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?
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