminine traits of fertility, nurture, and service. Focusing on the integration of gender and ecology as an important aspect of ecological critique on power and progress, this paper attempts to delineate the gendered relationship between the indigene and land. It delves into two important areas of study: firstly, probing the distinct ways the indigene ‘self’ unifies itself with the land, and secondly, critiquing the gendered dynamics involved in this merger. The study focuses on the emancipatory impediments of indigenous women by analysing select works of Easterine Kire and Mamang Dai, also, tangentially referring to a few other indigenous women’s writings from North East India.

Keywords: Land, Gender, Ethno-politics, Ecocriticism

When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls…The girls were property, the disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong… The ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels. During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only. (Leopold, 1949, p. 201)

One may look at Aldo Leopold’s reference to Homer’s Odyssey in The Land Ethics (1949), and immediately recognize how Leopold set in motion reflective criticism of the position of ‘Man’ by critiquing Homer’s “god-like Odysseus” (p. 201), and attempted to redefine ‘community’ by problematizing the narrative of man as “conqueror of the land community” to “member and citizen of it”. Leopold stressed the necessity to see land and everything on it (both human and non-human) as a unified community, urging that “when we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (p. 204).  This renewed meaning of community, in his words, could aid nurture an “ethic of care” (p. 204) that is organically fostered through ‘experience’ and ‘connection’ with the land. However, this inspiration of the “ethic of care” becomes the very site of inquiry and debate in this paper, in order to realize the gendered relationship of land and Indigene. In the discourse of ecofeminism, the vocabulary of care has been aggressively scrutinized upon the currency of care, for care is inspired chiefly by connected ‘experience’ of nature, “that reflect” as argued by Roger. J. H. King (1991), only and “typically male set of experiences of the world” and “aspects of Patriarchal thinking” (p. 76).

While land ethic of care has been a defining code of indigenous ontology, even before its academic acknowledgment through Leopold, this paper reflects on the limitations of the vocabulary of ‘care’ in insufficiently delineating heterogeneity of gendered experiences. Also, by occasionally subscribing to ecofeminist ideology that seeks resonance between women and land, the study focuses on the emancipation of Indigenous women whose identity is often caught or neglected in the hierarchy of larger structures of violence. As pointed out by Dai in her introductory note to the edited anthology, The Inheritance of Words, Writings from Arunachal Pradesh (2021) that “while the joys of motherhood, love of land and questions of the self are evoked…poignant with the anguish of love, they are also fierce with resistance against what it means to be a woman in a traditional society where inherent customary laws dictate how women live their lives, something that often results in untold suffering” (p. 3).

With special reference to Kire and Dai, and few references to other indigenous women writers from North East India, the paper wields on an interdisciplinary approach to explore natural and socio-cultural histories that have been governing and continues to govern the gendered heterogeneous experiences of native subjects – men and women. Pertinent to indigenous women’s writings that idiomatically juggle between feministic discourse and the issues of nation-state, tribal nationalism and nativity, the paper proposes that literary scholarship concerning native cultures requires a striding movement from post-colonial criticism to ‘native’ feminism. Kate Shanley, argues, in the context of Native Indian experience, that “the word ‘feminism’ has special meanings to Indian women, including the idea of promoting the continuity of tradition, and consequently, pursuing the recognition of tribal sovereignty” (1984, p. 215). In the impetus of decolonization and revival of roots movement, the recent decades in indigenous studies have seen a shift from mere political and spatial recognition of the otherwise historically contingent idea of indigeneity to acknowledging the intricacies of indigenous cultural histories from the native perspective. This according to Fabricant and Poestero (2018) is “perhaps the most provocative turn in indigenous studies” (p.137) which has been mobilizing scholars to exfoliate indigenous ontologies that had gone almost extinct in the hegemony of the western knowledge system. This turn in indigenous studies aims to shake intellectual terrains that have been building on the inherited binaries of European philosophy, by focusing on Indigenous knowledge and practices as “new modes of thought” (Cameron, 2014, p.19). Based on various indigenous practices, it lays careful attention to ontological pluralism (worldviews) and stresses reconsideration of epistemology by challenging euro-centric approach to meaning, knowledge, and power. However, in lieu of this development, arbitrating the intersection of gender and nativity continues to remain complex, as more than often feminist discourse is seen as antithetical or foreign to the codes of native epistemology. Arguing upon native women’s question of belonging, Ramirez argues that “too often the assumption in Native communities is that we as indigenous women should defend a tribal nationalism that ignores sexism as part of our very survival as women as well as our liberation from colonization” (2007, p. 22). This perplexity is pronounced in the select texts, for instance, the very usage of the word Adi word ‘Pensam’ (implying in-between, middle, belonging to both) in Dai’s (2006) The Legends of Pensam may be seen as an attempt to emphasize on the spatial complexity of contemporary native identity – an attempt to locate the appropriate bargain between the past and the future, and an attempt to gain agency over what needs to be continued or repudiated in the tide of change.

