Gender, Sexuality Nation

UNIT 2 FEMININITY
Karen Gabriel

Structure

2.1 Introductions
2.2 Objectives
2.3 Understanding Gender
2.4 Femininities and Patriarchy
2.5 Femininities and the Colonial Nation
2.6 The Indian Case
2.7 Postcolonial Femininities
2.7.1 Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Draupadi’
2.7.2 Dopdi’s Femininity, Masculinity of the State

2.8 Let Us Sum Up

2.9 Unit End Questions
2.10 References
2.11 Suggested Readings

2.1 INTRODUCTION
By now, you would have gained a fairly clear understanding of the category
of masculinity. You are also familiar with various conceptions and practices
of masculinity which intersect, interact with the discourses of nation,
nationalism and national identity. We have also explored how construction
and deployment of masculinities are related to the formations of patriarchy,
and how masculinity is a fundamental factor in the shaping of identity and
subjectivity.

In this Unit, we will examine the gender dynamic that underlies and intersects
the question of nationalism and national identity, specifically from the
point of view of the productions, deployments, operations and reproductions
of femininities, from within and outside the discourse of nationalism. One
of the main features of any nationalist discourse is the way in which it
seeks to control and regulate its women.

As you have already learnt, all nationalisms invest heavily in their own
reproduction, that is, in the reproduction of the discourse as much as of
the conditions that favour that reproduction. This has two dimensions to it:
one is the regulation of sex and sexuality which you will be engaging with
in Unit 3 of this Block and the other is the regulation of notions of masculinity
and femininity, to ensure that the ‘appropriate’ gender identities are

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disseminated and reproduced in the nation. In this Unit, therefore, we will Femininity

explore the ways and means by which nationalism engages with these
categories. In particular, we will focus on the figuring of femininities in
nationalism.

2.2 OBJECTIVES
After completing this Unit, you will be able to:

• Analyse gender, with a specific focus on the concept of femininity;

• Discuss how femininities intersect with the discourses and practices of

nationalism;

• Explain how femininities impact or are shaped by narratives of

nationalism; and

• Critically examine Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Draupadi’ to explore the issue of

femininity.

2.3 UNDERSTANDING GENDER

As you would have already grasped from earlier Units, the terms ‘masculinity’
and ‘femininity’ register gender rather than sexual difference. They are
distinct from the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’, which register sexual difference.
The obvious question that arises then is, what is different about these two
registers? What are the domains they cover, and is there any overlap between
their respective domains? This question has been central to feminist critique
since the nineteen seventies. Feminists like Simone de Beauvoir had
recognized even in the nineteen fifties that “social discrimination produces
in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to
be caused by nature” (de Beauvoir, 1972[1949], p.18). However, it was
psychologist Robert Stoller who, in 1968, first rendered the specific
distinction between biological traits (sex), and traits of masculinity or
femininity that were social or psychological in nature (gender). This was
subsequently and famously theorized by feminist scholars like Gayle Rubin
as the ‘sex/gender system’ to refer to a “set of arrangements by which the
biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human,
social intervention” (Rubin, 1975, p.165).

Generally speaking, Rubin belongs to the ‘social constructionist’ school of

understanding gender, which holds that gender is shaped and determined by
social and cultural practices i.e., gender is learned behavior (see also
Unit1, Block 3, MWG-001 and Unit 2, Block 1, MWG-002).There are also
other interpretations of the sex-gender difference: one very influential
school of thought led by psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow (1995) understands
gender as an issue of personality formation in early infancy. It is shaped by
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Gender, Sexuality Nation parenting, specifically by the extent of the child’s individuation from the
mother. The mother-daughter relationship usually permits less individuation
than the mother-son one, because mothers tend to identify more with their
daughters. Masculinities and femininities are thus the traits developed in
the course of this process of individuation. Another way of thinking the sex-
gender issue came from feminist political theorist Catherine MacKinnon
(1989) who argued that gender was essentially the consequence of the
sexual objectification of women. Because women are perceived as objects
for the satisfaction of men’s desire, men are understood as sexually dominant
and women as submissive. Gender then becomes “the eroticization of
dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/
submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex”
(MacKinnon, 1989, p.113). That is, in all patriarchal societies, men are
conditioned into desiring submissive women, and conversely, women are
conditioned into finding their own submissiveness erotic. Male domination
is not learned social behaviour, as the social constructionists argue; rather
it is the social expression of an underlying power hierarchy based on male
sexual dominance.

