The Art of Cutting One's Own Hair

I have been asked by a few people how I managed to give myself a haircut during the COVID-19 lockdown. Some asked me for advice and a tutorial. Here are some useful tips:

Cutting one's own hair is an art. One uses not just sight but more importantly touch. One cannot cut one's hair at one go. Like art, it is work in progress and takes a few days to perfect.
To start with one needs to have an intimate knowledge of one's hair in terms of the shape and feel of it. One needs to know what the final result will look like and work towards that. As my friend Selva says, cutting one's hair is like doing sculpture; you are chiseling out the extra bits to arrive at the final product.
Start with the bits that seem obviously out of place. For instance the bits on the sides of the head which curl out, or the bits at the nape of the neck which are overgrown and which bother you. One needs to be extra careful at the front, I cut that the last.
Now for the back of the head, one needs to use one's touch. One will know if certain bits are longer than usual. Also decide whether you want steps or a straight cut. Use your hands to feel whether the hair at the back is even or not. Touch is most important while cutting your hair at the back of your head. 

To cut hair on any part of the head, grab the extra bit with one hand and chop with the other. 

the first haircut won't be good, just like the first draft of any bit of writing one might do. The second will be better. Also you can get peer reviews from others around to improve. Try taking a photo of the back of your head to get an idea. Use the front camera, look back and click a photo. 

This advice/tutorial is mostly for those who have short hair like me.
Good luck with giving yourself a haircut, it is pleasurable and fun; on the plus side, you save money and feel neat and tidy in the end. 

The “Unspeakable Inequalities”: Gender-Neutrality and Educational Spaces

Postfeminism is a term used to herald a time when equality is supposedly reached and when feminism is then no longer required. Postfeminism can be thought of as an epistemic break from the second wave, but most importantly it is played out in the context of media culture and is often bemoaned as lacking a political agenda. Postfeminism is contextually located in a neoliberal and globalised first world space where there is a constant emphasis on choice and empowerment through a language of the media and globalisation (Gill 2007a). Rosalind Gill and Angela McRobbie warn us of taking this ‘choice’ discourse at face value and try to critically think about the problems and implications of the constant occupations with the self and the body. This move from sexual object to sexual subject is not totally unproblematic (Gill 2007a). Rosalind Gill (2007b) argues that one needs to look at the way power works in these contexts. One needs to be wary of being celebratory of this media discourse of ‘choice’ and unpack the ways in which it interpellates women into normalised roles.

Following from Bartky’s reading of Foucault’s modernisation of power, Rosalind Gill (2007a) looks at how the female body is overly sexualised and why one needs to be critical of this move. At the same time, Gill observes a returning to the traditional pleasures of femininity: the heterosexual family, giving up work, taking the husband’s name among a few other things. Gill sees this as telling us two things: one, the 'return of the repressed' and second as prefeminist ideas being repackaged as postfeminism. These do not put into question normative heterosexual femininity. The danger that Gill reads into it is that all of this is packaged in the language of neoliberal individualism.

It is in this postfeminist context that Rosalind Gill (2011a) argues that it’s time to use the word sexism again and recover it from its previous meanings. She looks at the new forms that sexism takes in the present context, where equality is assumed and yet where men are privileged in various ways. These inequalities are those which exist outside the strategies which are used to challenge these inequalities: like anti-discrimination laws etc. Rosalind Gill calls them unspeakable inequalities: “largely unnoticed and unspoken about even by those most adversely affected by them” (Gill, 2011: 5). Talking about it in the contemporary media workplace, she says that the new and mutated form of sexism which exists works precisely through “the invalidation and annihilation of any language for talking about structural inequalities. The potency of sexism lies in its very unspeakability” (Gill, 2011: 5).

The piece follows from this strand of post-feminism to look at the unspeakable inequalities that work out in spaces which have a gender-neutral policy, especially in educational spaces. What happens when one has formal equality between boys and girls in educational institutions? What are the spaces for resistance then based on gender discrimination? How do women and men negotiate with these in such an environment?