Hence, to recognize the intersection of gender and nativity in the context of Indigenous communities from North East India, ‘native-feminism/s’ that is ideologically quintessential to native experience is essentially requisite. The idiosyncratic illustration of native women’s renditions, for instance, reveals in depiction of Kirhupfumia in Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014), with “vast store of knowledge” to answer “questions about spirit encounters” or to instruct if “what was to be done if a relative had touched stones that were taboo to touch” or to be consulted “on cures for fevers contracted in the forest… to disclose names of herbs in special areas, and how to use these to cure the fevers” (p, 146). It explains an indigenous woman’s rendition, not only as an active storyteller but also as a custodian of knowledge connected to nature, as the feminine resonance of women and non-human, that extends from the physical to the spiritual realm (feminine guardian spirits of rivers and forests). Or even the silent appraisals in indigenous women’s writings from Arunachal Pradesh, critiquing among others, the practice of polygamy sanctioned by customary norms – to be “traded for few mithuns to my father” (Reena, 2021, p. 44) and “when the children are grown, he decides to take another wife” (Dai, 2006, p. 77), highlighting the instrumental equivalency of women to the natural world coded in customary sanctions. Consequently, experiences of an indigenous woman traverse along multiple dimensions and the ‘self’ melds dual structures of enunciation – ‘indigeneity’ and ‘womanhood’. This then creates a spatial agency that is a combination of multifaceted voices. On the one hand, there are the concerns for representation – importance of native ontology in reasserting the connection of land and indigene, geo-political histories, tribal nationalism, etc. – and on the other, the emancipation of the feminine ‘self’. What makes this emancipation even more difficult is the calculated negotiation of self in the hierarchy of tribal nationalism, ecology, and gender.

With natives’ proximity to land, one of the first underlining issues, voiced in Indigenous women’s writings, is concerned with the various parameters of indigeneity and land-related ethnopolitics that differ for women and men. The heterogeneity of gendered participation, especially in land-related policies, materializes in matters of protection, ownership, and custody, which range from concerns of proprietorship to ethno-political concerns of instrumental subjugation of land. Whence, indigenous women are placed oust the value hierarchy of decision making. It is pertinent, however, to realize that penetration of the colonial idea of ‘ownership’ in native ethno-politics today, stands in contrast to a native ontology that revered safekeeping of the land. Dai (2006) calls it “tribal modified” (p. 175), indicating metamorphosis into modernity that prioritizes economic health over eco-centric indigenous practices. Dai’s The Legends of Pensam (2006) serves as a silent satire on this ironic shift in the meaning of indigeneity and its connection to the land. The recurrent presence of land as a personified being, in most of her works, distances land from being a mere geo-political entity, often nurturing the very consciousness and memory of its people. It taps on reviving the indigenous philosophy of ‘community’ that one shares with others, which is found in interdependency. (Kwaymullina, 2005, p. 2) As Ambelin Kwaymullina (2005) explains:

For Aboriginal peoples, country is much more than a place. Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human – all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle. Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self. (para. 2)

Dai draws on the Adi ontological credence of the interdependency of nature and man, both defending each other, by crafting the narrative of her historical fiction around the personified depiction of nature – river, forest, mountains, etc.  River and Mountains hold deep agency in Adi Abangs (oral histories/folk songs), serving as a crucial blueprint in trailing migratory routes and oral histories of the first Adi settlements. The river as a guiding agent in The Black Hill (2017) to direct Gimur’s destiny and the eminence of high mountain ranges standing as a barricade against the British invasion symbolizes the interdependent relationship of guidance and protection. Dai taps on the Adi folk philosophy of the river being alive, possessing a soul, a path through which the spirits of the ancestors travel. Contamination of the river is thus reflective of the end of cultural memory– “Our river must not be interrupted” (Dai, 2009, p. 45).  This philosophy of ‘personification of nature’ and interdependency of land and human, charges most of her works. It finds relevance in the deepening awareness of the fragility of the earth’s ecology and its grave implications for human survival.

Korff Jens (2021) stresses specifically the importance of studying the aboriginal perspective/worldview relating to Land. In his article “Meaning of land to Aboriginal people”, he argues that the key difference in the relationships people share with the land is rooted in the treatment of land as a ‘source’, which according to him is found in the dependency of a non-indigenous to ‘live off’ the land (land as capital) and the interdependency of the aboriginals to ‘live with’ the land (land as being).

“The latter has a spiritual, physical, social and cultural connection… and a profound spiritual connection to land. Aboriginal law and spirituality are intertwined with the land, the people and creation, and this forms their culture and sovereignty” (para. 1,5).

Obstinately, the two opposing ideas of ‘interdependency’ vs ‘ownership’ have assimilated to form a crude territorial ethno-politics that serve as power politics over eco-centric indigeneity. The gradually shifting matrix of native ‘land ethics’ from eco-centric ontology to a neo-colonial capitalist niche for control and possession are of the few concerns that Dai portrays in her works, in a wrestle to strike a balance between Land as community vs Land as capital. “Tribal modified” (p.175) as expressed in Dai’s Legends of Pensam, points at the change in social order and practices that differ from traditional forms, especially one that relates to concerns of land-human interaction. Referring to the pan-Maori ethnification in Newzealand, Elizabeth Rata (1999), in “Theory of Neotribal Captalism”, points at the various ways in which Maori natives attained legal ownership of land but consequently succumbed to its susceptible capitalization and commodification in strategic ways. Though different in terms of geo-political history, this susceptibility can be understood in the context of the indigenous lands in the Northeast India as well, particularly in the ongoing capitalization and commodification of tribal lands for resource extraction. The seemingly sustainable eco-political modules that aims to hybridize different land ontologies by merging indigenous land-based practices to settler based legal institutions – a situation argued by Burow (2018) as “conceiving of and relating to land, through their own practices and those created by settlers and settler-state institutions” (p.57) – is only begetting a new set of class structure within the indigenous populace. The gradual development of neo-tribal capitalism, that benefits a select few, may be seen as the most violent shift in tribal land ethics. In the wake of the neo-capitalist propagations, as revealed by Binita Kakati (2021), there have been constant alterations to the landscape in the aftermath of the so-called developments:

the valley rang with the sound of explosions – to make new roads into the valley. As we sat listening to birdsong and people’s stories, the deafening explosion felt even louder in the knowledge that nature seems to exist only to be taken. (Kakat, 2021, para 13)

