‘Safety, in my mind, has become an oppressive category, and we should be deeply sceptical of it’
Professor Madhavi Menon on literature, law, violence against women, and news
Madhavi Menon is Professor of English and Director for the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University. She is author of Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama; Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film; Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism; and most recently, Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India. NewsTracker’s Zinnia Sengupta caught up with her on a chilly winter evening in her office at Ashoka University, where Menon spoke about the temporal relations between desire and violence, the intersectionality of news media, and the roles of law and literature in mediating sexual violence. This is the first segment of a two-part interview.
The popular adage goes, ‘Rape is about power, not sex’. What are your thoughts on this?
I completely agree. But if we agree with that, we also have to agree that sex is about power and the two cannot be divorced from one other. How does a man get instantly turned on by a woman walking down the street? It’s because power is a very strong aphrodisiac. The possibility of subduing someone by exerting your power is an extremely strong sexual turn-on. So, yes, rape is about power, but only inasmuch as sex is about power, and we need to recognise that.
It’s a matter of note that from Draupadi to Kathua, the use of sexual violence against women in order to assert power has been ubiquitous. Could you comment on the historical and contemporary intersections between desire, political power, and violence?
Sexual violence is political not only because it’s involved in the formation of States and its institutions, but also because it maintains a certain status quo of gender and power. Why women are caught in the crossfire is because one gender is supposed to be the one that’s conquered and the other gender does the conquering. The surest, quickest shorthand that you can come up with to attaining power is always going to be by subduing women. The ecological crisis is also about asserting a certain kind of mastery over the land, but, of course, this mastery is coming back to bite us. One can only hope that this will happen with women as well, when we will be able to come back and say, you can’t continue with this violence, because it will destroy us all.
THE PRESENT IDEA OF INDIAN ‘VALUES’ IS A MIXTURE OF VICTORIAN MORAL PRUDERY ON THE ONE HAND AND THE WORST KIND OF HINDU CASTE VIOLENCE ON THE OTHER
I don’t see any sign of that happening yet, unfortunately. Coming back to your question, yes, there are certain symbols by which you can signify conquest, and violence against women has always been one of them.
So, how do you think violence against women has morphed over the ages, if it has?
I think we’re pretty static about that. In many ways, I think we’ve regressed. The idea of men being granted impunity over women has become worse over time. Take the Kama Sutra, for instance, written in the 3rd century, and which has several sections devoted to courtesans and their financial independence. Who is going to write a best-selling manual today extolling the virtues of financially independent women? What makes it worse is that despite this regression, we pat ourselves on the back, saying: “Oh, look how progressive, liberal and advanced we are.”
In an interview with Scroll, you spoke about “the cultural and political heritage of a colonised nation that embraced the coloniser’s morality as its own”. Could you elaborate on the implications of this on current ideas of desire and sexuality?
This is the whole debate about what gets called post-colonialism. There are two ways of thinking about post-colonialism. One, as a temporal marker; the date on which you got independence from your coloniser, from that point you’re a post-colonial nation. The other way to think of a post-colonial nation is as one that struggles against the coloniser’s ideologies and philosophies. In the latter case, we have singularly failed, especially in the last six years, and especially in relation to matters of gender and sexuality.
Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s long-overdue decriminalisation of Section 377 in 2018, in the last six years, we have embraced colonial sexual morality with a vengeance. Machismo has made a terrifying comeback in the public sphere, as has contempt for alternative sexual lifestyles — if anything, we are a far more colonised society now than we were before 2014. The present sense of Indian ‘values’ is a mixture of Victorian moral prudery on the one hand and the worst kind of Hindu caste violence on the other. The combination of these two strands has legitimised our ideas about ‘pollution’ and ‘impurity’; it has led directly to the much-vaunted idea of a ‘Swachh Bharat’.
Do you think that the imposition of Victorian standards of propriety on the subcontinent’s nuanced past of fluid desire has led to this prevalent culture of sexual repression? Would you say this is somehow connected to the alarming statistics of rape and other forms of sexual violence in India?
I think there’s no doubt that, in some ways, what we are seeing with these high rates of sexual violence is a culture in conflict with itself. Because the space and time we are inhabiting right now bear traces both of older civilisations and a more recent British past. Thus, the question of “Are we or are we not to be prudes?” is a very conflicting and conflicted one. These prudish strands have been there in Indic civilisation since the very beginning — it’s not just that the British came and imposed it on us — but because they did do that as well, those strands have come to the forefront. All the ‘alternate’ ways of doing things which weren’t that alternate, but really a part and parcel of daily life, have increasingly been marginalised. But our dilemma is that we have daily reminders of that past, whether it’s seeing hijras on the street, worshipping gods that are half-male and half-female, listening to ghazals about one man singing to another — we are reminded daily of a past that is being squashed out of us. That’s the reason why governments like these are all the more dangerous: they’re trying to tilt the balance from these alternate ways of being to only one way of being.