Some educational institutions in India follow a policy of gender equality, but in practice there exist subtle forms of gender power relations and a disciplining of the female body. Despite the fact that boys and girls study together, play together, have access to the same resources, gender socialisation plays a role in ways in which certain disciplinary norms are at work.

When I turned 21, in my final year of college, I was gifted my first mobile phone. It was a very basic model and only allowed me to make and receive calls and messages among a few other basic functions like the calculator, alarm clock etc. Some of my friends too had a mobile, and as young people in the first decade of the 21^st century, we gladly exchanged jokes via the medium of messages. One such kind of joke which was circulating among my friends and me during that time- mostly girl friends and a select few boys- were ‘non-veg jokes’ or jokes with a certain degree of sexual content. One day I sent one such joke, a witty one at that, to a girl friend. When she received my message, she was intercepted by a male friend who on reading the message, immediately exclaimed with much shock along the following lines “what a dirty joke, oh my god, she sends these kinds of jokes!” And the news spread. Before I knew, everyone knew that I sent and received non-veg jokes via sms. I was immediately told by some friends that the jokes that I sent to a male friend in the hostel was read by all the boys there. Boys started telling me that I sent dirty jokes, and that they would not communicate with me through sms. It came to the point where boys refused to have my mobile number because I sent ‘dirty jokes’!

At that time I was amused at the whole incident. It did not really strike me as basically problematic. But now I can read the complexities of the whole ‘harmless little’ incident.

The reaction to the message came from the young men. And suddenly the very young men who would watch porn slyly on the side, became scandalised by a young woman exchanging a witty joke with sexual material with another woman. It was almost as if, for the men in question, the woman who was worth keeping in touch with or considering part of one’s social circle was someone who was devoid of any interest in sexuality or sexual material. It was a subtle process of ‘slut shaming’[1] and excluding women who have any interest in sexuality. At the same time, it brought to light the Madonna-whore complex at work in the young men’s minds and how this binary of the good woman/bad woman orders everyday interactions.

And this took place in a college which prided itself on being ‘equal’ to men and women, which thought that gender identity was not imposed on any of its students. But I’m sure if you ask the women, they would tell of many more such incidents. But because of the gender neutral policy, the space to talk meaningfully about prejudices was missing.

Merely having a policy about equal access to resources does not make any space gender-neutral or even gender-less, or equal. The socialisation of students among themselves often betrays some amount of misogyny. It does not change how a boy perceives women and categorises them into the binaries of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ woman, or the Madonna-whore complex. For instance in a heterogeneous group comprised of boys and girls, boys might prefer the fairer girls and thinner ones and might exclude or shame the ones who do not adhere to a normative sense of the feminine. When this happens, the space to protest, resist or seek some form of equality and justice is suddenly missing. This is so because the school space, which is supposed to be ‘gender-neutral’ or ‘gender-transcendental’ does not recognise these every day acts of the disciplining of the female body. At the same time, having a gender-neutral policy makes one incapable of literally speaking about what has recently been coined ‘slut shaming’. ‘Slut shaming’ in a gender-neutral college then renders the very act unspeakable. Those who protest or dissent then carry the burden of being gendered, or worrying too much about gender in a gender-less world, just like those who talk about caste discrimination suddenly carry the burden of caste, absolving the higher castes of any caste identity.

References

Gill, Rosalind (2007a) “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility”. European

 Journal of Cultural Studies, 10 (2): 147-166.

Gill, Rosalind. (2007b). “Critical Respect: The Difficulties and Dilemmas of Agency and

            ‘Choice’ for  Feminism”. European Journal of Women’s Studies. 14(1): 69–80.

Gill, Rosalind. (2011) “Sexism Reloaded, or, It’s Time to Get Angry Again”. Feminist Media

Studies 11(1): 61-71.