Critiquing the connection between domination of nature and domination of women, Roger King argues that “the failures of moral perception and thought that can be found in the human relation to nature are symptomatic of similar failures to be found in the relations between women and men” (King, 1991, p. 75). While Dai’s The Legends of Pensam traverses towards the agency of ‘change’, Kire actively engages in critiquing the liminalities in this transition. Often invoking gendered codes hidden within the narratives of tribal culture, especially those that deal with the integration of women and nature, tied to their “umbilical chords” (p. 88). Women’s body and the physical manifestation of nature continue to be a recurrent site of resistance to essentialized feminine biologism. This integration is manifested under the traits of procreation and nurture as feminine strength versus feminine ‘essentialism’. In When the River Sleeps (2014) Ville lingers in the comfort of Earth as “mother” (p. 102), “the forest” his “wife” while at the same time the Kirhupfumia stands as antithetical to the conventional notion of motherhood, destined to “never have children” (p. 147) and the “widow-women” (p. 101) guards the river “shouting curses on the two men” (p. 104) for violating the sleeping river. Kire, thus, challenges the notions of feminine essentialism and attempts to break down the essentialized connection of women and nature, affixed in feminine biologism of reproduction and nurture, de-aligning biology as the overseer of women’s lives but social relations (Beauvoir, 2011). Indigenous women’s writings, as also in the works of Dai, tussle against biologic instrumentality of women “like a fermented bean/ left to procreate” (Reena, 2021, p. 45) and the replicating capitalized treatment of nature as an instrumental resource than an inherent being. This idiomatic interconnection of women’s experience to nature and species has been infamously criticized as anti-feminist by feminist scholars, for further grounding the assumed subsidiary position of women and nature to men.

Questioning the pan-cultural tendencies of women’s association to nature, in her article “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture”, Sherry B. Ortner (1974) highlights three ideological categories/tendencies that strengthen the supposed connection of nature and women: 1. Woman’s physiology, seen as closer to nature, 2. Woman’s social role, seen as closer to nature, 3. Woman’s psyche, seen as closer to nature (p. 74-81). Ortner critiques this logic of culture” (p.76) that places women as subordinate to men due to their assumed closeness to nature. However, in the context of Native women’s experience, the association between nature and humans cannot be negated. Nativity is innately linked to land, and indigenous ontologies are derived from and for it. This focus is crucial to dissect as well as identify normative regulations governing indigenous experiences that need to be reevaluated, not with the seee purpose of drawing a relationship between the two but to critique and understand its socio-cultural implications. In her photo-essay-poetry, “No Questions, No Comparisons”, Padu (2021) engages in this dialogue of dissimilarity in women’s experience through her inability to “compare myself with the women who have fought for equal rights and equal wages around the world” (p. 112), explaining women’s emancipatory hurdles arising in different cultural expressions – “I am weighed in numbers of cattle rather than gold” (p. 114). This difference in cultural expression may or may not be a dividing factor in universal concerns about womanhood, but acknowledging indigenous women’s experience is essential to their liberation.

Indigenous Women’s writings echo the ethnopolitical and ecological questions that oust women’s participation in decision making. Karry Padu’s (2021) “I am Property, A Photo essay”, published in Dai’s edited anthology The Inheritance of Words raises questions relevant to Galo women’s political and domestic experience. As it is scarce for women to participate in the public sphere of decision-making, it questions women’s involvement in their “rights under the guidance of a man” (p. 108). Padu confesses her existential ethos on being a “tribal woman” that binds her to “customs and tales of the ancestors” and her expected demeanor as a Galo woman, a “daughter” that “belongs to this land… (who is) its property!” (p.109). This question of ‘belonging to the land as a property’ may take us back to the initial reference made to Leopold’s (1949) criticism of Odysseus who “hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls…The girls were property, the disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong” (p. 201). The locus of Leopold’s argument is in understanding the expediency of human ethics that he argues should begin to extend its ethical periphery to nature. The viability of this reference strikes the most important question, particularly, in the wake of hybridized tribal nationalism, as to how far has women’s identification with land been altered, both in terms of subjectivity and instrumentality. It taps on the inflexibility of tribal hybridized movement, that seems to be melding the best of both worlds – sustainability of indigenous episteme to the progressiveness of transnationalism yet fails to recognize how indigenous women’s emancipatory issues have been placed at the bottom of the various political expediencies of power and policies of land ownership.

One cannot trace to segregate how social narratives of gendered socio-political dynamics came to existence in indigenous communities. Whether colonial capitalism continues to penetrate tribal ethno-politics or has cultural narratives inherently sanctioned men to be leaders and women, like nature, compliant followers. Both Dai and Kire unceasingly borrow from folk narratives and customs to critique these gender relations, synthesizing cultural histories to critique “The laws of birth, life and death …fixed and unchangeable” (Dai, 2006, p. 77). Traditional narratives navigating women’s rendition are thus embedded in archetypal evidence (universal symbols) as a means of identity construction and are redefined for a rational identification with the modern world.

In Gender and Folk Narratives: Theory and Practice (2013), Neelakshi Goswami talks about three areas of concern in the folkloristic literature; firstly, how women have been portrayed, the second one relates to the questions of women’s aesthetics and the third involves how women have been recognized as artists. Folk narratives connected to the heroic tales of clan-heads revolve around legends of warriors who sacrificed their lives for the protection of their clan. These heroes were projected as symbols of protection, bravery, and authority. The feminine traits, however, projected in the tales of goddesses and fairies as deities of harvest, are symbolic of fertility and prosperity. On cultural identity, philosopher William James argues that identity comprises two modes of thoughts—the ‘paradigmatic mode’ (present) and the ‘narrative mode’. And narratives as ‘modes’ constructing identities “provides models of the world” (qted.in Burner, 1986, p. 25).