Yet, sexual violence is quite rampant in seemingly non-repressed societies in the West as well, especially on college campuses. Which forces do you think are at play in this equation?
I find it hilarious when the West says it’s not repressed. I think Christian countries, because of their particular religious legacy, have been — and are — deeply homophobic and superficially homophilic. The language of rights and liberty that they’re telling themselves now is a very shallow one. The kind of sexual violence that you find in these countries is still very grave.
Our problem, contrastingly, is that we’re superficially homophobic, but deeply homophilic. So how do we tap into that depth, instead of just succumbing to reiterating that surface over and over again? And the reason we reiterate that surface is because it ironically allows us to sound like the West did when it ruled over us. So this sort of homophobia, the idea that ‘homosexuality is not Indian’, is absolute nonsense: when Europe was burning sodomites at the stake, Mir was writing love poetry to another man. It’s a complex, temporally, ideologically skewed mess we’re in right now.
I THINK THERE’S NO DOUBT THAT IN SOME WAYS, WHAT WE ARE SEEING WITH THESE HIGH RATES OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE IS A CULTURE IN CONFLICT WITH ITSELF
If young people in the West feel that they’re more empowered to speak about their sexuality now, then that’s a good thing. But we also need to examine the form that this speech is taking. Continuing to inhabit identity categories in the hope of creating diversity is not exactly my idea of liberation. You can’t create diversity by saying that there are more and more individual identities — that is not diversity. Expanding the LGBTQIA acronym doesn’t necessarily mean you’re more free, it means you’re freer to find narrower niches in which to live. This cuts you off from demanding and providing solidarities with those who might be deemed “other” from one’s own niche.
In relation to this demand for more and more pure identities, we might think about historical examples of diversity. Diversity to me is breaching the sacred/profane divide by having sculptures of orgies outside temple complexes; it is to have poetry in which a man dressing up as a woman continues to call himself ‘he’ (as Bulleh Shah does) because that keeps us guessing. Changing your body or pronoun to feel like the gender you identify with can be extremely liberating for some, but as a narrative, it runs the risk of sliding back into a prescriptive way of being: there’s only one way to feel like a woman or look like a man. We have to embrace the transness of trans politics and understand that there are multiple ways of looking, being, feeling and having sex.
In another interview with The Wire, you said that although “we know the concerns in response to which the separate compartment of the metro has come into being, if you have a women’s only compartment, you’re just ceding space to men, which is an impractical, short-sighted solution…” What are your views on this thin line between prescriptive moral policing and ensuring safety, especially in public spaces? How does one navigate this grey area?
Safety itself is a very problematic word for me; it’s a word that has been used with every single woman I know to prohibit us from doing things. Don’t go out at night, it’s not safe. Don’t talk to men, it’s not safe. Safety, to my mind, has become an oppressive category, and we need to be deeply sceptical of it. I think it’s more respectful of women to allow us to take risks, to allow us to be unsafe so we can actually develop a sense of what might or might not work for us, rather than smothering us, and assuming a paternalistic knowledge about our wellbeing.
But I hear your question. Should we provide a space where women won’t be groped or feel unsafe? Of course, we all want that space, but might that space be achieved by having more women in public rather than shutting them out altogether of the public sphere? If there are as many women as men in mixed carriages in the metro, then we might start seeing and experiencing things differently, Hopefully, there will be women in that compartment, and even men, with whom we can find comfort and solidarity. But the more you segregate, the fewer opportunities you allow for solidarity-building and understanding. The extent to which segregation takes place in India is ridiculous — in schools, buses, parties. Men and women become unknown continents one another, and this leads directly to a lot of sexual violence. Women don’t know how to call men out on their behaviour, and men think it’s the only way to go.
I DON’T THINK SPACES NEED TO BE MADE SAFE ACCORDING TO OTHERS’ DEFINITIONS; I THINK WE EACH NEED TO BE ABLE TO DECIDE WHICH SPACES WE FIND SAFE AND WHICH WE DON’T, AND TO MAKE SPACES SAFE FOR OURSELVES IN WAYS THAT WORK FOR US
“Safety” has been used as a ruse with which to suppress women’s voices, and we should be careful while occupying that rhetorical terrain; this is why I don’t have ‘safe space’ written on my door. I don’t think spaces need to be made safe according to others’ definitions; I think we each need to be able to decide which spaces we find safe and which we don’t, and to make spaces safe for ourselves in ways that work for us. So, to answer your question, let’s think in terms of numbers: fundamentally, we need more women out and about in the public sphere.