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[1]  ‘Slut shaming’ is a way in which women who do not confirm to gender expectations or who act on/acknowledge sexual feelings are made to feel inferior and/or are discriminated against. This is done in multiple ways and needn’t involve the use of the word ‘slut’ or any other related word.

A BOOK REVIEW OF HANSEN’S VIOLENCE IN URBAN INDIA

In Violence in Urban India (2001), Thomas Blom Hansen traces the plebeian politics in Mumbai, focusing on the rise of the Shiv Sena in Bombay. This review traces the basic arguments made in the book, a brief comparison with other books on the same topic, a comment on other reviews, some interesting points in the book and the shortcomings in the book.

Hansen makes three arguments in the book: one, he looks at the politics of xenophobia and Hindu nationalism not as an anomaly but “rather as possibilities always folded into India’s unique experience of modernity and democracy” (9). The notion that communal and secular are clear opposites is a spurious claim. Taking the case of Shiv Sena, Hansen states that this party “has enthusiastically embraced modern city life and technological progress” (9); this is what seems to be the key to its success.  

      Two, the rise of Shiv Sena was made possible by the decline of the earlier political culture. Shiv Sena developed the rhetoric of plebeian politics, employing a violent strategy of political performance (9).  

            Three, Hansen traces how the identity of the Marathi individual is fluid and fragmented and that caste and religious groups are not a priori but are created through performance and ritual.

            In chapter one, Hansen explores “the ethno-historical imagination centered around the history of the eighteenth century Maratha empire” (10). Shivaji from the past becomes the rallying point for the Marathas, a case of the formation of identity which constructs itself as the descendants of the valiant warrior with the other as the Brahmans and upper castes. The second chapter traces the changing identities and affiliations of the Shiv Sena and how it used it violent rhetoric to produce xenophobia. Chapter three traces the anti-Muslim Hindutva rhetoric of the Shiv Sena and how the recovery of masculinity found an important place in the programme of Shiv Sena’s Maratha nation formation. The fourth explores Shiv Sena’s hold in the industrial city of Thane and how its power played out in that field. The fifth chapter explores the Bombay riots in 1992-3 and the subsequent inquiry into it- the Shrikrishna commission reports. This sheds light on the relation between the police, the residents, the production of truth during the commission. Chapter six, looks at the Muslim Mohalla, how Muslim identities are shaped, the rise of gansterism, the dons and dadas of the Muslim community. The last chapter explores some theoretical issues, elaborating on Zizek’s notion of ‘anticipatory identification’ and the questions of the beautification of the city, the question of slums and so on. In the conclusion, Hansen problematises Chatterjee’s notion of the political society while raising questions about what is acceptable and what is not a political society.

            What are Hansen’s sources? Apart from the usual academic books and articles for the history of Bombay, Hansen has used ethnographic material- informants, interviews, pamphlets, newspaper articles. The pamphlet ‘Shiv Sena Speaks’, Bal Thackeray’s satirical weekly Marmik, the daily newspaper Saamna, other papers like the TOI, interviews with Shiv Sena MLAs, BKS leader, former mayor of Bombay, confidante of Thackeray, his physician/family doctor. Apart from interviewing authorities, he also has informants, whose identities are not cited. Hansen has placed his official informants, but not his other informants- he hasn’t stated the baggage of his other informants, those of the official ones are self-explanatory. 

            How is this book different from the other book Hansen has written and how does it differ from the other books on Shiv Sena? Hansen’s earlier book The Saffron Wave: Democracy and the Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (1999), centres around the analysis of the RSS, VHP and the BJP. His main contention is that Hindu nationalism emerged in the broader realm of public culture (Hansen 1999, 4). Though he concentrates on the workings of RSS, BJP and VHP, Hansen does make some comparisons between the Shiv Sena and these organisations. He writes about the militant youth organisation Patit Pawan (literally the purification of the fallen), in Pune, Maharasthra, which consists mostly of students, who are non-Brahmins and come from poor and middle class families in the slums. Their style of working is unlike that of the RSS. The latter has the Brahmin quiet style of working; the former has a vagabond Maratha working style which is similar to the Shiv Sena- militant, activist, simple and with a highly communal version of the Hindutva. But yet there is a difference- the Shiv Sena is more plebeian, the Patit Pawan aims for middle class respectability (Hansen 1999, 122-24).