Archetypal male figures have often been projected as protectors with the burden of social relations and welfare. In Dai’s The Black Hill (2017) this accounts for the public and political participation of Kajinsha and the male heads of other tribes in their fight against the British to protect their land, while Gimur is found to have been actively involved in settling the trajectories of her private life, as her quest being more domestic than political. Kajinsha becomes a martyr of the clan and Gimur’s misery is manifested through the loss of a child and spouse. The matter of concern here is to understand the public-private dichotomy and the traits of bravery and fertility attached to the concerned ‘subjects’. Evidently, the narratives surrounding gender can control resultant ‘gender performativity’, but more importantly, what remains implicit is the interplay of absent narratives in shaping the symbol of the ‘female subject’. Commenting on the importance of “the public/private debate” as an important trajectory of feminist folklore, Margaret Mill argues that “Women genres can be less public and dramatic and hence less visible compared to male genres…especially personal experiences narratives, tend to flourish in the private domain” (qtd. in Goswami, 2013, p. 7).  The lack of ethnographic narratives that would articulate the possibility of juxtaposing traits of bravery, protection, or public participation to ‘female subject’, makes it nearly impossible for Gimur to be projected as equal to Kajinsha in the public arrangement. What governs Gimur’s character is not evident in what was present in an ancestral past but in the absences and lapses in feminine representation that continue to control and govern the ‘feminine subject’. The “subject” of gender as sites of inquiry ignites numerous questions pertaining to identifying what the subjects signify. “The idea of ‘process’ or ‘becoming’” (Salih, 2007, p. 3) is significantly crucial in understanding subject formation which situates key importance on history to recognize the synthesizers that regulate it (Butler, 2006). Dai’s writings investigate how elements of culture operate and regulate the functioning of the social structure.

The significance of narratives in identity formation as asserted by Burner, is in understanding how “human being achieves (or realizes) the ability not only to mark what is culturally canonical but to account for deviations that can be incorporated in narratives” (Burner, 1987, p. 68). This deviation, found in the critique of fixed cultural edifices, forms an important agency in Indigenous Women’s Writings. The emancipation of ‘self’ combines elements of cultural memory, and socio-political resistance while attempting to identify the codified cultural fetters. This posits, as mentioned earlier, the urgency to theorize a native-feminist discourse that acknowledges ‘experiences’ shaped in lieu of traditional ontologies. Indigenous women’s emancipation can only be achieved by rethinking ‘community’. To rethink the gendered connection to the land and the indigene towards formulating a tribal nationalism, can effectively mark the possibility of distancing from the western notion of tribal sovereignty. This would require building on the “native philosophical concept” of interdependency, as argued by Ramirez, “rather than creating a hierarchy between the group and individual rights, that a respectful interchange between the two can be established” (2007, p. 31).

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

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Karyir Riba is a Research Scholar in the Department of English at the North-eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya. She specialises in interdisciplinary and comparative literary studies. Her area of research and interest include Folk Literature, Indigenous Women’s Writings, and contemporary discourses on Indigenous Studies.

Image of Woman in Indonesian Folktales: Selected Stories from the Eastern Indonesian Region 

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Sugiarti1, Eggy Fajar Andalas2 & Aditya Dwi Putra Bhakti3

1Department of Indonesian Language Education, University of Muhammadiyah Malang, Indonesia, sugiarti@umm.ac.id

2Department of Indonesian Language Education, University of Muhammadiyah Malang, Indonesia, eggy@umm.ac.id

3Department of Communication Science, Faculty of Social and Politic Science, University of Muhammadiyah Malang, Indonesia, aditya@umm.ac.id

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages  https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.12

First published: June 19, 2022 | Area: Gender Studies | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number2, 2022)
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Abstract  

In Indonesia, a folk tale is used as a medium of entertainment as well as a teaching tool for children. Parents read folktales to their children at night. Folktales are used in the text of Indonesian lessons at the elementary education level. However, Indonesian folktale is suspected of being gender-biased. Although there is research on this subject, there is still little research on Indonesian folktales originating from Eastern Indonesia. Previous research conducted is still focused on the western region of Indonesia, for example, Java and Sumatra Island. This study aims to understand how women are depicted in Eastern Indonesian folktales, especially to understand the objectification of female characters. Based on the results of our research, we argue that many female characters in Eastern Indonesian folktales are subject to objectification. The objectification of female figures is carried out in the form of women as objects of sexuality, women as a medium of exchange of power, and women being passive and working in the domestic sphere. This finding shows that the folktale of Eastern Indonesia cannot be separated from patriarchal ideology. These stories show that women in the imagination of the Indonesian people still occupy an inferior position compared to men. Furthermore, the female characters also experience objectification and inequality as in folktales from Western Indonesia. The patriarchal point of view in folktales has deep roots and spreads in Indonesia. Research proves that the ideology of folktale is not always in harmony with the ideal values ??that exist in society. It takes a critical attitude towards the selection of stories that will be conveyed to children

Keywords: Image of Woman, Objectification, Indonesian Folktales, Eastern Indonesian Region

Introduction

According to the Central Statistics Agency of Indonesia (2015), 1331 ethnic groups inhabit the territory of Indonesia, an archipelagic country consisting of various cultures. The cultural heritage of Indonesia is enriched with artifacts produced by these diverse ethnic groups as hinted by the presence of 366 documented folktales in the nation. (Baihaqi et al., 2015) But, in comparison with a large number of ethnic groups, the number of documented folktales is very little. The existence of folktale in a community occupies an important position. A folktale is an ethnographic description of the community that owns the story (Dundes, 1969) because it contains its values and worldview (Andalas, 2018; Aristama et al., 2020; Sulistyorini & Andalas, 2017). For generations, the folktales have been passed down as “cultural treasures” that contain the cultural essence or cultural DNA (Bar Zaken, 2020) of a particular community. In other words, understanding the folktale of a community will gain knowledge and views of the community’s life (Andalas, 2015; Dundes, 1969). These various cultural treasures are passed down between generations and perceived as shared cultural truths.

