It’s not hard to see why daughters are a burden here in India’s patriarchal and increasingly global-market-friendly society, or why women hardly ever become swashbuckling heroes as their male counterparts in film do. They are thought to be more intimately (and shamefully) connected to the elements, the purportedly blind forces of nature modernity seeks to tame in its pilgrimage of ascension; they do not bring money in to families as boys do when they later attract handsome dowries; they menstruate and lactate and bleed, and their unwieldy bodies melt and bloat when they get pregnant. In short, the tenderness and dramatic transformations that attend the female body do not make it amenable to the mechanical, take-no-prisoners, time-starved, disembodied imperatives of our progressively global economic and political contexts.
A patriarchal world order that functions by assuming the universal and making hasty generalizations will not long abide the excruciating particularity of the feminine. Today, to be female is to be a refugee in the very places that are conditioned upon its life-nurturing contributions. The Enlightenment may have gotten rid of pagan sentiments, and driven aground the remnants of vampires, werewolves, hoofed gods, priests seeking indulgences, and topsy-turvy carnivals of debauchery, but its flattened terrain bred its own unexpected monster: the female-identified body is the modern world’s monster.
In India, many grew uncomfortable with the oppression of the female, and started to organize to address it. From the mid-eighteenth century, the European colonialists who observed some of the local traditions with contempt (like Sati—the custom that required a widow to take her own life shortly after her husband’s death), made gender equality a central issue of their campaign. Like movements in the West—often delineated into thematic “waves” in progressive sequence—the rights of women to vote, to have equal access to health care and education and good pay, became paramount matters for preindependence and postindependence feminist groups in India.
In the larger world, women had been disenfranchised, denied rights, and treated as second-rate citizens along with nonwhite populations. Important victories for women’s suffrage were won in Europe and then in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, respectively. When fighting women and sympathizing men struggled, aligning the many-streamed feminist movements with the quest for civil liberties, other important legal victories followed that sought to protect women from sexual exploitation and marginalization.
Today, feminist epistemology (or the spectrum of theories of knowledge from a feminist perspective) is a wild forest of many life forms, a variety of value orientations about what should matter in theorizing feminist struggles and responses. There is no broad feminist consensus on what is at stake—whether equality with men or diversity—but, as I hope to show, and as I seem to have glimpsed in my pursuit of these hushes, the riddle the woman poses is our source of deepest hope in locating new existential settlements. The aroma of the home I seek for you drifts in the air, opening into a finer country—a home only to be found in the deepest woodlands, and for which a queer feminism of the monstrous is required. The story that follows about feminism trades in whispers and outlines. It is partial, broad, and too simplistic an account to even begin to touch on the intricacies of these cultural moments. Ultimately, however, I write of an exhilarating errancy that disturbs the kind of easy feminism I grew up with—the one that merely says women ought to have just as much. It is a material feminism that overturns “nature itself,” leaps over fences or spills through, upends the logic of fundamental separation, hints at the inevitability of the grotesque in the regular, and cleaves open a politics that goes beyond equality to something more orgasmic: emergence. Indeterminacy. The preposterous.
Mind if I go all nerdy for a while, my dear? Right. I’ll assume you nodded an ecstatic yes—your mother’s tolerance of my rantings hit zero years ago.
Following Descartes’s clinical splitting of reality into a binarism—mind and matter, subject versus object, in here versus out there—the body became a “vexed object,” a troubling obstruction in the way of the logical operations of pure rationality. Truth came to be seen as the unvarnished account of the universe, only to be accessed by means that were passionless and disinterested: to understand how the world works, the meaning of reality, the mystery at the heart of flight, the mechanics of light propagation, the pilgrimage of planets, and the strange monoverse that is the human mind, one needed to put away the flesh—the irrational, teenage, recalcitrant wildness of the body—and discipline the self well enough for the pure mind to perceive the faint signals of the truth. Like a Democritean orb, floating in bland emptiness, reality lived in an exclusive space that was difficult to reach. One needed a certain delicateness, a certain detachment to see the real in the midst of the fleeting. And men—white men, to be precise—were especially suited for the task.
Soon, this ontology of distance—this story that our own bodies betray us, that truth is far away, and that nature can only be truly known in certain ways that exclude the participation and contributions of the body and of anything material—became the bed and justification for a gruesome political configuration—a social architecture that preferred pyramids, with white men perched atop the structure and everyone else stuck in the quagmire beneath. Persons from other cultures were thus naturalized or stabilized (both euphemisms for “imprisoned”) with some kind of biological essentialism, which supposedly determined their behaviors or explained why they deviated from particular (white) normative practices. The black slave was locked into perpetual servitude because it was their nature to serve masters. Women, seen as passionate, emotional, and weak, also needed the discipline of their husbands. They needed control, a strong hand, or a leash. Their regretful deviations and bodily otherness required the benevolent training and interventions of patriarchy.