Although each of these understandings of gender emphasize different ways

in which gender and sex are distinct, they do share what has been referred
to as ‘gender realism’ that is the understanding that all women differ from
all men, albeit in the specific ways in which each school emphasizes gender
difference. This is more loosely referred to in the literature as ‘essentialist’
understandings of gender. Critics of such gender realist positions argue that
gender is intersected by class, race, age, etc., and that unless these
differentials are take into account, white western middle class feminists’
experience of being women would marginalise all other women (Spelman,
1988). Another influential criticism of the sex/gender system is the argument
that it is ‘normative’. Judith Butler, for instance, sees the sex gender
distinction as creating identity categories, which, as she argues, ‘are never
merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary’ (Butler,
1991, p.160). (See also Unit 1, Block 3, MWG-001 and Unit 4, Block 4, MWG-
004). Further, she understood gender not as natural to men (masculine) and
women (feminine) but as “performative”: it was not ‘a stable identity or
locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted
… through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts’ (Butler,1999,p.179). Butler
in fact dismisses the distinction between sex and gender itself:

“If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this

construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed,
perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that
the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction
at all”.

(Butler, 1999, pp.10–11)

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A rich debate has followed within (and outside) feminism on the utility of Femininity

this distinction. While the problems with maintaining it have been argued
strongly, one problem in particular with debunking it soon became evident,
viz., that by doing so, the category ‘women’ also came into question. If the
feminist political agenda is to end the oppression of women as a group,then
calling into question the category ‘women’ obviously undermined this agenda.
The debate continues on how this paradox can be resolved: feminist theories
of gender nominalism; a new gender realism; gender uniessentialism; or
understanding gender as positionality, for instance, have sought to re-
articulate the category ‘women’ in ways that permit its political relevance,
without necessarily generating an essentialist understanding (Mikkola, 2012).

However, we need not be detained by these debates, which in any event

are at this stage inconclusive. For our purposes, we need only note that:

a) the categories ‘men’ and ‘women’ are not necessarily either biological
or ideological categories, but denote mutually exclusive – but also
mutually definitive – social groups;

b) the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ denote biological difference, even

if that difference need not always be clear in some specific cases
(hermaphrodites, eunuchs, etc.), and as such, are referred to as ‘sex’
or as ‘sexual difference’; and

c) the categories ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ denote ascriptions,

practices, roles, identities and positions that relate in complex ways to
the other two sets of categories noted above, but also to other social
categories like race, class, ethnicity, caste, etc.

You have examined the concept of masculinities and their significance for
understanding nations and nationalism in the previous Unit. Here, in what
follows, we will briefly explore the ways in which the networks of relations
noted above determine specifically our understanding of femininities.

2.4 FEMININITIES AND PATRIARCHY

The moment we perceive, as above, that ‘gender’ denotes a network of
relations of the categories ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ to the categories
‘men’ and ‘women’, as well as to the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’, on
the one hand; and to other social categories like race, class, ethnicity,
caste, etc., on the other; we realize that ‘gender’ is embedded in a
network of power. When we say that gender is a relation to power, we do
not mean simply that, by and large, men wield greater power than women;
rather, we are referring to the ways in which power is configured and
distributed in this network. This is not necessarily constant or consistent
between sexes, over cultures and history, since the definitions, the

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Gender, Sexuality Nation constituents and the locations of power vary. For instance, musculature,
sexual control or wealth may become signs of power even when they are
associated or distributed in cross-gendered ways. To trace the relation
between gender and power then is to trace the relations between what
crucially feature in the configurations of power and masculinity and femininity
as they come to be defined, organised and related.

One such crucial feature or element in the configurations of gender and

power is the organisation of sexuality specifically, the dominant organisation
of sexuality as heterosexuality. Much has been written about this since
Frederick Engels (2004 [1884]), argued the connections between the family,
private property and the state as far back as 1884. As Cameron (2000) and
Gabriel (2010) point out, feminists have furthered this argument to chart
the ways in which heterosexuality as the lynchpin of the family has served
to domesticate women and their labour. Rubin(1975) and Williamson (2012)
state that capitalism particularly evolved as in the European context, the
institution of ‘separate spheres’, or the gendered separation of social space
into the public (masculine) and the private (feminine), permitted the
domestication and separation of women from waged labour, but not from
labour itself. This is not to suggest (rather absurdly) that women’s oppression
is an effect of capitalism alone but that the nature and dynamic of that
oppression took a different shape under capitalism. That is, the public-
private divide as it was shaped by the demands and pressures of a capitalist
economy, thereby realigned the gendered distribution of power in both
spheres. This is particularly evident in the ways in which, as Nancy Armstrong
(1987) has shown, the contours of an English middle class in eighteenth
century England become clear only through the emergence of the ‘domestic
woman’. It must be noted that the public-private divide is a porous one
:“the links between them are innumerable, and both spheres remain
significant in the production and reproduction of social reality” (Padgug,
cited in Caplan 1987, p.19). Yet sexuality was primarily associated with the
private, even as it remained integral to the shaping of other social relations.
The discrete sets of social relations (gender, race, culture, caste and class)
that are coupled with sexual practices sustain systems and structures
separately and in the configuration of their relations with each other. That
is, a reorganization of patriarchal structures and alignments took place at
the time, because the enactment of (hetero) sexuality was often the
enactment of the politics of patriarchy – the dominant system that defines
sets and regulates the terms of gender and sexual relations. Male privilege
in patriarchy results from patterns of institutional and social control in
society “in which men have some degree of unreciprocated authority or
control over women, and/or men have greater control than women over the
operations of institutions or sets of institutions” (Meyers,1997, p,28). But
what must be noted here is that, although there is a general sense in which