In Indonesia, a folktale is used as a medium of entertainment as well as a material for teaching to children. Parents’ reading folktales to their children at night and their usage in the text of Indonesian lessons at the elementary education level shows the importance of folktales to the people of Indonesia. However, in reality, various folktales, that are constantly reproduced and consumed in reading books or learning materials in schools, are suspected of being gender biased (Eliyanah & Zahro, 2021). Andalas & Qur’ani (2019) argue that Indonesian folktales have an imbalance in the proportion of characters and a particular stigma is attached to the male or female gender.

Various folktales found throughout the world also contain gender bias as exemplified in Persian folktales where male and female characters are depicted as different-sex objects while men are portrayed as independent, rational, strong, and accomplished characters and women as the opposite (Hosseinpour & Afghari, 2016); the folktales of Sri Lanka which reflect male dominance in the stories (Medawattegedera, 2015). However, there are also examples of exceptional  folktales where the women are not subordinated or subjugated rather heightened as the African folktales which reject or subvert women’s patriarchal control, manipulation, exclusion, and oppression (Florence, 2016; Sheik, 2018); or folktales found in Saudi Arabia present brave and intelligent women (Al-Khalaf, 2019).

The outcomes of previous research intensify the belief that folktale as a form of cultural heritage must be assessed concerning its topic, form, and content as it is related to the children’s acquisition of knowledge. Understanding these parts of folktales is crucial as the pragmatic development at the level of early childhood is not adequate to comprehend the problem of gender bias that is socially and culturally imposed on them.

Studies on gender issues in folktales found in several regions of Indonesia, as in Java (Ariani, 2016; Hapsarani, 2017; Iswara, 2019; Juansah et al., 2021; Rochman, 2015; Sari, 2015; Setiawan et al., 2016; Wulansari, 2020), folktales from Sunda (Fauzar, 2019), folktales from North Sumatra (Baiduri, 2015; Paramita, 2020; Syahrul, 2020), and folktales from Southeast Sulawesi (Putra, 2018) among others, have been carried out. Instead of the research works of a large quantity done on the folktales originating in the Western parts of Indonesia like Java and Sumatra Island, the folktales of Eastern Indonesia have not been observed from scholarly perspectives. So, it has an utmost necessary to do research works on those unsung tales. So, this study aims to throw light on the folktales originating in Eastern Indonesia. This research aims to understand how women are depicted and also objectified in Eastern Indonesian folktales. It is expected that the results of this study can complement the results of previous studies. Understanding this issue will help us reassess the story based on the topic, form, and content because it is related to the acquisition of knowledge that children will receive. This is also important because perceptions at the early stage of children’s growth and development are not suitable for understanding the problems of socially and culturally imposed gender ideology.

Gender Representation in Folktale

Representation is the practice of constructing meaning through signs and language (du Gay et al., 1999; Hall, 2003). From this perspective, language is not understood as a stable thing and will always be tied to the context in which it attends. In everyday life, human beings use language to translate and construct various meanings about various things around them. Various objects that exist around human life are understood as neutral things. However, through human beings’ marking, the meaning of an object is attached by constructing several representations. The meaning attached to an object is not standard but fluid, and can always change according to the context of human development in interpreting things.

Hall (2003) views language as a representational system because, through language, human beings can maintain the dialogue that occurs and allow them to build a culture of shared understanding and interpret the world around them in the same way. Language is a medium that can represent thoughts, ideas, and feelings in a culture. Therefore, representation through language is essential for creating meaning because culture is a battleground for meaning. Through culture, various meanings about things are created and legitimized as a common truth.

As the author’s ideological space, folktale provides dozens of spaces for interpretation and hypnotizes his readers to unconsciously participate in the ideological flow contained in literary works (Sugiarti & Andalas, 2018). This is because the process of reproducing literary works is not isolated from the cultural, political, and social context of a society and, in turn, will shape the worldview of writers, readers, and the audience (Arimbi, 2009). In the context of this research, a folktale becomes a space for the representation of gender construction from the perspective of Indonesian society. The various divisions of roles inherent in each character, regarding how to be a man and a woman, are a form of representation of the ideology of gender in Indonesian society. These various ideologies are embodied in literary fiction spaces that the readers will receive.

Through the representational system built-in folktale, the identity to be a woman or a man is built. Identity, in the study of feminism, is not understood as a singular thing. Identity is the result of the construction of individuals or groups in the self-labeling process. Gender, from the point of view of feminism, is seen as the result of socio-cultural construction prevailing in a society. Therefore, the gender identity attached to the roles that men and women must carry out in human life is the result of human construction and is not innate. Therefore, gender identity is a political matter. The identity construction process does not occur in a single or causal process at the subject’s will but is a temporal process that operates through the repetition of norms (Butler, 1993).

In this identity politics, feminism is positioned to attack the traditional identities attached to women based on traditional norms built from the point of view of men’s minds. Women are invited to build awareness of their identity by understanding it as a flexible thing (plural) and not like what men have attached to it (Lara, 1998).

Apart from this, space and time also significantly influence the process of identity formation. Different moments will create different identity narratives, and different environments build different historical perspectives (Arimbi, 2009). In this context, it is crucial to understand the form of gender identity built in the narrative of Indonesian folktales.

Female Objectification

The existence of folktale as a cultural product of society cannot be perceived as a value-free cultural product. Folktale as a cultural product is ideological. A folktale is constructed based on a particular point of view. Within this framework of thought, feminist criticism aims to weaken oppression against women from economic, political, social, and psychological perspectives.

