Manhandle

http://www.kashmirdispatch.com/others/10106313-manhandle-women-kashmir.htm

An ad of men underwear shows some goons in a restaurant teasing a girl and the hero (who is a cook in the restaurant and wears that underwear) comes to rescue the girl in trouble. He beats the men in his cookery style making each of them a recipe. The girl in the end swings into his manly arms saying the he cooks the food well, in response to which the hero, with that teasing tint in the eyes says that he also does home delivery. The ad is interesting in the sense that it depicts the women sexually twice. The goons tease her because they see her as a sex object ready to be exploited but she refuses not because she does not see herself as a sex object rather the approach of those men was not convincing and just after that the hero beats those men, and she swings in his arms and agrees to his home delivery, which of course has sexual connotations. The girl agrees to be taken sexually because the hero passes himself through bravery and by becoming a macho-man. Thus, the ad succeeds in imaging the women sexually twice – in her agreement with the hero as well as in her resistance to those goons. The proliferation of such images or the ‘feminine mystique’[1] as Betty Friedan calls them in her eponymous book, is enormous in movies, commercials, T.V. soaps, and sitcoms. These images are not new as such. They have existed in our society even before the boon of infotainment. Women in literature (with due exceptions) have been rendered through pornoglossia – a term that Deborah Cameron uses to describe the language that describes women “purely in terms of their sexual usefulness, availability, or attractiveness to men.”[2]

This pornoglossia, this feminine mystique casts female in the male gaze making them appear, appear passively, and precisely making them appear as passive sexual objects. This is evident in the movie Paranormal Activity. The handler/holder of the movie is a male. The camera is handled by male and it is through his gaze that we see everything and as spectators, we occupy his position, his gaze. It is through him/camera that we see his girlfriend and all the paranormal activities in the house. More precisely the male handled camera makes us, spectators as voyeurs and we indulge in a sort of scopophilia. The camera has been brought in to capture or investigate the paranormal activities but in the process the male gaze/camera tries to capture each and every activity of the female, which more than often are normal. So as a typical voyeuristic cinema, the male/camera investigates the female and through her the complexity of plot is resolved. It is interesting to note that the female does not want to be enframed or made visible in the male gaze/camera. She, most of the times, is irritated and male gaze/camera often threatens her. Thus, in a way, the coming of male gaze/camera enhances the paranormal activities in the female, which come to an end when she kills her husband and gazes right in the camera, on us, spectators and voyeurs. The man-handled camera, the male gaze is the real ghost/demon in the movie.

This patriarch enframing comes significantly in Dibaker Banerjee’s LSD. The three stories which we as audience watch as voyeurs, are enframed and captured in patriarch narratives as well as by the camera held by males. All the three stories become visible to us through male gaze/camera. The first story, a sort of meta-cinema, is a satire or parody of the popular bollywood movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ). The girls in both the movies are the properties of their fathers and while the father of Simran (DDLJ) lets her go with the hero Raj, the girl in LSD elopes with her boyfriend against her father’s wish. It is interesting to see the patriarchal elements hidden in DDLJ which LSD makes explicit. Simran (DDLJ) does not go with Raj unless and until her father tells her to go and Simran of LSD goes against the consent of her father and she is killed by her father and we as part of that patriarch society witness it through the camera.

The second story reveals the feminine mystique and pornoglossia in the most explicit way. It exposes the patriarch view of woman as only a sex object ready to be consumed. The boys in the camera room keep on replaying the recorded shots of women where any sort of intimacy is developed by them.  In the end the girl wholly becomes the victim of male voyeuristic patriarchy, where she is captured by the male in the most intimate and personal moment and then consumed by the same society on mass level through internet.

The third story is the most interesting and different of all. It also has a male camera handler who uses it for good purpose – ‘trying to help a girl’. He hands over the camera to the girl, who has to trap the culprit. But, this sort of sting operation happens with a cost. She uses the camera by fixing it in her revealing dress. Unlike the male who just uses the camera, she has to use her body as the currency to pass as the holder of the camera.