            The Shiv Sena shakha notion is derived from the RSS, yet there are fundamental differences between the two- the BJP presents the respectable Hindutva while the Shiv Sena has a strongman style with a plebeian agenda and an increased criminalization. Apart from that Hansen does not build any similarities between these two types of organisations. He has written two books on each topic separately, but he does not offer an adequate comparison in either of the books.

            So far, two scholarly books have been written on the Shiv Sena: one Dipankar Gupta’s Nativism in a Metropolis: the Shiv Sena in Bombay (1982), and the other more recent one Julia Eckert’s The Charisma of Direct Action: Power, Politics and the Shiv Sena (2003). Gupta’s book claims to be the first full length study of Shiv Sena. It is his PhD thesis for which Gupta conducted his fieldwork in 1973. It was a study of the Shiv Sena from 1966 to 1974, and is done from a Marxist perspective. Gupta’s theoretical framework is structured around the sociology of social movements. Gupta analyses Shiv Sena’s structure, ideology, areas of activism from ’66 to ’74. He traces the background and cause of the rise of the Shiv Sena to a decrease in employment, to the communal history of Bombay, migration, economic structure and the Sena’s sense of nativism. Its origins lie in Thackeray’s Marmik which influenced a wide range of readers. The participants of the movement are sainiks from the lower and middle classes. Gupta uses the Weberian concept of charisma for Thackeray’s popularity; Gupta also adopts John Davis’ concept of ‘source credibility’ to explain Thackeray’s credibility. Gupta arrives at the conclusion that though the Sena holds sway in Mumbai, it has no impact outside the city- in rural areas- or in other parts of the country. Gupta’s is a sociological and Marxist account of the Shiv Sena. Though Gupta and Hansen both use ethnographic material, there is a gap of almost three decades between both books. Gupta thrust is on sociology; while Hansen’s theoretical framework is psychoanalysis- he uses Lacan, Zizek, and also Foucault. He also problematises Chatterjee’s notion of the political society.

            Eckert seeks to see how anti-democratic party succeeds in a democracy using the latter’s framework for its political success. This is demonstrated by exploring the case of the Shiv Sena. Eckert writes about the Shakha, popular culture, plebeian politics, charisma of the leader, militant enmity, violence as a method and ideology. But there doesn’t seem to be any reference to ethnographic work. The sources are, scholarly books, newspapers such as the Hindu, TOI, The afternoon and evening news, magazine such as the Week, Frontline, Outlook, and Samna. Though the topics covered are the same, the thrust seems different- the question also is different. Most importantly it is the methodology and sources which are different. If I maintain that Hansen’s book is more authentic since it involves ethnographic work, does it mean that I am privileging empirical data?  

            What are the interesting points of the book? The ethnographic data and its interpretation is definitely a plus point. But there are some issues in the second chapter which need some elaboration since it traces the continuous shift of identities. SMS and later the Shiv Sena, have constantly redefined their alliances and affiliations with different identities. The construction of their identity as well as that of their opponents changes with time and is often contradictory. Shiv Sena is an ambiguous party with often contradictory alliances which change over time. The ‘others’ were mostly the outsiders, the immigrants, the non-Marathis. But this category too keeps changing subtly. 

            During the battle for Bombay in 1956, the emergence of new identities of SMS and Marathi identity clashed with the economic interest. At that point the unilingual Marathi self was affiliated to Marathas, Brahmans, Hinduism/Hindu culture and non-brahmans as well. It was “a rather fragile coalition of disparate forces that never became organized into a permanent structure” (43). The others were the business communities of Gujaratis, Marwaris and Parsis, the urban western elite. The identities were mostly linguistic urban/rural, regional and economic. The religious angle was added later-“the religious supplement- Hindu and anti-Muslim- to the regional/ linguistic construction” (43).