The perpetuation of operations against women on cultural products, such as folktales, is carried out by using the male point of view in seeing the reality of life. This point of view then seems to be seen as neutral and inclusive even though it is not neutral and inclusive because it tends to objectify women (Hapsarani, 2017).

Objectification theory argues that women experience sexual objectification when they are treated as body parts or a collection of body parts judged on their benefit to others  (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Sexual objectification is a form of dehumanization because women are seen as objects or commodities (Nussbaum, 1995). Women are treated as objects which do not have complete power over their destiny and can be bought or sold without considering their experiences and feelings. This shows that sexuality and sexual relations are born by asymmetric power structures.

Seven conditions indicate the occurrence of objectification in a person: 1) if someone is treated as a tool to fulfill goals, 2) if someone is treated as a person who cannot determine his wishes, 3) if someone is treated as a person who has no agency, 4) if someone is treated as if they could be exchanged with other objects, 5) if someone is treated as an object that can be hurt, 6) if someone is treated as something that can be owned, and 7) if a person’s feelings and experiences are considered unimportant (Nussbaum, 1995). These indicate the occurrence of objectification in building subject-object relationships.

Based on the opinion above, it appears that the various descriptions in Indonesian folktales need to be evaluated in the framework of gender studies. Various representations of the objectification of women in stories are indeed very dangerous, especially when children consume folktales. Sexual objectification is the beginning of the emergence of sexual violence, which has significant consequences on one’s understanding and perspective on sexual violence (Loughnan et al., 2013). When a person sexually objectifies another person, he will perceive that that party is lower than himself. The perception of women as objects of men, especially in terms of sexuality, is very dangerous for children’s understanding of gender. Women are only seen as objects or commodities.

Impact of Gender Biased Reading Materials on Children

In contrast to sex, gender is a trait that is attached to human beings based on their socio-cultural roles in society. Throughout the history of the development of human life, there have been situations of injustice in the position and roles of women in various spheres of human life. Women tend to be positioned as inferiors who must submit to the superiority of men who dominate human life (Bourdieu, 2001).

As a fundamental dimension in understanding social life individually, gender becomes a tool for self-awareness in responding to and understanding various phenomena around them. In addition, gender awareness also influences how human interactions may be held as a worldview from birth to death (Taylor, 2003). Therefore, a person is never born with a particular gender but with the freedom to determine the roles and positions they want in their lives.

Childhood is a crucial period that will affect the way of life until adulthood. This stage is the initial stage for children to learn to understand various realities and respond to them. Through reading materials or fairy tales that they consume every day, children will get information on attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors that they will emulate and apply in their lives. In this position, it is crucial to be aware of the stereotypes that are widely practiced by patriarchal cultures regarding how men and women should play their roles in life. If children are presented with gender-biased stories from an early age, this will affect how children perceive various things in their future lives.

Various forms of ideology and teachings, both explicit and implicit, exist in literary works created from a patriarchal point of view and continue to be studied and shared in each generation. As a result of this kind of consumption, children will perceive various things in the story as a truth stored in their subconscious, and unconsciously will become their guide in interacting and behaving with their environment in the future. If this continues, children from an early age will begin to perceive biased gender roles in memory even though they cannot discriminate between men and women sexually (Bussey & Banddura, 1992). This is despite the view that, in reality, children feel that they have to identify themselves sexually, as male or female. If this is allowed to continue, there will be efforts to perpetuate patriarchal culture to limit the various roles of women from an early age and limit children’s social processes in the later years of development (McDonald, 2010).

Method

This study uses a qualitative method and the feminist literary criticism approach. Sources of research data are Indonesian folktales originating from Eastern Indonesia, namely 1) “The Legend of Ile Mauraja from East Nusa Tenggara”, 2) “The Origin of Lake Limboto from Gorontalo”, 3) “The Origin of Botu Liodu Lei Lahilote from Gorontalo”, 4) “La Upe from South Sulawesi”, 5) “Sawerigading from South Sulawesi”, 6) “La Onto-Ontolu from Southeast Sulawesi”, 7) “Indara Pitaraa and Siraapare from Southeast Sulawesi”, 8) “The Legend of the Horn of Nature from Central Sulawesi”, 9) “Napombalu from North Sulawesi”, 10) “Alamona n ‘Tautama n’Taloda (First Man in the Talaud Islands) from North Sulawesi”, and 11) “Four Sultans in North Maluku from Maluku”. The eleven stories have been accessed from the documentation done by www.ceritarakyatnusantara.com. This website is one of the complete databases for the preservation of folktales. The stories on the website are managed by the Center for the Study and Development of Malay Culture, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The selected eleven stories fulfill the following criteria:  1) The stories come from the eastern part of Indonesia; 2) there are female characters in the story; 3) there is a depiction of the role of female characters in it. The eleven stories are analyzed using content analysis techniques with a feminist perspective to criticize how women are depicted in folktales in Eastern Indonesia.

Results and Discussion

This study aims to describe the representation of female characters in Eastern Indonesian folktales, especially the objectification of female characters. The data shows three forms of the objectification of female figures: women as objects of male sexuality, women as a medium of exchange of power, and women who are passive and work in the domestic area.

Women as Objects of Male Sexuality

Objectification theory argues that women experience sexual objectification when they are treated as body parts or a collection of body parts judged on their benefit to others (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Sexual objectification is a form of dehumanization because women are seen as objects, or commodities (Nussbaum, 1995). Women are treated as objects which do not have complete power over their destiny and that can be bought or sold without considering their experiences and feelings. This shows that sexuality and sexual relations are born by asymmetric power structures.