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male privilege is sustained in patriarchal societies – and in fact is definitive Femininity

of them as patriarchies – nevertheless, precisely because such privilege is

not absolute but mediated by other factors, such as caste, class, age,
region, race, ethnicity, etc., a multiplicity of gender forms are generated.
That is, there is no single form of masculinity or of femininity, but rather
a variety of masculinities and femininities, which are structured and moulded
by their intersections with these other social categories, as much as with
each other. Thus, there may be some forms of masculinity that would be
socially lower in rank and power than some forms of femininity within a
particular patriarchal formation, as for instance in the case of the relative
social power of a white woman over a black man.

Check Your Progress:

What are some of the differences you can identify between the terms
“sex” and “gender”? Jot down your thoughts here.

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Gender, Sexuality Nation
2.5 FEMININITIES AND THE COLONIAL NATION
In Unit 1, Block 1, you read about the close relations between the emergence
of the middle class in Europe and the formation of the nation-state. The
emergence of the nation-state too was also therefore deeply coloured by
the gendered distribution of power that we have noted above. That is,
fundamental changes in the organization of heterosexuality were effected
in the course of the emergence of the middle class in Europe, that also
affected the formation of nation-states in this region. George L. Mosse’s
path-breaking study, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal
Sexuality in Modern Europe (1985) opened the doors for much scholarly
work along these lines, to trace how transformations in the understandings
and practices of heterosexuality affected the understandings and practices
of masculinity and femininity, and were in turn affected by the demands
of nationalism. As Mosse argued,

Nationalism helped control sexuality, yet also provided the means

through which changing sexual attitudes could be absorbed and
tamed into respectability. It assumed a sexual dimension of its
own, coming to advocate a stereotype of supposedly “passionless”
beauty for both men and women.

(Mosse, 1985, p.10)

It is thus clear from his argument that most forms of nationalism, precisely
because they engaged with changing sexual attitudes and ideas, also
generated and promoted ideals of masculinity and femininity that drew
their legitimacy and value from the discourse of nationalism itself.

Ann Tickner has noted that:

Our Western understanding of gender is based on a set of culturally

determined binary distinctions, such as public versus private,
objective versus subjective, self versus other, reason versus
emotion, autonomy versus relatedness, and culture versus nature;
the first of each pair of characteristics is typically associated
with masculinity, the second with femininity.
(Tickner, 1992,p. 9)

After noting that “autonomy is associated with masculinity just as femininity

is associated with interdependence” (Tickner, 1992, p. 41), she goes on to
observe that “the seventeenth century ... witnessed the rise of the modern
state system. Since this period, autonomy and separation, importantly
associated with the meaning of sovereignty, have determined our conception
of the national interest” (Tickner, 1992, p.41). That is, a crucial element
in the evolution of nationalism and nation-states in the European context
was the understanding of the autonomy and sovereignty of the nation as
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‘masculine’, and conversely, the understanding of subjection and dependence Femininity

as ‘feminine’.

Alongside these developments was the growth and consolidation of many

European states as colonial and imperial powers. This means that the
discourse of nationalism as it evolved in Europe, as well as the gendered
frames that it generated, was transmitted into the colonial contexts of
each European imperialist realm, in Asia, Africa and South America in
particular. The multileveled violence that was essential to the colonialist
project, was arbitrary and brutal in the manner in which many post-colonial
states were formed territorially and politically, in the configuration of imposed
ideologies and in the burial of vast constituencies of people and their
memories, even by the newly formed nation-states. Women were one of the
oldest of these constituencies who in their metaphorisation, were voided of
effective subject status, full memory and narrative, even during anti-colonial
struggles and after territorial colonization ended.