            Hansen mentions how the Shiv Sena included the peasants and lower-caste politicians and how the previously aligned Brahmans, intellectuals and artists didn’t find a place in the linguistic movement (45). There is this shift in defining whom to include in the movement.

            When the Shiv Sena was formed in 1966, the rhetoric indicated the sons-of-the soil movement, with a hyper-masculinity, tiger images and construction of the other as the South Indian who was rather not more in number but stealing the Maharashtrian’s white collar jobs.

            At the same time there is an ambiguity of class in the party. The Sena depends on the marginalised, brutal, street lower class males. At the same time the Sena emerged from the middle class environments. “From Shiv Sena’s early phase, rather disparate elements of proletarian street culture, entrepreneurial aspirations, as well as Marathis speakers’ middle class desires of respectability and recognition have co-existed within the organisation”. (47)

            The Sena also projected itself as a group for the common man, to the lower-middle-class families “squeezed between the city’s powerful economic and political elite and large, self-conscious working-class communities” (50). Though it supported the cause of Marathi, it demanded in the 1970s that English be the medium of instruction at all levels (52).

The others keep changing too. First it was the South Indians, then the Communists then the Muslims. The categories of the others change from regional to political to religious. The Sena in 1969 had as its primary opponent the Communists. This attracted the support of the Congress and the big business houses: the Ambanis, Nirlons, Bajaj. The latter is unusual since during the primary opponents during the Battle for Bombay were these very business houses and communities- the Gujaratis, Marwaris and Parsis. 

            The Sena’s political affiliations also keep changing: Shiv Sena supported the Congress during the emergency and since the 80s has shifted its allegiance to the BJP.

In 1979, the Shiv Sena also tried to have negotiations with an unlikely ally: the Muslims. According to one of Hansen’s informants, this was a desperate measure to survive.

The one identity of Shiv Sena is constant: the Marathi- linguistic/regional and the Hindu- religious identity. The other factors like, class, caste, economics, political party affiliations keep shifting.

This gives rise to a question which remains unanswered in Hansen’s book: why didn’t other cities go the Mumbai way. Several other cities were renamed- Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai. These Metros also had immigrants coming in to work; even they had business communities such as the Marwaris, the Gujaratis and so on. Especially Kolkata has a large Marwari population. How is it that there was no such party formation/assertion of linguistic/regional identity in these metros revolting against the immigrants, or business houses or the move to maintain regional and linguistic purity? Why didn’t these other cities go the Mumbai way? What made Mumbai out of all other metros go this way? There is a discontent against immigrants such as in Bangalore or Kolkata. Why is it that that doesn’t give rise to identity politics like in Mumbai?

The other interesting point is the constant references to Thackeray urging the men to regain their masculinity.

In Lacanian terms, the Muslims in India are the objet petit a representing what is “lacking” in the Hindu, namely weakness, effeminacy and so on. The remedy Thackeray prescribes is to recover Hindu aggressiveness, restore the martial spirit a-of the Marathas. The recurrent references to Shivshakti (Shivaji power), to the myths and anecdotes of Shivaji, to the worship of the war goddess Bhawani all contribute to that scheme (Hansen 2001, 90).

This recovery of masculinity is reiterated in Nandy’s chapter on the Psychology of Colonialism in The Intimate Enemy (1983). Following the process of identification with the aggressor, the Indians, according to Nandy

Saw their salvation in becoming more like the British... they may not have fully shared the British idea of the martial races- the hyper-masculine, manifestly courageous, superbly loyal Indian castes and subcultures mirroring the British middle-class sexual stereotypes- but they did resurrect the ideology of the martial races latent in the traditional Indian concept of statecraft... (Nandy 7).