In Eastern Indonesian folktale, it is found that the story is not neutral, and it tends to be inclusive because the depiction in the story tends to objectify women. In the eleven stories analyzed, this depiction was found in eight stories, namely “The Legend of Ile Mauraja from East Nusa Tenggara”, “The Origin of Lake Limboto from Gorontalo”, “The Origin of Botu Liodu Lei Lahilote from Gorontalo”, “La Upe from South Sulawesi”, “Sawerigading from South Sulawesi”, “Napombalu from North Sulawesi”, “Alamona n’Tautama n’Taloda (First Man in the Talaud Islands) from North Sulawesi”, and “The Four Sultans in North Maluku from Maluku”.

The representation of women as objects of sexuality in the stories like “The Legend of Ile Mauraja”, “The Origin of Botu Liodu Lei Lahilote”, “The Origin of Limboto Lake”, “Alamona n’Tautama n’Taloda” (First Man in the Talaud Islands), and “The Four Sultans in North Maluku” show similar motifs. These five stories have the same motive; they begin with a male character who accidentally sees seven beautiful women taking a bath. Girls are depicted as half-human beings, such as angels or other creatures. The male character then peeks at seven girls who are bathing and decides to steal a wing or other object that causes one of the youngest nymphs not to return to heaven. The girl is then married to a male character to have a child. However, the ending is not happy because someone will always separate them; whether they die or one of the characters (female) finds the object or wing and leaves the man. At the end of the story, a different motif is found in the Origin of Lake Limboto because women defeat male characters with their supernatural powers.

In “The Legend of Ile Mauraja” from East Nusa Tenggara, for example, it is told that one day a king who was looking for a goat got lost and entered a cave. However, he accidentally saw seven girls bathing in a river from the cave. He was fascinated and wanted to marry one of them. He took one of the garments and hid it in a tree hole. The clothes belonged to the youngest. They got married, but fateful fate made them burn to death (Samsuni, 2011c). The original story of Botu Liodu Lei Lahilote from Gorontalo also tells the same thing. However, in this story, the main character is a young man named Lahilote. One day Lahilote accidentally peeked and was fascinated by seven nymphs who were bathing in the lake. Lahilote then took one of the wings of the seven nymphs and hid it in the house. It made her unable to return to heaven. Lahilote comes back and pretends to help him. Long story short, Lahilote married the youngest angel and lived in harmony until finally the youngest angel who had been tricked found her wings hidden by Lahilote and returned to heaven (Samsuni, 2009a). The same story of the Origin of Botu Liodu Lei Lahilote is also found in the story of Alamona n’Tautama n’Taloda (The First Man in the Talaud Islands) (Samsuni, 2010a), dan and the Four Sultans in North (Samsuni, 2010b). The thing that distinguishes the story of the Four Sultans in North Maluku is that the object stolen by the male character is a shawl.

The above four stories refer to the same scene, namely the desire of men to have women in the wrong way. They want to have women based on their physical image, which is beautiful. The objectification of the women in the story is practiced as women are treated as body parts or bodies that are only judged based on their utility. In the story, the description of the objectification of the female body is illustrated through the narrative and dialogue as found in the following Legend of Ile Mauraja:

How surprised he was when he saw seven beautiful girls bathing in the river in the cave.

“Oh… how beautiful those girls are!” murmured the King’s with admiration.

Seeing the beauty of the girls came his intention to marry one of them. So, he secretly took one of the clothes from the girl that was placed on the river bank. Then he hid the clothes in a tree hole. (Samsuni, 2011c).

In the data above, women are objectified for their physical beauty. Similar representations are also found in other stories. In the original story of Botu Liodu, Lei Lahilote is described as “He then hid behind a big tree, then peeked out to check on the situation…He watched their every move without blinking an inch. The handsome young man was fascinated by the beauty of the girls.” (Samsuni, 2009a) likewise in the stories of Alamona n’Tautama n’Taloda (The First Man in the Talaud Islands) and the Four Sultans in North Maluku. The woman in the story lives in a culture that places her body to be looked at, judged, and objectified (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). In fact, in the stories, “Alamona n’Tautama n’Taloda” (First Man in the Talaud Islands) and “The Origin of Lake Limboto”, expressions of exploitation of the female body are described in a more vulgar way. In the story, “Alamona n’Tautama n’Taloda” (First Man in the Talaud Islands), verbal expression is expressed by “from behind the phone, he then observes the movements of the angels who are taking a bath. Wow, this is a really amazing sight. How beautiful those women are,” murmured the Crab Man in admiration.” (Samsuni, 2010a). Likewise in “The Origin of Lake Limboto”, which is “from behind the tree, he watched the seven nymphs bathing until their eyes did not blink a bit.” (Samsuni, 2009b).

In La Upe, Sawerigading, and Napombalu stories, female characters are visually exploited by male characters through their physical beauty (Samsuni, 2009c, 2009e, 2009d). Unlike the four stories above, in these three stories, the exploitation of women’s bodies is expressed in the admiration of the female characters’ physical appearance by the male characters. Through the description of physical beauty, the male’s sexual desire is displayed. This picture needs to be taken seriously because the representation of women’s bodies and the desire for male domination over women’s bodies need to be viewed as social practices (Goffman, 1971) and systems of power (Laqueur, 1990). This picture, at the same time, confirms the dominance of men over women (Bourdieu, 2001). Women become weak figures who are displayed more with just their physical aspect. The depiction of female intellectuals as human figures is not found in the story. Various descriptions found regarding the objectification of women in Eastern Indonesian folktales are in line with research findings on Western Indonesian folktales (Baiduri, 2015; Fauzar, 2019; Hapsarani, 2017; Iswara, 2019; Juansah et al., 2021). Women in folktales in the region also experience sexual discrimination in the form of objectification. The female characters in folktales tend to be passive, and the beauty aspect is the main attraction for male characters to get female characters. In addition, women become objects, especially of the sexuality of male characters.

