A Rejoinder

Ashley Tellis faults Laxmi Murthy for mischaracterising the history of the feminism and defends the new spaces of liberation feminists of late have created
The tradition of Women's Day is not about symbolism but about working women uniting to fight as women and workers. Nothing about it is obscured in the 'mist of time' (sic). There are very specific records of how March 8 came to be celebrated in the Western world as Women's Day, from the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire protest in the US to peace rallies against WWI in Europe.

'Gender' is not a 'sanitised' term and nor does it take away the reality of women and transgender people bearing the brunt of patriarchy. Indeed, the inclusion of transgender people is a cause of the change in terminology to 'gender,' as is the inclusion of gay men, transvestites, and many other categories, including the category of heterosexual masculinity, premised on the insight that is as much in need of interrogation (indeed perhaps more because it is the hegemonic force) as any other gendered formation. So, the use of gender as a term is precisely to recognise that.

Nothing has taken away the raison d'être of the Women's Day celebration. Murthy conflates very different sites of engagement in her generally anti-academic and anti-intellectual account of feminism. Pitting the mythical common woman against mythical 'others' talking 'about going beyond the category of 'woman' itself' is a ludicrous and unfair conflation of levels of engagement and discourse. Feminists who have urged us to question the category of 'woman' – Judith Butler, Denise Riley, Joan Scott, to name three – are the first to recognise the need to fight on the streets as women and indeed have all fought and continue to fight as feminists and women on the street around various causes. However, they also ask us to philosophically examine the limited and patriarchal conception of 'woman' as category in an attempt to precisely get women to a feminist and more fluid and liberating conception of themselves.

The point of this is not to render the generalisation 'women' meaningless at all but to always be aware of the limits of this category and how it is being employed and by whom. It is to see, in the words of Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, the fact that every aspect of reality in gendered and often in different ways. Therefore, pitting traditional feminists vs. modern or 'doctrinaire' (where are they, by the way?) feminists is an inaccurate and counterproductive way of looking at how feminism has developed.

I am also not sure what the chronology of Murthy's embrace of, and then turnaround from, feminism in South Asia is really based on. South Asia is a vast region. Her examples mainly come from India and this chronology does not hold in India at all. The fact of the matter is that for bulk of women in India, feminism does not really exist. It passed them by, as it passed the government of India by (which can still have under the Women's commission an ad asking people not to kill girl children because they are the mothers of tomorrow!)

No one refuses the symbolism except the anti-feminists. The problem is that for the feminists it has become a case of merely holding on to the symbolism and doing nothing else. Having taught generations of young women for whom feminism means nothing, who do not know that they are in that classroom because their foremothers fought for it, is a chilling reminder that feminism needs to move beyond the symbolic into the real lives of women and intervene as it did when it started out. It is not just the corporate who have hijacked feminism, NGOs have, the state has, everyone has, but only as some symbolic crap. Each have their own appropriated and ineffective version of what feminism is. But the worst tragedy is that for feminists too it is just another symbolic game to be dusted out on March 8 and paraded about.

The feminist lens that Murthy refers to has to become the lens for us all, along with the other lenses of caste, class and many other constitutive elements in South Asian society that we must wear every moment of our lives, not just on March 8.

A very poor article indeed.