Thus, nation-formation outside the European context was determined not

just by the gender dynamics that shaped nation-formation in that context,
but by two additional factors:

a) the gender (and racial) dynamics of conquest and colonization, in which

the colonized were feminized by virtue of becoming subjected to the
colonizer; and

b) the existing gender dynamics within the colonized society, which would
have its own complex intersections with other forms of power distribution
within it ,along lines of caste, region, religion, the gender dynamics of
the patriarchal forms already in place. It also meant, conversely, that
the gender dynamics of both the colonizing and colonized societies
were affected by the unfolding discourses of nationalism and colonialism.
There is much work on how women’s issues were consistently posited
as deferrable, for instance Sangari and Vaid (1989), Cynthia Enloe
(1989) among others. What is important is the implicit domestication of
women’s issues within such moves which continues despite the
considerable involvement of women in militaristic struggles and their
equal protest about those.

Typically, these two discourses generated certain idealized forms of

masculinity and femininity that served and promoted the interests of the
colonizing power. For instance, Victorian England saw the growth of the cult
of ‘muscular Christianity’ (Hall, 1994), which was in turn related to the
evolution of the Boy Scouts movement (Rosenthal, 1986). This was
accompanied by a dramatic growth in adventure fiction for boys, that
essentially celebrated and promoted conquest and colonization such as
Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and by tales of selfless domestic care-giving for

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Gender, Sexuality Nation girls, that prescribed and aided the formation of a subservient subjectivity
like Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Daisy Chain. Rowbotham (1989) also shows
how Victorian girls were represented and indoctrinated into certain forms
of femininity. This literature not only served to promote and strengthen the
colonial project but also constituted a defense of it as a civilizing mission
– what Kipling was to refer to as ‘the white man’s burden’. And as Tickner
has observed, the burden of this fell on the colonial woman:

As the European state system expanded outward to conquer much

of the world in the nineteenth century, its “civilizing” mission was
frequently described in stereotypically gendered terms. Colonized
peoples were often described as being effeminate, masculinity
was an attribute of the white man, and colonial order depended
on Victorian standards of manliness. Cynthia Enloe suggests that
the concept of “ladylike behavior” was one of the mainstays of
imperialist civilization. Like sanitation and Christianity, feminine
respectability was meant to convince colonizers and colonized
alike that foreign conquest was right and necessary. Masculinity
denoted protection of the respectable lady; she stood for the
civilizing mission that justified the colonization of benighted
peoples.
(Tickner, 1992, P. 33)

Check Your Progress:

What is patriarchy, and why is it significant to understanding gender,

especially femininity?

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 Femininity
2.6 THE INDIAN CASE
The response of the colonized societies to such attempts at not just political
but also ideological conquest was often sharp. In the Indian case, one kind
of response was in the various social and religious reform movements of the
nineteenth century. The organizations in these movements included the
Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Sanatan Dharma, and other essentially
upper caste organizations; but there were also several lower caste
organizations such as the Satyashodak Samaj. These movements broadly
sought to address the Orientalist criticism of the ‘Hindu’ social order as
decadent, unjust, oppressive and steeped in ritual and superstitions (Zavos,
2000). Their concerns were twofold: to maintain the sense of a nationally
integrated and unified community, nationalism and simultaneously to bring
about changes in social and cultural practices that were perceived to be
primitive/barbaric/inhuman. For instance, the writings of Gyan Pandey,
Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Urvashi Butalia, Bhagwan Josh, Peter van der
Veer, and the particularly relevant writings of Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich
von Stietencron have studied the aforementioned societal interlinkages, in
fact, instituting nationalism through the very process of reform. Many of
these centered on the separation of issues of personal law from the civil
laws, and their formulation and regulation by individual communities.
Inevitably, these laws revolved round the deeply gendered questions of how
each community could regulate its protocols and procedures around marriage
and inheritance.

These reform initiatives were closely related to, but distinct from (and in
some ways oppositional to) the other kind of response, which was the
nationalist one. Dominated by the political power of the Indian National
Congress, the nationalist response was critical of the colonizing power
(unlike the self-critical gaze of the socio-religious reform organizations),
and sought to counter it not just politically but ideologically as well. According
to Partha Chatterjee (1993), this involved the invention and deployment of
a counter-ideological dualistic scheme, which may be represented in tabular
form as follows:

Table 2.1

East (India) West (England)

Colonized Colonizer

Spiritual Material

Private Public

Powerless Empowered

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Gender, Sexuality Nation A final dichotomy feminine/masculine was also sought to be mapped onto
this series, with the former in the first column of the table and the latter
in the second but this is where the dichotomies became complicated. The
equating of femininity with the East, and masculinity with the West, was
not a formulation that was acceptable to the colonized, precisely because
of the associations of power with masculinity and powerlessness with
femininity:

The [materialistic world] was a place where the European power

had challenged the non-European peoples and by virtue of its
superior material culture, had subjugated them. But it had failed
to colonize [India’s] inner, essential, identity of the East which lay
in its distinctive and superior spiritual culture. That is where the
East was undominated, sovereign, and master of its own fate. For
a colonized people the world was a distressing [and embarrassing]
constraint [especially for Indian males attempting to maintain
their masculinity] forced upon it by the fact of its material
weakness. It was a place of daily humiliation, a place where the
norms of the colonizer had to be accepted…No encroachments of
the colonizer must be allowed [by Indian males if they were to
maintain dignity under colonial oppressive conditions] in that inner
sanctum. In the world, imitation and adaptation to Western norms
was a necessity; at home, they were tantamount to annihilation
of one’s very [Indian male identity].