Leaving cinema apart, what is interesting to see is the proliferation of real, private videos and more precisely the sex videos and the handmade videos of the military encounters or the most recent stone pelting videos from Kashmir. The immediate question is why does one feel the need to capture those intimate videos. Are we obsessed and fascinated with recording or is the case reverse, that there is no fascination left in the outside world, so a need to create one. Does it not highlight the point that J. G. Ballard raised in the famous introduction to his cult classic novel Crash:

I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.[3]

To some extent the case is true. The bombardment of sexuality through pornography and fake representation of conflicts/struggles through media, press the individual to throw off this mask of falsity, of fake orgasms and computer generated fake encounters. Individuals who make these videos of sex and stone-pelting, work unconsciously as an artist, in order to create reality that will challenge the otherwise simulated world and it is done by capturing the private sexual acts or by capturing the real situations in which they have participated counter to those representations where they had no role to play and yet were captured. Pornography is an obvious example and in latter case it is mostly media reports or movies. Any bollywood movie about Kashmir has kashmiris as its subjects, yet when they see it they feel it is not them. Given to this situation it becomes necessary for them to create a ‘real’ one of their own and disseminate those videos or images that represent them in their real situations. Thus, a strong proliferation of sex mms’ and videos of encounters/struggles and stone-pelting in last few years.

In a way these videos act as ‘excess’ both in Bataillean as well as Baudrillardiean sense. This ‘excess’ acts as an act of transgression and disruption of the existing simulated reality of mass media.[4] It also is symptomatic of the fact that we have entered the age of simulation and these videos also suggest themselves to be an ‘other’ to the existing mass mediated system.

But even these videos also signify the fact that it is only males who are obsessed and only males who have this fascination of recording as can be observed in the above analyzed two movies. If one takes a look on the recent popular mms scandals form DPS to the latest one in Kashmir, one cannot fail to notice that all of them (with few little exceptions) were captured by males. And a close look into those mms’ will reveal the fact that almost all the males reduce the women to body in their videos. It is obvious how much patriarch they are otherwise they would not have captured these women in the first place. The women in these videos are passive bodies ready to be captured while actively doing what patriarch notions make them to do. But, what is interesting is to note that these males take their patriarch models of framing from pornography itself. They make the women in these videos do exactly what porn movies show them. Thus, it becomes a vicious circle between these individual videos and mass videos.

Same holds true for the stone-pelting videos from Kashmir. The fascination of recording is taken by males as almost all of these videos have been captured by males. Apart from the ‘excess’ element of these videos, what alarms me is the notion that these videos also take the models given to them by patriarchy and mass media (mainly movies and commercials). One of the clips, among many others, that shocked me was where these two boys have been injured badly by Indian military. They are drenched in blood and breathing their last and people are giving them water. The video tries to capture them in this situation, tries to capture their death. The question that was going in my mind was, why a need to capture this? Instead of attending those two boys, why would anyone make a video of them? I just said that this is excess and I was threatened when I remembered a quote from Baudrillard’s Vital Illusions, where he says, “Real is disappearing . . . not because of a lack of it – on the contrary, there is too much of it. It is the excess of reality that puts an end to reality.” [5]

I managed to cool myself off by suggesting that this video could only be captured by a male and what I craved was for a feminine version of this struggle. The guy who was showing me the video added his narration to the video where death for ‘motherland’ was heralded high, while his sister kept her eyes closed through the whole clip. I was craving…

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[1] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (New York: Norton, 2001), p. xv.

[2] Jeremy Hawthorn, A Concise Dictionary of Contemporary Literary Theory, (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 155.

[3] J. G. Ballard, “Introduction” to Crash, (London: Vintage, 1995).

[4] Though in Bataille’s general economy it’s a transgression and disruption of capitalism.

[5]Jean Baudrillard, Vital Illusions, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 65-66.

