Last October, when law student and Dalit feminist Raya Sarkar put up a crowd-sourced list with names of professors in the Indian academia who have been allegedly sexually predatory towards students, it did more than just spark a discussion on sexual harassment and due process. It started a deeply uncomfortable conversation on the very divide in the feminist movements in India in addressing issues of gender politics in the age of the internet.
Recently, an internal complaints committee of the Ambedkar University Delhi found eminent scholar Lawrence Liang, dean of the law faculty (whose name was on the list), guilty of sexual harassment. If one were to read his statement to the committee as reported on The Scroll, it would point to how gendered ‘consent’ continues to be. However, that’s a discussion for another time.
For now, what’s more concerning is the response of prominent feminist and professor Nivedita Menon’s to the same; historicising due process without acknowledging how the law and the state still continue to be deeply patriarchal and misogynistic, invalidating the politics of the “List”, and dissing contemporary feminist practices as uninformed/self-righteous/finger-tip activism.
To me, Menon’s blog brought to fore the widening gap between generations of feminists and their understanding of the evolving ‘means’ to empowerment.
1. Her response plays on various implicit victim-blaming tropes that we use, especially as feminists, without really weighing the implications it can have. Menon has spent a significant number of years of her life theorising feminism and leading important gender-rights movements in India. For someone with that body of work to call out women and men as ‘finger-tip activists’ is a really low blow. Her constant attempt at distancing India’s feminist movement/practice from ‘finger-tip activism’ is alienating, and the assumption of the internet public as uninformed, unaware and incapable of ‘owning’ their voice is extremely problematic.
Those of us who came out to share our horrid, traumatic and coerced sexual encounters on social media know how hateful that space can be. Sexual harassment is now served to most of us on Facebook comments, and Instagram inbox requests. When women talk online, it’s not as simple as typing words on a keyboard. It’s putting out a narrative for the world to scrutinise, opine and judge, and most often, de-legitimise. At a time when the internet is becoming so obviously polarised, #MeToo symbolises a solidarity of people to call out the misogyny most of us live. It was a movement to call out power, not just of gender, but of the multitude of identities that accompany masculinity.
It was also a cry for fixing the due process, that either failed some of us or doesn’t exist for most of us (as in with child sexual assault). The individual act of people speaking out is the testament of a larger feminist ‘practice’ of breaking the silence. Each individual act contributed to making the #MeToo ‘movement’ as we know it today.
I think, making clear the difference between movement and practice, especially in this particular instance, is useful.
Once we acknowledge that, one will see how radical the act of speaking out in the context of the #MeToo movement is. Finger-tip activism, in that sense, is radical. The ability of women to come out to voice themselves in spaces they occupy actively de-legitimises them as a body and mind and is radical. And the “List” is part of the same radical ‘practice’ of calling out abuse in even ‘apparently’ feminist and egalitarian spaces. It’s not a fetish, as Menon refers to it. It’s what re-claiming politics looks like.
Due process for sexual harassment, on the other hand, has itself been a feminist intervention. There is no denying it. I think it would be wrong to assume that people who put out testimonies in the public do so only because due process fails. For a lot of us, in extremely imbalanced power structures of gender, class, caste, age and education, speaking out is itself a radical act. It’s not so much to denounce due process as to own one’s narrative. The way Menon refers to “counter-narratives” and “protests” in cases of the failure of due process is itself reminiscent of the existing power imbalance. In a culture where the burden and shame of harassment are so internalised in the psyche of a victim, due process does very little in cases where the abuser is a prominent, influential name. Even so, the politics of the “List” only makes the due process accountable, rather than simply vindicating it. And, acknowledging that essential difference is useful for all of us – finger-tip activists or not.
2. I don’t see where Menon’s sense of her claim to feminism arises from. She calls out finger-tip activists for “no historic memory” – and adds that the fetishisation of the “List” and some individuals by finger-tip activists is contrary to the ethics of “all” feminists.
(Read it again, if you don’t catch the paradox.)
Last time I checked, the historical memory of the feminist struggle urges each of us, especially those of us with a background in feminist theory, to acknowledge the existing divide in the feminist practice over generations, which in fact, is rather pervasive. Historic memory asks us to learn from our experiences and struggles as feminists and evolve practices for empowerment. If we don’t learn to adapt our politics with the changing times, we might just end up creating the very bias we wish to uproot.
If being a feminist has taught me something, it is to acknowledge that women are not a bunch of homogenous humans that can be bracketed into a singular category. Most of us live complex and intersectional lives, take on various other identities on the lines of class, caste, sexuality, etc.
That’s where feminism starts for me. There will always be women whose struggles I will never encounter, and I can never fully empathise with, no matter how actively I try to be cognisant of my unconscious bias and privilege. Instead of trying to pulling down each other, maybe we can all just listen and stand up ‘with’ instead of standing up ‘for’ women. I think we all have a voice, and we all deserve the mic. Most of us just need the mic. Let’s not hold it for too long, let’s just pass it around.