(Chatterjee, 1993, pp. 238-239).

By implication, femininity came to imply a double subjection: to the colonial

masculinity of the English in the ‘world’ and to the colonized masculinity
of the Indian at ‘home’. The nationalist response then became partly to
invert the meanings established in the table of dichotomies noted above,
so that spirituality was posed as a superior form of civilization and therefore
as a masculine ideal, countering its equation with femininity. A classic
example of such countering was in Mohandas Gandhi’s famous response to
a question put to him, as to what he thought of ‘western civilization’: he
is reported to have said that it would be a very good idea (that is, for the
‘west’ to get civilized).

Evidently then, these were also strongly gendered responses: the first kind,
that sought to undertake the social and religious transformation of India,
was gendered not just in terms of the centrality of ‘the woman question’
to those reform initiatives, but also often with a strong sense of being ‘less
than’ the colonial masculine-a sense which was deliberately reinforced by
the British themselves in their construction of the ‘manly Englishman’ as
opposed to the ‘effeminate Indian’ (Sinha, 1995). Consequently, one strand
of this response sought to rectify (or reform) the perceived corruptions and
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decadences in Indian society, as an exercise in regaining vitality and potency. Femininity

It thus laid a heavy emphasis on the ‘manliness’ of the colonized Indian,

and connected nationalism to masculinity in terms of power: this could be
seen in the writings of Swami Vivekananda which exemplifies the discourse
noted above, of civilizational superiority as an effect of spiritual strength
as much as in the Hindu nationalist discourse of V D Savarkar (Bhatt, 2001).

The second kind of response was also gendered, but in a different way:
under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi, it aimed to subvert the colonial
association of masculinity with violence, and the concomitant association of
femininity with non-violence, by espousing non-violence as resistance. While
the association of masculinity with violence precedes the colonial regime
and may not be attributed to it alone, this association was arguably intensified
in specific ways under colonialism. Colonialism brought with it an
administrative and technological apparatus that drew on and introduced a
conceptual universe of rationality, instrumentalism and enumeration that
demanded a radical re-construction of the very bases of identity and
community formation, including gender and gendered constructions of
community identity (Vijayan, 2012, p.175ff). The existing associations of
masculinity with power fed into this new organization of power and its
apparatuses. It is for this reason that when Gandhi initiated the idea of
non-violent resistance, he integrated it to a larger rejection of the entire
conceptual universe that underlay the colonial construction of power and
powerlessness, and the apparatus that administered it.

The problem, however, is that the strategy of non-violent resistance struggled

with the gendered association of masculinity with violence and power, and
the concomitant association of femininity with non-violence and
powerlessness. This was not only a political problem, insofar as it was
vehemently rejected by Hindu nationalist forces as ‘feminizing’ the nation
(eventually, leading to the assassination of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse on
these very grounds); it was also a social and cultural problem. A large
number of women had cast off traditional modes of femininity that required
them to remain within the house, to participate actively in the non-violent
modes of resistance of the nationalist movement. This required the
construction and practise of modes of femininity that permitted women a
greater degree of autonomy and agency, albeit specifically tailored to permit
their participation in the public process of the struggle for independence.
After independence, however, they found themselves having to adopt the
earlier modes of femininity again, and renounce their active public lives.
The espousal of non-violence, even as it challenged the gendered structuring
of colonial relations, did not reconstruct or even question the hierarchies
and inequalities of actual, everyday gender relations. Evidently, the
patriarchal injunctions and compulsions that regulated the lives of these
women before independence had not lost any of their force after, or in the
course of the nationalist movement (Sangari and Vaid, 1993).
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Gender, Sexuality Nation
2.7 POSTCOLONIAL FEMININITIES
The post-independent Indian state inherited the structures of governance
and administration from the colonial state, and did little to change them.
In the process, it also inherited the gendered associations of that apparatus.
That is, the colonial association of power with a particularly aggressive and
rapacious construction of masculinity, as well as the concomitant association
of powerlessness with a particularly domesticated and passive understanding
of femininity, was also perpetuated into the period after independence.
One consequence of this was that, whenever the Indian state behaved like
a colonial state (as it has often done, especially in relation to the weaker,
more invisible, more vulnerable, less resourceful, marginal sections of the
Indian populace like dalits, minorities, tribals and amongst these, the women
in particular) the gendered connotations of such an approach are inevitably
also put in play. The inevitable (self-)masculinization of the state in terms
of power may not necessarily render all its subjects ‘feminine’ in the exact
same way, all of the time, everywhere; but the intent of such (self-
)masculinization is to allow for the possibility of ‘feminizing’ its subjects
specifically in terms of power, or rather, of powerlessness, when required.
When it does so, its women subjects become particularly vulnerable. This
is brilliantly exemplified in Mahasweta Devi’s short story, Draupadi.