Different Voices, Different Messages

http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2011/Sep/26/different-voices-different-messages-14.asp

“If men can strip off their clothes”, tells a University professor to a group of research scholars, “why cannot women?” And then he closes his academic lecture with a proclamation with which the audience is satisfied, “This is what Western Feminism strives for. They want women to be naked.” And no doubt this view is popular among most of our scholars. Whenever one discusses Western Feminism with them, the answers range from claiming that it advocates nudity, glamour, fashion (Fashion Shows, where female body is exhibited), and even pornography. This is the popular image of Western Feminism in Kashmir, while a cursory look at the whole tradition of Western feminism proves that this is not the only way to view this endeavor as most of the times the pursuit of Western feminism has been the questioning of these very images and issues.
London Miss World Contest 1970 held at Royal Albert Hall saw various feminists, most notably Laura Mulvey, protesting against the concentration on physical attributes in these beauty contests as the only criterion that defines woman. One remembers the efforts of Andrea Dworkin, whose radical feminism and anti-pornography group fought against the pornography. For Dworkin, these pornographic images celebrate the violence against women and encourage men to eroticize the abuse of women. In her book, Beauty Myth: How Images of Women Are Used Against Women, Noami Wolf criticizes the fashion industries and consumerist mentalities which create the myth of ‘beauty’ to meet their market demands.
By these popular examples I just want to say that Western Feminism is not so monolithic and monotonous as only promoting nudity and porn. Rather it is multi-faceted and dynamic in its approaches. If Feminism is a movement to change the outside world as well as a theory/theories/philosophy trying to question why woman is a woman, if she is a woman, and how she has been constructed and made into an identity and cast into roles through a prioritization of male viewpoints, then there is no doubt that Western Feminism has been able to achieve most of these goals through various feminisms: Marxist and Social Feminism, Psychoanalytic Feminism, Liberal Feminism, radical Feminism, Postcolonial Feminism, postmodern and third Wave Feminism. Among the very influential 20th century feminist theorists include:
Simon de Beauvoir: argues how woman is created, and is created as an ‘other’ in patriarch society.
“One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.”
Luce Iriagaray: explores the construction of female body in phallogocentric systems like Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
“Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters.”
Hélène Cixous: criticizes language as fraught with binary oppositions (where one term is privileged over the other) and stresses feminine writing - écriture féminine.
“Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours. . . . She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. . . . Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible”
Judith Butler: argues that gender as well as sex is constructed discursively.
“. . . gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is 
also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”
Western Feminism is not a woman rejecting to cook, rather a questioning of her role as a Cook. It is not a woman fighting men, rather a critical examination of why she has to raise her voice to make herself audible enough to exist.

26 SEPTEMBER 2011

Power Politics and Kashmir

http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2008/Mar/29/power-politics-and-kashmir-13.asp

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master— that’s all.’
(Lewis Carroll)