The Indians in the pre-Gandhian era, sought to redeem their masculinity to defeat the British, and subscribe to aggression, achievement and power. (Nandy 8, 9).

There have been several reviews of Hansen’s book. Apart from the usual delineation of the book and what it says, and also praises for it, Madhavi Kale and Rachel Dwyer point out to certain lacks in the book. Kale mentions two lacks in her review- one is the absence of the Dalit movement which “provided a ‘strong antidote’ to Hindu nationalism for several decades”. The other is the absence of women- the wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, of these plebeian youth involved with the Shiv Sena. Moreover, what is the implication of the movement in the spheres of domesticity and that of the public sphere for both men and women? (1278)

 Dwyer rather concentrates on the nature of sources: the scarcity of Marathi language material, printed as well as electronic media, the lack of discussion of how masculinity and criminality changed in the 70s, the relationship between Hindi and Marathi languages otherwise and in the media, the lack of mention of Marathi fiction and writing, theatre and press. Dwyer also feels that the glossary needs to be checked by a linguist, the book also requires a proper index and map (109, 110).

            There are a few other things which Hansen has left unexplored- on is the question of the women participants in the Shiv Sena and the other is the question of the citizenship of the dada/don leader figure. The former question seems to have found an answer in Atreyee Sen’s  Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (2008). She has done extensive fieldwork in the slums of Mumbai among the women members of the Mahila Aghadi (Women’s Front), a women’s branch of the Shiv Sena which is took part in the communal riots in ’92-3. Her book is a continuation and a complement to Hansen’s which does not elaborate on the women’s role in the Shiv Sena movement.

            Overall Hansen’s book is an interesting ethnographic account of the Shiv Sena. Even though the critical engagement seems to be minimal the book provides ethnographic insights which one would otherwise miss in a critical analysis of the Shiv Sena.

References

Dwyer, Rachel. . “Review of Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial

Bombay by Thomas Blom Hansen”. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 66.1 (2003): 108-110.

Eckert, Julia. 2003. The Charisma of Direct Action: Power, Politics and the Shiv Sena. Delhi,

            OUP.

Gupta, Dipankar. 1982. Nativism in a Metropolis: the Shiv Sena in Bombay. Delhi, Manohar

            Publications. 

Hansen, Thomas Blom. 1999. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and the Hindu Nationalism in

Modern India. Delhi, OUP.

------------------------------. 2001. Violence in Urban India: Identity Politics, ‘Mumbai’ and the

          Postcolonial City. Delhi, Permament Black.

Kale, Madhavi. “Review of Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay

            By Thomas Blom Hansen”. Journal of Asian Studies. 62.4 (2003): 1276-1278.

Nandy, Ashish. 1983. The Intimate Enemy. Delhi, OUP.

Sen, Atreyee. 2008. Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum.

            Delhi, Zubaan.  

Sex, caste, feminism and adolescents: the debate on ‘choice’ and ‘victimhood’ DRAFT 1- Crude beginnings

The debate on choice/agency/pleasure and violence/victimhood within feminism has raged within various contexts, pornography, prostitution, sexuality among others. In this paper I would like to look at some of the ways in which this debate has played out in various contexts and try to make the connections between sex, caste, feminism and this debate and try and see how this could provide a framework to think about adolescent sexuality and sex education.   

One of the key sites for the debate on choice/agency/pleasure and violence was during the sex wars in the USA during the 1980s. In fact one can trace the beginnings of the pleasure debate to the sex wars in the United States, especially to the Barnard College Conference in 1982. The Barnard Conference on the Politics of Sexuality brought together theorists who wanted to “expand the analysis of pleasure” without discounting or ignoring the dangers of sexuality and violence. The conference aimed at theorising pleasure for women. This brought a public onslaught where the anti- pornography, WAP (Women Against Pornography) brigade staged a public protest.