2.7.1 Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Draupadi’

In Devi’s narrative, Draupadi is named so by the wife of the upper-caste

landlord for whom her mother was working when she gave birth to her.
Draupadi becomes ‘Dopdi’ in the tribals’ dialect. “It is either that as a
tribal she cannot pronounce her own Sanskrit name (Draupadi), or the tribal
form, Dopdi, is the proper name of the ancient Draupadi” (Spivak,1981,
p.387). Already the particular construction of femininity connoted by the
Sanskrit name comes into play: the reference is to the wife of the five
Pandavas in the ancient Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, who is molested and
almost stripped by their enemies, the Kauravas. Because her marriage to
the five brothers is a deviancy from patriarchal norms, Draupadi becomes
susceptible to being labelled a prostitute by the Kauravas, in justification
of their molestation. In the epic, she is rescued by divine intervention:
when the Kauravas try to strip her sari off her body, it turns inexhaustible,
preventing her ever becoming naked. Emboldened by this, Draupadi then
chastises her husbands for not protecting her and curses the Kauravas for
attempting to violate her.

In contrast, Dopdi is not only stripped, she refuses to clothe herself, her
nudity becoming her challenge to the military men who gang-rape her: she
says, “There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you
put my cloth on me. What more can you do?” (Spivak, 1981, p.402). Here,
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Dopdi transforms the meanings of being a man: the violent, rapacious, Femininity

masculinity associated with state power and embodied in the soldiers who
rape her is scorned and rejected, for a notion of masculinity that will
respect and uphold her dignity as a woman. But by doing so, she also
transforms the meanings of femininity from being the vulnerable subject of
sexual violence – defined, in fact, by subjection to that violent masculinity
– to one that refuses subjection in spite of violation, and through that
refusal, not only undercuts the efficacy of this form of masculinity, but
questions its very essence.

Dopdi is not like Draupadi to begin with: she is married to one man, Dulna
Majhi, and is a Naxal rebel, on the run with her husband from the Indian
government’s Special Forces that are deployed to subjugate the ‘insurgency’
in the tribal areas. In fact, her husband is killed by the armed forces, well
before she too is caught. Spivak states that there is only a cursory reference
to why this couple became Naxals, as if this is mostly self-evident: we are
told that they are resisting the combined oppression of “grain brokers,
landlords, moneylenders, law officers and bureaucrats” (Spivak, 1981, p.393).

Ironically then, she becomes like her polyandrous namesake from the epic
only through the multiple ‘husbands’ who posses her sexually through her
gang-rape. That is, Dopdi becomes Draupadi in and through the very violation
that the latter is rescued from. Both women are rendered vulnerable by the
fact of their sex – i.e., by the fact that men want to sexually assault them.
Draupadi’s vulnerability is alleviated by a miracle that prevents the sexual
assault; Dopdi however, is assaulted and raped so severely that her
vulnerability itself is rendered meaningless. She becomes invulnerable once
the threat to her vulnerability is physically realized on her body: as she says
mockingly to the commander, Senanayak, “What more can you do?”
Senanayak, “the elderly Bengali specialist in combat and extreme-Left
politics” (Spivak, 1981, p.393), is described by Devi as feeling, “for the first
time”, “terribly afraid” at Dopdi’s response. This is also especially because
she then goes on to immediately challenge him to “counter” her (to kill her
in an encounter): she no longer fears not only rape, but death itself.
Senanayak is terrified precisely because her fearlessness challenges the
very foundations of his own world. Devi tells us early on that Senanayak’s
creedo is, “In order to destroy the enemy, become one. Thus he understood
them by (theoretically) becoming one of them” (Spivak, 1981, p.394). Now,
his smug belief that he knows the “enemy” is revealed to be self-deception;
consequently, his sense of his own self – his belief in himself and his
abilities – also stands compromised.