A Caucasian gentleman named Samuel George Morton, an early-nineteenth-century “natural scientist” who was a professor of anatomy and earned degrees from prestigious universities, even went so far as to measure cranial capacity of Caucasian, Indian, and Negro skulls—inferring that blacks had diminished capacities for intellectually rigorous work, while Caucasians, created separately by God, were inherently superior to all races. Of course, that puts you—a child of an African father and an Indian-African-Caucasian mother—in a very confusing place, doesn’t it?
Smarmy jokes aside, Morton’s scientific racism has since been heavily disavowed and criticized for his bias in data collection, manipulated samples, and selective attention to those pieces of data that supported his deeply held prejudices. But even then, the point is not lost that scientific practices and knowledge claims are not immune to prejudice and fatal distortions of the sort that deny the contributions of blacks, of women, or of non-Caucasian balding men—thus perpetuating a power dynamic in the holy name of factual innocence.
Feminists saw how modernism helped produce the painful racial occlusions that were once endorsed by supposedly neutral scientific authorities, and justified disenfranchisement and oppression. When you assert a standard, when you draw a line in the sand, you simultaneously create the conditions for deviation and failure. “Blacks,” whose customs and perspectives did not align with European philosophies, were thought to be lesser beings … lower than Indians on a scale that ultimately and conveniently placed Caucasians at the top. Their shocking employment in the hands of their slave masters and colonial lords, who sought to capitalize on their labor, was legitimized by the ideas that this was what they were created for.
It may be hard for you to understand any of this, Alethea—and I hope that wherever you are, wherever you live right now, you never know that vacant sky to which many have offered a libation of tears, only to be told that the reason for their suffering and the injustices they feel in their bones is a just recompense for their very natures.
Understandably, feminists working in the academic world rejected this nature. They rejected matter, or at least placed more emphasis on the role of language in ma
king reality. In their views, those perspectives that spoke of “womanhood” or moved painfully close to the body’s workings were either complicit in constructing a social order that privileged some above others or, at the very least, dangerously at risk of imitating the same essentializing gestures that characterized chauvinistic paradigms.
As such, feminists took their enemies’ arrow and turned it back on the modernists; they walked away from the universalizing schemes of modernism, insisting that we pay attention to the disciplining norms, cultural modes, discursive practices, and complex relationships that constructed bodies. In other words, feminists—especially those that latched on to the postmodern denial of reality—said everyone should pay just as much attention to the brushstrokes and the painters more than they did to their masterpieces about “nature.”
These feminists described the manners in which long-standing institutions codified power and molded subjects into malleable shapes. They reclaimed emotionality and “irrationality” as legitimate forms of intelligence, and perforated the bloated myth of a “pure” rationality that wasn’t already complicated by other forms of knowing. They hit at the fantastical accounts of self-determination and patriarchal permanence provided by modernism—attacking the idea of an essential self that wasn’t discursively constructed. They critiqued the “generalized body,” carefully developing insights into the particular ways one could no longer speak of “womanhood”—as if that were a single category where all women could be lumped together.
In short, they sought to castrate every phallogocentric ideological and institutional structure that claimed superiority over others on the grounds of nature. To their former lords who opined that nature makes us, they countered: “No, we make nature. And the nature you have constructed serves you to the exclusion of us.” It’s not difficult to see why there was (and is) a distaste for biology, for the empirical. Arguably the more popular feminist theories are the ones associated with postmodern sentiment and its characteristic abandonment of embodiment and the materiality of the world.2 The biology of bodies and nature is the battleground evoking fresh traumatic memories of a time we suppose we have succeeded.
Many feminist theorists, seeking to “denaturalize” nature, advanced intricate arguments showing the many “discursive practices through which bodies and matter become intelligible.” They placed the emphasis and the burden of causation on the discursive, on epistemology—not ontology. On language, not “material.” It was our way of speaking about reality that was more interesting—not reality itself. “Reality itself”? No such thing. To return to ontology (or the study of “reality itself”) was to yield ground to the idea that matter—the dead and mechanical thing of Cartesian imagination—had agency. That would be yielding too much. That would be giving in to essentialism and its blindness to context, to culture, and to the dynamics of political complexities—the equivalent of walking back to the scorched soil of previous battles and surrendering to the ghosts of your once-assailants.