But for a lot of women, there’s multiple barriers preventing them from venturing into the public. In my case, my parents would only let me travel on the metro if I promised to use the female carriage. So how do we realistically tackle such a deep-rooted mindset?
This is the problem between what I would term a liberal politics and a radical politics. A liberal politics will “allow” women to leave the house if they promise to travel in the women’s compartment on the metro. But a radical politics will challenge and change the very language of “permissiveness.” A liberal politics depends on women saying, “We promise to remain helpless, to not talk back and allow you to rule our lives, just please let us go outside.” But in a radical politics, we have got to tell our parents where to get off, we’ve got to tell men where to get off, and we need to practice learning how to do that. As you know, it’s very difficult for women to tell others where to get off since we’ve been taught how not to do that for our entire lives.
You’ve also talked about how the common media trope of the weak, cowering woman and the evil demon man is dangerous and needs to be dismantled if the status quo is to be truly shaken up. How do you think media coverage of sexual violence could play a more effective role here?
The very idea of rape and sexual harassment is overlaid with moralistic and gendered layers. Women are often held responsible for being raped, and their lives are described as being over if they have been raped. Raped women are allegedly reduced to being a ‘zinda laash’ (living corpse), which was an idea recently articulated by a woman Cabinet minister of the ruling dispensation. It’s said that women who are victims of sexual harassment or rape have to live through their harassment again when they have to record their narrative or file a police complaint, but this is because the social and emotional narrative around these incidents is so overdetermined, so charged in a way that is not neutral. It’s always going to be about, “Oh what did you do, how did you dress, you must have done something wrong” etc. The presumption is always going to be against the woman. But when a woman is a victim of domestic abuse, nobody says, “Oh my god, her life is over.” This is why lawyers like Flavia Agnes have made an argument to for laws to be gender-neutral and not sexually specific, since sexually-specific laws will always target and tarnish women. If you go to file a complaint on dowry harassment or domestic abuse, your situation is going to legally and socially read in a different way. If the woman who has been raped is not looked at with horror and pity, then that would make a huge difference to her. We should reserve our horror for the rapist.
THERE IS AN ARGUMENT TO BE MADE FOR MAKING LAWS GENDER-NEUTRAL AND NOT SEXUALLY SPECIFIC, BECAUSE SEXUALLY-SPECIFIC LAWS WILL ALWAYS TARGET AND TARNISH WOMEN
This is, however, a debate with very real pros and cons. A strong argument against gender-neutral laws is that given the history of sexual violence by men against women, one needs to pay specific attention to women. We need to start proactively discussing the merits and demerits of gendered laws.
Speaking of law and the issue of marital rape, I’m interested to know about the historical connotations at play here, vis-a-vis the laws and reality of violence within a marriage. Could you shed some light on this line of thought?
Marital rape is not illegal in India. This is based on the deeply problematic presumption that a woman gives consent for life when she gets married. A big part of the problem is marriage itself. Because it is such an important institution for the State, it is made to mimic the patriarchal bias by which the State itself stays in place. And this bias is given a religious sanction.
Among Hindus, marriage is considered a sacred bond, a sacrament that is near-impossible to break, and that must not be questioned. In Islam, marriage is a contract where both the man and the woman are told at the outset exactly what will happen if the contract stops working. (In fact, the secret about the position of Hindu and Muslim women in India is that Muslim women are much better off in terms of their relationship to marriage, precisely because it is a contract. But that knowledge has been overtaken by phobic narratives describing Muslim women as poor and helpless victims of criminal Muslim men.)
In the West, the idea of marriage is not sacred any longer, despite its existence as a sacred covenant in Christianity. In relation to marriage, I would say the West is definitely more progressive than we are. Here, we are still hanging on to the oppressive notion of the sanctity of marriage even though marriage is an infant on the horizon of Indic histories. It did not exist for thousands of years — in many parts of the country, till well after the British came (in parts of Kerala, not till the 1960s). So marriage is not the only answer to forging a sexual relationship, and it certainly should not be considered sacred. We need to disarticulate sanctity and sexuality, because only then will a sexual violation count as a human rights violation rather than being explained away as part and parcel of a marriage.
Part 2: Why Madhavi Menon believes capital punishment shouldn’t exist
** This interview was updated 4 July, 2020, to include clarifications on some ideas