The anti-censorship and pro-sex/sex-positive position, argues against the anti-porn movement by maintaining that looking for an end to violence against women by ending porn is not the solution. The problem of violence is structural; it is embedded in the structures of the family, state, religion and not in representations of sexually explicit material like porn. What needs to be addressed is the sexism in porn, the right to sex education and so and not the elimination of porn as a whole. The anti-porn movement has taken strong images of sexuality which might not be very familiar to women, and strong feelings about rape and violence and abuse and conflated the two and said they are the same thing. Looking at the industry of the representation of sexual fantasy, Gayle Rubin maintains that Harlequin romance novels rather reproduce gender hierarchy, but no one takes to the streets to protest against it. S/M porn is mostly about fantasies and the category of those who read and watch S/M sex and the category of rapists is very different. (Rubin 1982)  

Gayle Rubin, Carole Vance, the organisers of the conference thought that it was important to speak about women’s sexual pleasure because without it one ran the danger of perpetually placing female sexuality within the domain of danger and victimhood, and not allowing space for other forms of experiences, especially desire. The position that feminists took to examine the politics of female sexuality was to see how sexuality was a question more complex than just danger and humiliation. It involved both pleasure and danger, not in black and white terms but with an intermixture which was both temporal and spatial. Vance argued that pleasure and its acknowledgement becomes a tool for empowerment.

This discourse of pleasure also spilt into the debate on education and sexuality education in the United States. Michelle Fine, in her seminal article in 1988, argued eloquently for the need of desire and sexuality in education and said that the discourse of desire was missing. Fine, stated that “despite substantial evidence on the success of both school-based health clinics and access to sexuality information, the majority of public schools do not sanction or provide such information. As a result, female students, particularly low-income ones, suffer most from the inadequacies of present sex education policies. Current practices and language lead to increased experiences of victimization, teenage pregnancy, and increased dropout rates”. This essay sparked off a need to include desire and pleasure in the curriculum of sexuality though as Fine has lamented, thirty years later, that little in terms of actual implementation has actually happened in schools.

Later, in another context, Louisa Allen and some others have argued how the inclusion of desire and pleasure in the curriculum could be not so desirable since it could set desire and pleasure as the new unreachable goal, which could be again harmful.

These debates then address the questions of not just pleasure but also of choice and agency and the lack of it. Intrinsic in the argument of pleasure and desire is the question of choice and agency.

In the present context we need to be able to complicate our understanding of agency and choice, and place it in its cultural context. As Rosalind Gill makes her case in the context of consumerism and a post-feminist UK by arguing that the so-called “choices” of women to wear G strings is not as autonomous as we might think them to be. They have to be placed in a cultural context where one is continuously exposed to images which shape and influence this ‘choice’. She cites Modleski in saying that “we exist inside ideology, that we are all victims, down to the very depths of our psyches, of political and cultural domination”.

Though I cannot argue with Rosalind Gill’s call to contextualisation and Modleski’s rather bleak view of ‘victomhood’, I feel that what is understated is a harking back to the Althusserian model of interpellation. The young women in the 1990s and later in the UK were all interpellated into wearing G strings. It seems somehow that the debate of agency has come full circle- from the seemingly non-agential interpellation to the assertion of autonomy and the call to ‘choice’ and agency and back to a re-configured sense of interpellation in a post-feminist era. 

The discourse of ‘choice’, Gill argues, erases the whole work that post-structuralism and postmodernism and psychoanalysis has done, and the implicit ways in which power works. Maybe Gill has a different understanding of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’, and seeks to place it in the rather individual being, and doesn’t see ‘choice’ when maybe a whole community of group of people wear, or follow a certain practice. 

The debate on choice and agency plays out in a very different context in India. In the Indian context, the debate on the discourse of choice and agency is rendered more complex by the inclusion of the category of caste. The moment caste enters the debate of choice, agency and feminist politics the categories of agency and choice stand destabilised.

Let me look at two instances where the public debate of choice, agency and caste have been played out in the last year or two in the public sphere.