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Gender, Sexuality Nation 2.7.2 Dopdi’s Femininity, Masculinity of the State

At the heart of this compromise is his gender, his particular practice of

masculinity: Senanayak’s subtle oneupmanship on his Sikh predecessor, Arjan
Singh, is founded on the espousal of a superior form of masculinity, one
whose power is founded in the modern technology of the gun, and not in
the more pre-modern forms of the “five Ks” espoused by the Sikhs. “The
“five Ks are Kes (“unshorn hair”); kachh (“drawers down to the knee”);
karha (“iron bangle”); kirpan (“dagger”); kanga (“comb”; to be worn by
every Sikh, hence a mark of identity)” (Spivak, 1981,p.391).

First...he [Senanayak] presents an encomium on the military genius

of the Sikhs. Then he explains further: Is it only the opposition
that should find power at the end of the barrel of a gun? Arjan
Singh’s power also explodes out of the male organ of a gun. Without
a gun even the “five Ks” come to nothing in this day and age.

(Spivak, 1981, p.393)

Alongside this espousal of the modern technology of combat, Senanayak

also embodies the modern administrative and technological apparatus noted
earlier, that espouses rationality and instrumentalism as its basic principles
of operation. In this, he becomes the embodiment of the post-colonial state
that, in essence, colonizes its own people – what has been referred to as
“internal colonialism” (Hind, 1984). By extension of the gendered logic of
colonialism, the colonized “nation” – in this case, the tribal regions of
Bengal – is rendered the subjugated feminine, and the femininity that
Senanayak expects to emerge subsequently is the subjugated and vulnerable
femininity of the colonized.

When Dopdi rejects such a femininity then, she undoes Senanayak’s universe.
Like his soldiers, he is unable to make sense of this overturning of what to
him is the rational discourse of gender, in which masculinity equals power,
femininity equals powerlessness, and the latter must therefore be subject
and subjugated to the former. But after being raped, when Dopdi is given
water to drink and a cloth to cover herself,

She pours the water on the ground. Tears her piece of cloth with
her teeth. Seeing such strange behavior the guard says, She’s
gone crazy, and runs for orders. He can lead the prisoner out but
doesn’t know what to do if the prisoner behaves incomprehensibly.
(Spivak,1981,p.402).

Dopdi’s strength is in her complete rejection not only of the gendered ad

sexualized discourse of subjugation but of the coercive system of threat
and pain that undergirds that discourse. Her femininity is a re-crafted one,
that refuses subjection to such rapacious masculinity, but also, peculiarly,
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endorses another kind of masculinity, the lack of which renders Senanayak Femininity

and his men, less than men. This masculinity is implicitly constructed as
respectful of women and their bodies – a masculinity before whom she can
feel shame when naked because this masculinity would be ashamed to see
her public nakedness, as a violation of her dignity. Such masculinity would
clothe her out of respect for her dignity, which is why she tears up the
cloth provided by the guard. Senanayak’s entire sense of superiority is
undone when he realizes the absence of this more respectful and dignified
masculinity in himself and his men, and by extension, in the entire
governmental apparatus that he embodies. Thus when Dopdi repeatedly
challenges him to “counter” her, the critique of gender becomes also a
critique of the gendered system that legitimizes such encounter killings.

2.8 LET US SUM UP

In this Unit, you have engaged with broadly three related issues: the first
was the question of gender, and how to understand it; the second was the
issue of femininities, and how to examine and understand them; and the
third was the specific case of the formation and constitution of gender,
especially femininities, in the Indian case. You learned of the distinctions
between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, and got an overview of some of the issues
involved in the debate around these two terms. We then explored the
relations between gender and the concept of patriarchy, as one of the main
factors that determine the specific forms and structures taken by
masculinities and femininities in a given context.

The nature of patriarchal structures changes geographically from society to

society and historically from period to period. But these structures also
impinge on and mould each other, when they come in contact. Hence, we
then explored the ways in which gender relations and the patriarchal
formations they were embedded in evolved in the European context during
the colonial period, especially in the establishment of colonies under various
imperial regimes. In the process we discovered that the formations of
masculinities and femininities in the Indian context have been substantially
shaped by the colonial encounter. We then glanced at some of the ways in
which the nationalist movement attempted to subvert some of the gender
implications of colonial conquest. But we also saw how the post-colonial
state effectively reintroduced these same gendered meanings in the process
of establishing itself, in the process of internal colonialism that occurred
after independence. We then examined Mahasweta Devi’s short story,
‘Draupadi’, as a brilliant account of how such gendered formations are
deployed in administration, and how they may also be subverted. Through
this Unit, you have engaged with the question of gender then, not just as
a theoretical exercise, but through the analysis of a narrative of its

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Gender, Sexuality Nation intersections with other formations of power. You should now be equipped
to engage with questions of femininity and its implications for nationalism.

2.9 UNIT END QUESTIONS

1) Do you agree with the view that masculinity and femininity are not
singular but plural phenomena? Give a reasoned answer.