Various representations of the objectification of women in stories are indeed very dangerous, especially when children consume folktales. Sexual objectification is the beginning of the emergence of sexual violence and it has significant consequences on one’s understanding and perspective on sexual violence  (Loughnan et al., 2013). When a person sexually objectifies another person, he will perceive that that party is lower than himself. The perception of women as objects of men, especially in terms of sexuality, is very dangerous for children’s understanding of gender. Women are only seen as objects or commodities.

Women as an Exchange of Power

Women are objectified when they are seen or treated by others as objects(Nussbaum, 1995). Objectification works through the experience of treating a body that is judged in terms of its usefulness for (or consumption by) others (Hapsarani, 2017). In the folktales of Eastern Indonesia, two stories describe female characters as a medium of exchange of power. The two stories are “Sawerigading” from South Sulawesi and “Indara Pitaraa and Siraapare” from Southeast Sulawesi. This depiction cannot be separated from the use of the background of events during the royal period. In the story of “Sawerigading”, the princess of the Chinese kingdom was used by her father to strengthen the ties of brotherhood with the kingdom of South Sulawesi. Putri does not have a role in participating in making choices in her life for the power of male characters (Samsuni, 2009e). Likewise, in the story of “Indara Pitaraa and Siraapare”, the king’s daughter became a gift for Indara Pitaara for helping to kill a giant snake. Putri has no power over her destiny and choices for the sake of perpetuating the king’s power in this region (Samsuni, 2011a).

The objectification of women as a medium of exchange of power in both of the stories occurs because women do not have the power to make decisions. In both the stories as well as in almost many folktales from Indonesia, women are depicted as passive beings who do not have the power to have opinions or make decisions (Toha-Sarumpaet, 2010). The depiction in folktale almost entirely depicts decisions made by men. This condition has implications for the emergence of constructions regarding the nature that a woman must possess. A good woman is a woman who obeys the decisions of men. However, in the folktale above, the passivity of women causes them to become objects for the medium of exchange of power. Women become commodities for men’s interests in perpetuating their power.

Women are Passive and Work in Domestic Areas

One of the methods of objectification of women is identifying a person based on his body or body parts (Langton, 2009). In Eastern Indonesian folktales, some depictions limit women’s space based on identifying their physical condition. The female characters in the story are described as having only access to the domestic area. Women occupy a passive role and obey the male characters. This is because women are depicted as physically weak characters and need men as their protectors.

In most of the stories, female characters are only described as having access to the domestic sphere. The female characters are tasked with taking care of household needs. In the story of La Onto-Ontolu, by the female character, Grandma, everything that deals with the kitchen area is done (Samsuni, 2011b). The grandmother figure is a representation of the depiction of the role of women in this region. Likewise, in the story of Indara Pitaraa and Siraapare, the mother character is depicted as the person who is responsible for the kitchen to meet the food needs of her children. Unlike the female characters, the male characters have access to get out of the domestic area. They have to work outside and even have access to leave the village to earn a living (Samsuni, 2011a).

The data shows that in the folktale of Eastern Indonesia, women are also described as being more dominant in the domestic sector. This picture is in line with the research findings conducted by  Zahro et al., (2020), which state that in Indonesian folktales, female characters tend to maximize their potential in the domestic sector and ignore broader competencies. Moon & Nesi (2020), in their research on fairy tales from East Nusa Tenggara, also found that women have more roles in the domestic area. Women rarely appear in public. This means that the images of women in folktales, both in the Western and Eastern regions of Indonesia, tend to represent women’s roles in the domestic sphere.

The placement of women’s positions only in the domestic area is closely related to how men perceive women’s physical strength. Many female characters in Eastern Indonesian folktales depict women as passive beings who have no will. Characters are treated as individuals who do not have the autonomy or ability to determine their desires (Nussbaum, 1995). For example, in the story of La Onto-Ontolu, the character Putri Bungsu must obey her husband’s invitation to leave her family at the palace (Samsuni, 2011b). The female character is described as a good figure if she follows her husband’s decision.

This picture shows the position of women in the family. A man is the head of the family as well as the protector of his wife and children. This construction influences how men view women’s position as weak creatures who only need to work at home and wait for the results of men’s hard work.

Women’s domestic roles and passivity are in contrast with the more dominant characteristics of men. Men have a much stronger physical body and can protect women. This depiction is emphasized in the Legend of the Horn of Alam story as a male character who comes to save a female character from being kidnapped (Samsuni, 2019). Similar stories are also found in several other stories. In this construction, men become patrons for women who nurture and protect.

Conclusion

This study aims to understand how women are depicted in Eastern Indonesian folktales. This understanding is mainly related to the objectification of female figures. Based on the analysis conducted on eleven folktales, it is found that many female characters in Eastern Indonesian folktales are subject to objectification. The objectification of female figures is carried out in the form of women as objects of sexuality, as a medium of exchange of power, and as being passive and working in the domestic sphere. This finding shows that the folktale of Eastern Indonesia cannot be separated from patriarchal ideology. These stories show that women in the imagination of the Indonesian people still occupy an inferior position compared to men. Furthermore, the female characters also experience objectification and inequality as found in the folktales of Western Indonesia. The patriarchal point of view in the folktales has deep roots and spreads in Indonesia. Research proves that the ideology of folktale is not always in harmony with the ideal values ??that exist in society. It takes a critical attitude towards the selection of stories that will be conveyed to children.

Declaration of Conflicts of Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding
The authors would like to thank the Directorate of Research and Community Service – Directorate General of Research and Development Strengthening – Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education of the Republic of Indonesia for funding this research.

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