Border thinking and disidentification: Postcolonial and postsocialist feminist dialogues

Abstract

In the context of the continuing dominance of delocalised Western feminist theoretical models, which allow the non-Western and not quite Western ‘others’ to either be epistemically annihilated or appropriated, it becomes crucial to look for transformative feminist theoretical tools which can eventually help break the so-called mere recognition patterns and move in the direction of transversal dialogues, mutual learning practices and volatile but effective feminist coalitions. Speaking from the position of postcolonial and postsocialist feminist others vis-a-vis the dominant Western/Northern gender studies mainstream, and drawing on examples from a broad range of social contexts (from the Armenian queer social movement to a recent Indian gang rape controversy), the authors of this article address the validity of two such transformative feminist tools: border thinking that operates on a more general theoretical level, and disidentification that offers a more praxial operational realisation of the border principle.

Keywords

Disidentification feminist border thinking geopolitics of knowledge postcolonialism postsocialism Southern feminist theory

When I do not see plurality stressed in the very structure of a theory, I know I will have to do lots of acrobatics – of the contortionist and walk-on-the-tightrope kind – to have this speak to me without allowing the theory to distort me in my complexity.

When I do not see plurality in the very structure of a theory, I see the phantom that I am in your eyes take grotesque form and mime crudely and heavily your own image. Don’t you?

When I do not see plurality in the very structure of a theory, I see the fool that I am mimicking your image for the pleasure of noticing that you know no better. Don’t you? (Lugones, 1991: 43)

As feminist scholars from Russia, Estonia and India, we have in various ways experienced being perceived as this ‘phantom’ that María Lugones talks about when discussing non-Western¹ women’s position within feminism, miming ‘crudely and heavily’ the image of the dominant Western feminist figure, though that itself is another caricature (Lugones, 1991: 43). This experience has prompted us here to construct a conversational space focussing on collaborative praxis as a methodological and theoretical intervention.

While non-Western feminisms have existed for a long time with their own important discoveries and models, few effective modes of egalitarian or honest transcultural dialogue on feminisms (as opposed to the usual asymmetrical cosmopolitanism in which the North may easily remain ignorant of the South but the opposite is never allowed) have been offered between the global North, the global South and the many spaces that do not fit this binary, including the so-called postsocialist space. For fear of being accused of essentialism or rebuilding meta-narratives, the first generation of non-Western feminists often remained insulated, either theorising in a way that is detached from reality, or particularising concrete contexts and local experiences without looking beyond or initiating coalitions (e.g. Jayawardena, 1986; Ahmed, 1992; El-Saadawi, 1998). The second generation switched from pleading descriptive discourses and/or investigating concrete cases of discrimination, to epistemic delinking from the Western/Northern modern positions, putting forth their own theoretical standpoints, often understanding theory in a very specific experiential way (e.g. Minh-ha, 1986; Oyewumi, 1997; Sandoval, 2000; Barlas, 2002; Lugones, 2003; Shih, 2005).

Similarly, socialist feminists in a number of Central and Eastern European countries have had their own trajectories of goals, agendas and power dynamics in relation to Western feminist hegemony. For example, Yugoslavian feminists formulated their difference from European colleagues at the international conference ‘Comrade Woman – The Women’s Questions: A New Approach’ in Belgrade in 1978 (Bonfiglioli, 2009), after which Rada Iveković among others addressed the looming subalternisation of socialist women by their Western sisters and stressed the fact that there was ‘no space for unilateral thinking among us [Western and Yugoslavian feminists]’ (Iveković, 2012: 15). Postcolonial feminism, in contrast, attempted to critique both liberal and state socialist ideologies for their darker colonial sides. However, for several decades there were no intersections between liberal/socialist, postcolonial and imperial/colonialist modernities. An important exception is the postsocialist and postcolonial locale of Central Asia where initially Western-indoctrinated forms of feminism quickly transformed into a multiple critique of Western appropriation, Russian imperialist feminism and the local heteropatriarchal fundamentalism (Shakirova et al., 2002).

In the last twenty-five years, postsocialist women (in the spatial rather than ideological sense) have involuntarily joined the Global South even if geographically and culturally they belong to the North. This was a direct consequence of the coloniality of knowledge that taxonomised populations according to its Eurocentric heteropatriarchal normativity. Western feminism, with a number of notable exceptions, has been characterised by a distinctly dominant developmental narrative, which not only homogenises feminist thought but also forces non-Anglo-American feminists to ‘reposition themselves in line with the former’s logic’ (Hemmings, 2005: 116) and presupposes Western feminism as the parameter (Duhaček, 2000), even when being critical.

