What makes a ‘woman’?

Sexualitiesedited by Nivedita MenonWomen Unlimited, 2007.Just before the start of the Seventh National Conference of Women's Movements, held in September last year in Calcutta, the organising committee was forced to wrestle with a new question. In and of itself, this process was nothing new. Such conferences have long been voluntary efforts, organised by women's groups for women, and every preparation process sees debates on what exactly constitutes a women's group: is the criterion women members only, or is it women's leadership, or is it a focus on women's issues? While such discussions have led to a realisation of the complexities around various feminist ideologies and attempts to organise women, at the September meeting a seemingly basic question was finally discussed: Who is a 'woman'? And, can those who identify as 'female' but are not biologically female take part in the conference?.For a movement that, just a decade and a half ago, had been struggling with issues of whether same-sex desire was 'natural', and whether lesbian-women's issues should be considered a priority, this was a huge shift. For the first time, discussions within women's movements had moved towards a more realistic and nuanced understanding of genders and sexualities, in the plural..In such a context, it is apt that one of the volumes in Women Unlimited's "Contemporary Issues in Indian Feminism" series should, finally, be titled Sexualities. It is also refreshing to see that some of the complexities with which the women's movement and women's-studies scholars are currently grappling have found space in the volume, edited by Nivedita Menon. Having long talked about sexuality within the framework of sexual violence, recent challenges to women's movements and feminist theories have come from 'transgressive' and marginalised sexualities. The simple fact that Menon's volume focuses on these challenges, highlighting the various voices for expression of desire, is in itself one of the most significant contributions made by any book on sexualities published today.. Moving beyond earlier feminist writings on the issue, Menon has put together a collection that dwells less on the construction of sexualities, and more on the complex articulations of 'desire'. The book is divided into five sections: Counter-hegemonies, Caste and Sexuality, Masculinities, Pleasure and Desire, and Campaign Documents. The last is an important archive of some 11 documents from various movements, which contextualise the academic postulates of some of the preceding essays. These campaign documents also help Sexualities live up to its promise to cover "a broad area characterised as 'transgressive', whether in terms of normative sexual practices or in terms of academic disciplinary boundaries".. Indeed, most of the writings in this book are explorations of transgressive sexualities – of expressions of sexuality and desire that transgress the prescriptive institutions of marriage, family and heterosexual desire. Tarun, a law student, looks at "Heteronormativity in National Law School in Bangalore", one of India's more progressive campuses. He examines both the obvious and subtle ways in which the campus has supported dominant sexualities, yet simultaneously created space for queer activism. Along similar lines, the Masculinities section includes a piece by Lawrence Cohen that studies the secret literature that circulates in Benaras during Holi. Cohen analyses a range of pulp pamphlets containing cartoons, poems and photographs, all of which can be termed obscene, but which are centred around the dilemma of the ordinary (invariably male) political subject. "In recounting how men desire the bodies of other men and women," Cohen writes, "[this literature] offers a form of political satire".. India's emerging queer movements are represented in two articles, each of which places emphasis on the particular cultural and political location of these within parallel transnational movements. Arvind Narrain discusses the possibilities and limitations of queer struggles around law, both inside the court and outside, in terms of generating debate and challenging the mainstream. At the same time, Paola Bacchetta discusses how transnational queer politics needs to look at the various ways in which 'local' spaces have defined queerness, and the self-reflection needed to retain this variation – rather than at the fear of effacement that currently seems to be the norm. To illustrate this, she looks particularly at lesbian and 'lesbian' (referring to women who love women but do not identify with the term lesbian) movements in Delhi during the 1980s, thus countering the belief of those, particularly US-based academics, who presume that queer organising in India was a pheno-menon of the 1990s.. Heterosexuality as norm In Sexualities, one of Menon's constant concerns is that of modernity. She argues that, during the 19th century, "two opposed tendencies – British colonial interventions and the emergence of the Indian nation – flowed together to produce the same effect, that of erasing homoeroticism and 'naturalising' heterosexuality in India." This is a difficult argument, because while criticising this notion of modernity, Menon constantly battles the dominant rightwing discourse that derides modernity and paints a picture of an idyllic past. Menon establishes her critique of modernity distinct from the right wing, and is also able to give a critical modern context to the present-day progressive resistance movements.. Fernando Franco, Jyotsna Macwan and Suguna Ramnathan's article, in the Caste and Sexuality section, further challenges the creation of a hegemonic discourse. Looking at the lives of Dalit women from the Vankar, Bhangi and Koli-Patel communities in Gujarat, the writers argue that these women experience sexuality and motherhood differently from, and have more autonomy than, the upper castes. While the rituals around marriage and childbirth in these communities are becoming increasingly Brahminical, desire and women's control over their bodies exhibit a non-Brahminical core. Within