Abstract
Discontent is a powerful intellectual tool which is necessary for the continued relevance and rejuvenation of any serious political project and the same holds true for feminism. As feminism has gone mainstream, accruing respectability and inclusion, it has also given rise to doubts about its continued relevance. In the process of its mainstreaming, feminism became restricted to a dualistic understanding of sex/gender, hardened into a paralytic state of a grand theory, and became easily amenable to the logics of neoliberal and neoconservative movements. Feminisms of Discontent, an edited volume of 10 chapters, draws its intellectual rigour from ‘casting the gaze of discontent back onto feminism’ (p. ix), in the context of law. Using the tool of discontent, the essays in the book dismantle the idea of a singular strand of feminism and bring to light the many ‘feminisms’. As Brenda Cossman writes in the first chapter, it is a shift from ‘criticism to critique’ (p. 3), where intellectual feminism is taking its subject apart and at the same time throwing up for dialogue how a politics can be envisioned which is based on a non-essentialised political identity. The edited volume, which has grown out of the proceedings of a conference held in 2011, is organised into two sections. The first section deals squarely with the mistakes of feminist political engagement and draws insights from these discontents. The second section looks at identity categories beyond gender and their salience for feminism.
The first section titled ‘A Feminist Project: The Rights and Wrongs of Feminist Political Engagement’ consists of chapters that critique feminism’s exclusionary practices and its blind spots. Brenda Cossman in the first chapter directs our attention to how feminism has lost much of its earlier jouissance of creative engagement and has over time become an orthodoxy. Through a thought-provoking engagement with Wendy Brown’s and Judith Butler’s writings of critique, Cossman argues that to break free from the stasis that is plaguing it, feminism has to move from criticism to critique. Engaging with the sexual assault charges against Julian Assange and the feminist responses to it, Cossman urges feminists to tread more difficult paths and to turn their critical lens on the entire apparatus of sexual legislation, the slippery terrains of consent, the languages deployed to describe sexual assault and the discursive slippages which occur as allegations of sexual assault travel across borders. In the following chapter, Ratna Kapur critically scrutinises how the dominant or structural feminism of the 1980s in India produced a victim subject to reinforcing its anti-Western and nationalist credentials. Sex was articulated through the discourse of violence and affirmative expressions of sexuality as pleasure were avoided. This conception of feminism was challenged by sexual subalterns such as sex workers, gays and lesbians as well as Muslim women. Kapur looks towards campaigns like slut walk as a form of ‘feminism lite’, a form of analytical space-clearing which can yield to the decimation of many feminist conceits. Kerry Rittich and Margaret Thorton, in their respective chapters in the section, interrogate how market-facilitating rule of law and good governance projects have impacted the construction of gender. Rittich critiques second-wave feminism’s dependence on the state for gender equality and the concomitant investment in public law as drivers of change. This meant a lack of engagement with private laws such as property laws, contract laws, etc. even when resistance to the public/private divide was a central organising principle of the feminist project. But with the changing governance and the emergence of new actors and institutions in the production of global legal norms other than the state, these feminist blindspots proved costly. In a different engagement with the question of equality, Thornton critiques the feminist move away from the principle of gender equality and asks the difficult question as to whether the disintegration of the category ‘woman’ is concomitant with the neoliberal turn of abandoning equality. Thornton argues that feminist legal scholars avoid the nuanced understanding of ‘woman’ as it is often incomprehensible to judges and law reformers, leaving the feminist activist without an ally in her radical questioning of the feminist subject. The privileging of applied knowledge, as opposed to critical and theoretical knowledge, as a result of neoliberal commodification of education also led to students of law desisting from taking courses in feminism. In the final chapter of this section, Lakshmi Arya, relying on the non-normative forms of marriage, inheritance, family and fidelity as they existed in 19th- and mid-20th-century Mysore, and the non-availability of hardened norms that could be malleable to British law regarding adultery, provides an interesting insight into the way the Western philosophical tradition problematises questions of normativity and freedom. She contends that the modes of configuration of subject knowledge and action in the Indian context differ from the Western context which leads to different conceptualisations of power and emancipation, a point that has to be heeded by Indian feminists.
The second section of the book looks into identity categories beyond gender and how feminist critique can be applied in other contexts as well as can learn from other axes of analysis. This section of the book delves into specific identity categories and is an interesting read which envisions the different possible trajectories through which feminism can revive itself. Ashleigh Barnes in her chapter employs the postmodern feminist lens to critique the category of the child as articulated within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and points to the many categories of children (such as the children of parents with substance-abuse problems, children of parents with HIV/AIDS and street children) who are excluded because of an uncritical adaptation of ‘family’ as a safe and happy place. In this section, Vasuki Nesiah uses a feminist critique to look at the formation of the category ‘victim’ in transitional justice mechanisms through an interplay between icons and measures, while Maneesha Deckha critiques the elision of the non-human, and advocates for the subverting of the human/animal binary in postcolonial feminism. Aziza Ahmed and Arvind Narrain draw from queer theory to provide insights for feminism. Narrain deploys a queer perspective for a reworking and questioning of democratic practice in itself. He argues that a queer vision, seen through the politics of location, questions the notions of purity and opens up a space for those at the margins of hegemonic structures, while simultaneously loosening the rigid structures of caste, gender and heteronormative sexuality, thereby creating a politics of radical kinship. Ahmed provides a scathing critique of dominance and of cultural feminists who used an uncritical mode of male/female subordination in their response to the photographs of torture that emerged from Abu Ghraib. They were thus complicit in the erasure of Muslim men as victims of the ‘War on Terror’. Ahmed relies on a queer theoretical lens which does not foreclose an understanding of men as individuals harmed by torture and of women as possible perpetrators, thus bringing to light the harm done to Muslim men and making the photographs, at last, visible in their injury.