The control of language directly leads to power in Foucauldian concept of ‘discourse’, which for him ‘is a strongly bound area of social knowledge, a system of statements within which the world can be known… it is also in such a discourse that speakers and hearers, writers and readers come to an understanding about themselves, their relationship to each other and their place in the world’.
 Discourse thus joins power and knowledge together. ‘Those who have Power have control of what is known and the way it is known, and those who have such knowledge have power over those who do not.’ This discourse is held by groups in power through ‘Ideology’. ‘Ideology is a term developed in Marxist tradition to talk about how cultures are structured in ways that enable the group holding power to have maximum control within minimum of conflict.’
 The discourse writes and constructs YOU, and discourse can be politics as well as art, which studies, analyses and categorizes you. For example as a Kashmiri I am being constructed continuously in Indian movies. In these discourses, I am a dimpled cute village girl, who needs a macho man (like Sunny Deol) to survive or I am a blind helpless girl who needs man -a symbol of power- to survive in an otherwise harsh world. Thus, I am being continuously constructed as a ‘KASHMIRI’, categorized as suffering from ‘Cinderella Syndrome’—where a helpless Cinderella waits for a prince charming to liberate her.
 The ideology is continuously worked on a mass level through commercials, where a new sign-signifier system is created to produce a consumer. A simple sentence, “Tanya’s skin is fair. She is very beautiful”, is a complex sentence. The sentence does not tell a fact but creates it. The sentence maintains that for being beautiful the only thing you need is ‘fair skin’, dismissing all the other crucial categories. Similarly, the television reality shows maintain that stars are attainable and create a ‘false consciousness’ that everybody can become a singer, an actor, a movie or a rock star.
 These false associations – fair skin/beautiful, reality shows/fame, bikes/masculinity, Airtel/Shahrukh Khan and so on – through ‘commodification’ produce ‘conspicuous consumption’. “The attitude of valuing things not for their utility but for their power to impress or for their resale possibilities” is commodification and “the obvious acquisition of things only for their sign value and/or exchange value” is known as conspicuous consumption.
 This commercial system helps the group in power to alter the economy. It leads them from ‘will to truth’ to ‘will to power’. For example, the simple sign of map of Kashmir on Khyber Products especially Milk products helps the company to associate the Khyber products with Kashmir, thus suggesting the truth that it is a true Kashmiri product. Once we accept the truthfulness of the product, we are in direct control of the producers so much so that they give the same product for Rs 12 per litre. And in just last few years, it stealthily rises to Rs 20 per litre, with an increase in the overall market price of other milk and milk products. You cannot question it because the name has been associated with Kashmir and given so much importance that conspicuous consumption is evident.
 Now coming to the crucial question, what is Kashmir? It is a piece of disputed land lying between two powers – both claimers of the land. What is Masla-e-Kashmir? It is a thing to be worked out, out there in the field. Nevertheless, what do we have? We have the power discourses rather language games - Jannat-e-Kashmir, Naya Kashmir, Safar-e-Azaadi, Healing Touch, Peace Process – what I am pointing to is that Kashmir has never been dealt practically, it is a language construct of both pro-Indian and pro-Pakistani groups, which is worked out in every meeting in AC rooms with no solution at all. You cannot question…you cannot challenge. The power is maintained through Ideology. This is not a matter of groups deliberately planning to oppress people or alter their consciousness, but rather a matter of how the dominant institutions in the society work through values, conceptions of the world, and symbol systems in order to legitimize the current order.
 The pro-Pakistani groups, e.g. by itself become pro-Islamic groups because of a fixed symbol system association of Pakistan with Islam. These groups have Pakistan/Islam as their centre and derive their power from it (holding meeting and preaching in Mosques). You cannot challenge…you cannot question…because this trinity: pro-Pakistani groups/Pakistan/Islam, questions your faith before you challenge or question it. I always confront the people who say “you are not a Pakistani; you are not a Muslim”, whenever I challenge the Pakistani support. The same is true of pro-Indian groups where I am materially challenged – “don’t you eat of India, don’t they give you jobs”, whenever I challenge Indian support.
 These ideas orient peoples’ thinking in such a way that they accept the current way of doing things, the current sense of what is ‘natural’, and the current understanding of their roles in the society. This socialization process, the shaping of our cognitive and affective interpretations of our social world, is called by Gramsci, ‘hegemony’, it is carried out, as Althusser writes, by the state ideological apparatuses – by the churches (in our case Masjids and Darul Alooms), the schools, the family, and through cultural forms such as literature (Indian books on Kashmir), music, advertising, sitcoms etc.
 Any Ideology will tend to ‘disappear’ which contradicts it or exposes its repressions. Ideology’s cultural activity will include the construction of pseudo-problems which are given pseudo-solutions, e.g. the highlighting of meetings on Kashmir to such an extent that it seems the problem is solved every time the meetings are held, while every time there is only a “process”. In these meetings language games are played and solved in such a manner as if these issues are really central to our most fundamental human concerns, our moral and mental health, justice and equity for which the world is calling out. And all sorts of social and moral problems get disappeared in the process. Under the totem of “peace process” and “peace talks”, these groups are being exempted of all other significant and vital social and moral issues by us.
 We have to see beyond these meta-narratives or grand-narratives, “to form ourselves as individuals, as against being formed by, and within, the social apparatus”. We are not to fight these grand narratives but simply stop believing in them; in which case they will be assumed to wither away.

29 MARCH 2008