this, the women are able to bend the norms of caste, exploring relationships outside of marriage and with men of the upper castes. Without downplaying the possibly exploitative nature of these interactions, the researchers read these experiences as women's autonomous choices.. A similar concern is underlined in Radhika Chopra's study of male domestic servants, who "work as women for women". Chopra underlines that the intersection of class, sexuality and gender within the domestic sphere gives a "particular kind of invisibility" to these men. The private domestic space of the home is made public as the workplace, and also becomes a place where the gender identities of these men are muted to "enable cross-sex and cross-class interactions between male worker and female employee" – thus, the authors say, creating new forms of masculinity.. Modernity created a particular understanding of sexuality, within which the norms of upper castes and classes defined desire and pleasure. In contrast to these broad definitions are the multiple other voices, some of which are recorded here in the section on Pleasure and Desire. These include J Devika's analysis of desire as expressed in the Malayalam writer Lalitambika Antarjanam's works, as well a translation of one Antarjanam's writings. Prem Chowdhry's interesting analysis of women's songs (songs by women sung specifically for women listeners) establishes the potential for various kinds of transgression through music. Chowdhry finds that such songs portray an image of lustful women at odds with the imposed image of a chaste woman, and also distinct from the lustful woman depicted in many male songs.. In the same section, Radhika Chandiramani documents the experiences of a phone helpline, attempting to add the words safety and pleasure to the lexicon of sex. She builds a case for creating language and space to talk of both pleasure and safety of self and others in sexual interactions, instead of making them appear in direct contradiction. Georgina L Maddox adds a playful account of breaking the norms of gender through drag, and the pleasures of the transgression. Yet, although this is an important section of the book in terms of its conceptualisation, the editor's selections do not truly represent the spectrum of women's expressions of desire.. Redefining gender In any society, at any time, sexuality and gender are both continuously created and recreated. And, thus, we return to one of the most significant challenges to present-day feminisms and women's movements: How does one define the political category 'woman'? This term, after all, is not defined by biology alone. In Southasia, for instance, it makes sense only when the complicated interrelations of gender with class, caste and community are included. Sexualities successfully adds another dimension to this complex mesh of understanding on gender, that of what can be called 'heteronormativity' – the understanding that gender cannot be understood (and, ultimately, challenged) without questioning the norms of both compulsory heterosexuality and binary gender.. The transsexual-rights movement poses a major test for women's movements, in attempting to incorporate counter-heteronormativity as the third axis in defining 'woman'. In Sexualities, Ashwini Sukhthankar subsequently foregrounds the voices of two transsexual activists, Famila and Satya, to serve as a counterpoint to the classic feminist position that sex-reassignment surgery reifies the rigid definitions of gender. Yet Sukhtankar's article is rather dated, since transsexual people have a much stronger presence and voice today, and the feminist debates around gender have also seen many more-complex discussions.. In her own article on the debate surrounding hijras standing for election to seats reserved for women, Nivedita Menon manages to articulate some of the complexity in the process of trying to answer what makes a 'woman'. The heterosexual, patriarchal family based on marriage produces and shapes citizenship. That a critique of marriage and nation state is vital to queer and feminist politics is one of the most crucial issues that Menon raises. She suggests that any radical transformative set of politics needs to be post-national: "Its politics can be represented by any idea that is counter-hegemonic, whether that hegemony refers to development, sexuality, caste/community, or any other." Indeed, some of these ideas have been widely discussed and written about within women's movements, and inclusion of some of those could have made Sexualities more complete.. There are other notable issues that have not been included in this volume, which the editor is at pains to explain was done on purpose. Better known and more widely available articles, for instance, were not chosen. Though sex work and censorship are important aspects of any discussion on sexuality, they too were left out, as separate volumes in the same series have been proposed to tackle these issues. Finally, disability and sexuality in the Southasian context has been entirely neglected in this work, apparently due to a dearth of current material. Although Menon's pieces in this work offer many new ideas, it seems that the selection of papers does not fully reflect the intricate debates within the region's feminist and queer movements. Inclusion of more campaign material from the past few years might have added some perspective, as well as hinted at some nuances, to make up for some of the lack in complexity of the academic papers in the collection.. Some pieces selected are also dense with academic jargon, which could have done with some whittling down. Apart from differences emerging from individual and positional preferences of style, language and ideas, Sexualities does manage to establish the crucial link between queer and feminist politics, through the common lens of sexualities – thus making it an important contribution to the sexuality and feminism discourses. As Menon rightly notes: "An alliance between feminist and queer politics … has the potential to disrupt official autobiographies of the Nation along all its dimensions."