The first instance is in regard to the response to the movie Dirty Picture. Jenny Rowena, looked at how the lower caste female body becomes a site for enjoyment by the upper caste male and how it is used to unleash sexual violence on. The subaltern female body becomes the site, through ritualised upper caste practices, for playing out violence and how this same body is also constructed as immoral and ‘dirty’. Thinking through this idea for the Dirty Picture, Jenny Rowena argues how most feminists missed the caste angle of the film. She maintains that Silk Smitha presents this very subaltern female body and to read the film as feminist and celebrating the sexual agency is to miss on this history of caste violence on the lower caste female body of Silk Smitha: “this intermeshing of caste and gender escapes most feminist analysis of sexuality”. In the second part of her article she asks: “How can we then celebrate this 'lack' [of endogamibility] as agential and empowering?”

The second instance, G Arunima, writing in response Gloria Steinem’s talk at JNU, in October 2012 questions the saviour attitude of feminist anti-trafficking activists. Proposing a radical and subversive critique of it she says the problem lies with feminism’s discomfort with sex and the selling of sex as a product “If we reversed the norm and only bought sex quite like a sari or toothpaste, then those grand edifices of society -marriage and family- would collapse instantly”. Though one might think she is arguing for the agency and choice of the sex worker, the point that she is making is that by ‘saving’ the ‘prostitute’ the question of sex and its relations to the monogamous marriage remain unanswered. Sex, as seen by the ‘saviour’, is dangerous, and ‘prostitution’ leads to ‘promiscuity’ as she cites an anti-trafficker. This puts the feminist anti-trafficker in the mode of the ‘moral’ saviour, aligning them with the moral and right wing brigade, and as Shohini Ghosh puts it, morality is something that feminism should not be concerned with. Though these are polemical reflections, they have, after its publication, sparked certain interesting responses.

One such response is centred on a discussion on a social networking site which asks the question: who are sex workers? It implicitly states that the sex worker is generally of lower caste and adivasi, dalit and poor women. The debate also reads the article as espousing choice and agency of the sex worker. Though the article does not deny that, its main argument is not that.

But my aim is not to take sides here and try and explain the intricacies of arguments to either party. Rather I want to use the occasion of this debate to reflect on crucial links that are being thrown up in the context of choice/agency and ‘victimhood/violence’.

What strikes one in these two instances is how the debate on choice/agency and victimhood/violence is ruptured and complicated by the inclusion of caste, a link which is missing in the earlier debates on choice and agency and most importantly in other cultural contexts. The inclusion of caste in the debate forces us to rethink choice and agency in very different ways than just purely as Rosalind Gill thinks about it as interpellation.  With this complexity laid out, I would like to propose a certain continuum of causal links which goes this way: at one end one has

1-      The State laws criminalising sex work and the anti-porn/anti-prostitution/pro-censorship position and right wing

Followed by

2-      Violence complicated by caste

Followed by

3-      The discourse of choice/agency/pleasure/desire

This continuum is specifically thought about in the context of women and feminist politics.

My question then is, can we map this debate out as a context and entry point in thinking about adolescent sexuality? If one answers in the affirmative, let me propose a similar continuum to think about adolescents:

1-      The State laws, the banning of the AEP in certain states, the Prevention of Sexual Offence Bill 2012, the right wing

Followed by

2-      Abuse and CSA

Followed by

3-      The discourse of choice/agency/pleasure/desire

This continuum would specifically be thought about in the context of adolescents and adolescent sexuality. If this is the case, then: how can we think about adolescent sexuality and adolescent sexual agency in the context of the new Bill 2012 and the banning of the AEP in certain states? What are the spaces open for adolescents to talk meaningfully about sex in such a political atmosphere? How do we understand choice, agency in this context of the Bill 2012 and the banning of AEP in certain states? How can talking about adolescent sexuality become a political project which will aim at recovering a sexual agency for adolescent as well as problematise the question of choice itself? Are we then talking about adolescents as a political category which can be recovered?