2) How did colonialism impact on gender formation in the colonies? Discuss

with the help of examples from the Indian case.

3) Do you agree with the view that although Dopdi challenges the existing
and deeply gendered dispensation of power, she does not actually bring
about a transformation in it? Justify your response.

2.10 REFERENCES
Armstrong, Nancy (1987). The Rise of the Domestic Woman in The Ideology
of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality. Nancy Armstrong
and Leonard Tennenhouse (Eds.). London: Methuen.

Bhatt, Chetan (2001).Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern

Myths. Oxford: Berg.

Butler, Judith (1990). “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” in

Performing Feminisms, S-E. Case (Ed.). Baltimore: John Hopkins University.

Butler, Judith (1999). Gender Trouble. London: Routledge.

Caplan, Patricia (1987). (Ed.) The Cultural Construction of Sexuality. London:

Tavistock.

Chatterjee, Partha (1993). “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s

Question” in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Ed). Recasting Women:
Essays on Colonial History. New Delhi: Kali.

Chodorow, Nancy (1978 [1995]). Reproducing Mothering, Berkeley: University

of California Press.

Dalmia Vasudha and Heinrich von Stietencron’s (1995). (Eds.). Representing

Hinduism: The Constructions of Religious Traditions and Identity. New Delhi:
Sage.

de Beauvoir, Simone (1972 [1949] ). The Second Sex. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Engels, Frederick (2004 [1884]). The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State. Chippendale: Resistance Books.

Enloe, Cynthia (1989). Bananas, Beaches, Bases: Making Feminist Sense of

International Politics. London: Pandora.

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Gabriel, Karen (2010). Melodrama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of Femininity

Bombay Cinema 1970-2000. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.

Gibson-Graham, J K, Stephen A Resnick and Richard D Wolff (2000) (Eds.).

Class and its Others. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hall, Donald (1994)(Ed.). Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian

Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hind, Robert J. (1984). The Internal Colonial Concept. Comparative Studies

in Society and History. Vol.26, No.3,July pp 543-568.

MacKinnon, Catherine (1989). Toward a Feminist Theory of State. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Meyers,T. (1997). “I M Young”. Feminist Social Thought: A Reader. London:

Routledge.

Meyers,T, and Diana Tietjens (1997)(Ed.). Feminist Social Thought: A Reader.

London: Routledge.

Mikkola, Mari (2012). Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender in The

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,Fall Edition,Edward N. Zalta (Ed.). at
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/feminism-gender/.
Retrieved 9th December 2013.

Mosse, George L. (1985). Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and

Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: H. Fertig.

Michael Rosenthal (1986). The Character Factory: Baden Powell and the
Origins of the Boy Scout Movement. London: Collins.

Rowbotham, Judith (1989). Good Girls Make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls
in Victorian Fiction. London: Basil Blackwell.

Rubin, Gayle (1975). The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’
of Sex in Toward an Anthropology of Women, R. Reiter (Ed.), New York:
Monthly Review Press.

Sangari, Kumkum and Sudesh Vaid (1989) (Eds.) Recasting Women: Essays in
Colonial History. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

Sinha, Mrinalini (1995). Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman’ and

the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the late 19th Century. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.

Spelman, Elizabeth (1988).Inessential Woman. Boston: Beacon Press.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1981). ‘Draupadi’ by Mahasweta Devi’. Critical

Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 2, Writing and Sexual Difference. Winter, 1981, pp. 381-
402, http://files.adulteducation.at/uploads/vateruni/Gayatri Spivak
DraupadibyMahasvetaDevi.pdf, Retrieved, 9 December 2013.
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Gender, Sexuality Nation Tickner, Ann J. (1992). Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. New York: Columbia University
Press.

Vijayan, Prem Kumar (2012). Making the Pitrubhumi: Masculine Hegemony

and the Formation of the Hindu Nation. PhD Thesis. The Hague: The Institute
of Social Studies, at http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/32246/ThesisPDC.pdf
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Williamson, F. (2012). Public and Private Worlds? Social History, Gender and
Space. History Compass. No 10 pp.633–643

Zavos, John (2000). The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India. Delhi:

OUP.

2.11 SUGGESTED READINGS

Butler, Judith (1999). Gender Trouble. London: Routledge.

Gabriel, Karen (2010). Melodrama and the Nation: Sexual Economies of

Bombay Cinema 1970-2000. New Delhi: Women Unlimited

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1981). ‘Draupadi by Mahasweta Devi. Critical

Inquiry.Vol. 8, No. 2, Writing and Sexual Difference. Winter, 1981, pp. 381-
402, at http://files.adulteducation.at/uploads/vateruni/Gayatri Spivak
DraupadibyMahasvetaDevi.pdf.

Zavos, John (2000). The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India. Delhi:

OUP.

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