None had forgotten how “women were associated with their corporeal reality”—a memory that hinted that “the road to their emancipation [seemed] to involve the removal of the biological dimension of the body.”3
For the feminists of this epistemology, there was no body as such, nothing essential, just the “discursive formation of embodiment” or the particular ways certain bodies were made concrete. A particular kind of “somatophobia” set in—a morbid fear for the hot burning plate of the brazenly corporeal. And this because “biology all too often comes implicitly to mean an underlying bedrock, inaccessible to analysis … often equated with unchanging essence.”4
Frost writes that feminists sought immunity from the activities, processes, and dynamics of the body—and left it out of their analyses of the real.5 It was either one or the other: either reality was “fixed nature,” a machine whose effect was a biological (and behavioral) determinism that cast white males against minorities and women in a sadistic plot of masters and slaves, or there was no such thing as “nature” that was not already “made up” to look beyond reproach.6
These critiques, some might say, succeeded in shedding the weight of essentialism. Some might even say they succeeded too well. Today, “feminism” hardly resembles the organized coherence of resistance and the galvanizing concepts for critique that characterized older feminisms. A sort of aversion to grounding themes, to any sort of metanarrative, beats at the heart of the project. Actually, I don’t think it can even be said that postmodern feminism has a heart, talk less of being a “project.” It isn’t one thing. It is this contradictory, pluralistic, antiauthoritarian, absurd “thing” that represents the shifting relationalities of femininity within popular, consumer, late-capitalist, neoliberal culture.7
Forged within a fervent consumer culture, held in place by fashion and media fluidity, and tattooed with a feverish individualism and subjectivity, feminism seems to have thrown off its “ism” to allow a form of “anything goes” milieu where empowerment comes in form of mobility, sexual adventurism, and cultural hybridism.8 Perhaps this same “movement” without edges is partly responsible for the spiritual eclecticism that is inspiring migration to hot-spot sacred places like Tiruvannamalai, a town of many temples 120 miles south of Chennai, where you are very likely to meet white people with flagrant pottus on their foreheads, dreadlocks, and spirituality workshops promising clients the potential of summarizing enlightenment in six easy steps.
Identity is a construct—fluid, user-friendly, and multiple, manumitted from foundational moorings. Neoliberal economics actually thrives on encouraging people to change their identities as often as they please, to buy the virtual face of an avatar or remain hidden behind a profile picture. Additionally, there is an intolerance for the binarism implied in notions of struggle, a trend that might account for a “decreased interest in activism,” except when it becomes fashionable to hit the streets or identify with a cause. One gets the impression that in unshackling itself from the prudery of modernist essentialism and universalism … in throwing away the proverbial bathwater, so to speak—postmodernism-allied femininity also throws away not only the baby but the idea of baths as well. Everything is up for grabs. Whereas Rosie the Riveter might have been part of the appropriate iconography of previous generations of feminist struggle, the “new feminism” has no appointed image, no fixed cause, no poster child for its loose federation of concerns: the tongue-sticking-out, goth-nailed, nose-pierced selfie of a self-absorbed millennial is no less authoritative than the intellectual musings of an academic feminist.
One might wonder how postmodernism and postmodern feminism could ever be seen within the same universe as other antihegemonic paradigms, especially since it seems in cahoots with consumerist culture—celebrating everything from Beyoncé to the latest iPhone. How could something so airy and breezy, without heart and suspicious of structure or discipline, pose a threat to oppression? Perhaps the veneer of irony that postmodernism wraps everything with is critique. As Fien Adriaens notes, maybe the fact that postmodern feminism is without foundations, always paradoxical, and without fixed adversary or ally makes it “a potential breeding ground for emancipatory discourses.” While she acknowledges that postmodernism can “extend and stabilize” neoliberal practices of elision, she notes that its amorphousness also grants it capacity to “critique and question … a hegemonic neoliberal consumer culture.”9
Postmodern concepts suggest we now live in a virtual world of our own making—a world of unequal power distribution, yes, but a world constructed from human comings and goings. There are shadows, but the world casts no shadows of its own. And if it looks like it does, this is only the ventriloquist behind the scenes, working the levers to gain power. Bodies are at the short end of the causal chain, without inherent meanings, and the mere backdrop for the inscriptions of culture.
What escapes postmodern discourse are the problematic stabilities it in fact produces—even when it claims that nothing is still. Even when it cla
ims everything is flotsam, to be retrieved and discarded at will for our Crusoean ends. Falling squarely on its blind spot is a humanistic foundationalism that centralizes and privileges discourse at the expense of bodily contributions. It’s easy to miss, but postmodern visuality betrays its deep anthropocentric commitments the closer one leans into it. You could imagine that with more sophisticated camera technologies, with zoom lenses, for instance, we have the ability to adjust focal length and depth. We can zoom in and out, traverse distances without taking a step—and with this focal changeableness it is easy to lose sight of the instigator behind the lens, the one afforded the luxury of permanence.
By centralizing human subjectivity, postmodernism effectively denies the material effects of the world that hosts us and shapes us. And that has real consequences. Perhaps the more visible effects of this “postmodern stretching” is that sooner or later, we face the retribution of the finite elasticity of things: the world snaps back and stings us. That sting is evident in the shadows of our cities, where the invocability of multiple identities and the denial of roots beyond the discursive are creating a feeling of homelessness, of tautological communication without depth,10 and of estrangement. Young people cast about in the angst of abandonment, seeking belonging in the anonymity of the moment.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 14