Several scholars have attempted to offer models for building dialogues between the North and the South. Nira Yuval-Davis, for example, has written on ‘transversal politics’ in an attempt to solve the contradiction of Western universalist theorising and non-Western descriptive particularism/relativism, framing it within her own political trajectory (Yuval-Davis, 1999). Global and transnational forms of feminism have declared their faithfulness to dialogue, but have offered limited tools to bridge theorising and oppositional praxis (Alexander and Mohanty, 1997; Waller and Marcos, 2005; Ferree and Tripp, 2006). This impasse entails confronting the limits of the ‘field imaginary’ of feminist studies, ‘the affective force that constitutes the psychic life of the field’ (Wiegman, 2012: 14), where Western feminism tends to be seen as the hegemonic centre against which the hoped-for non-Western feminism is to be framed.

Many feminist, queer and anti-racist thinkers have developed complex models of identification, drawing together relationality, intersectionality, hybridity and affect in resisting simplistic binaries (Hull et al., 1982; Muñoz, 1999; Sedgwick, 2003). However, as Sedgwick reminds us, ‘it’s far easier to deprecate the confounding, tendentious effects of binary modes of thinking – and to expose their often stultifying perseveration – than it is to articulate or model other structures of thought’ (2003: 2). Rather than address the question why Western feminist theory does not embrace Southern feminist theory/postsocialist feminist theory, we need to ask why people insist that feminist theory is by default Western? Cultivating a critical distance from the story of feminism as intrinsically Western and claiming space for a dialogic praxis demands developing new analytical tools to disrupt dominant logics and imaginaries in knowledge production. In this article, we explore ‘border thinking’ and ‘disidentification’ as examples of such transformative tools.

We are where we think

Our conversations arose from our shared experiences of working and/or living in Sweden² as ‘non-Swedes’, disidentifying with dominant modes of thinking through our specific postcolonial and postsocialist positions. Though our personal experiences differ, we fully realise that these grow out of the same phenomenon: the coloniality of knowledge that turns each of us into an exotic, impenetrable and invisible other of the neoliberal (Western) modernity – forever lagging behind, striving to assimilate and often simply representing the void.

We are interested in developing a meaningful dialogue between the genealogy of postsocialist and postcolonial feminisms. We are writing this text at a time when postcolonial feminism has taken its solid place within academia. We are concerned, however, that this has become a token addition and/or appropriation of some postcolonial feminists who have moved to Europe or the US and who publish mostly in Western journals and languages. The majority of Southern feminists, by contrast, have remained native informants and silent subalterns for Northern audiences. Postsocialist feminism found itself in a similar situation several decades later when the former second world came to be interpreted in temporal rather than spatial terms. ‘Postsocialist’ meant a time after the end of socialism and/or a worldview of those who used to be socialists or Marxists, not a complex human condition of those who did not have a choice but to continue living in these countries. As yesterday’s cousins in modernity (liberal and socialist), postsocialist feminists became aliens, sent back in history to start anew within the only liberal standards. Most Southern and postsocialist scholars in the metropole have to choose between engaging with feminist knowledge of the North or lagging behind. In doing so, they unwittingly support the feminist imperial project of the North rather than provide alternative tools for intellectual engagement. The problem in our view is not in the production of knowledge in the South or in the postsocialist world, but in its recognition and its circulation as legitimate knowledge.

At work here is the ‘coloniality of knowledge’, an epistemic regime of modernity that subsumes all models of cognition and interpretation of the world to the norms created and imposed by Western modernity and offered to humankind as universal, delocalised and disembodied. Decolonising knowledge means destabilising the subject-object relationship from the position of those who have been denied subjectivity and rationality, and undermining the very grounds of the epistemic matrix of modernity. This has to take into account the historical diversity of countries in the South and in the postsocialist space in relation to colonialism and development. For us, stressing the subjective specificity of knowledge differs from a poststructuralist claim of situated knowledges because of the continuing power asymmetries in the production and distribution of knowledge, and the colonial and imperial difference that interprets us as objects of someone else’s study or providers of raw facts for someone else’s universal and disembodied theories. Becoming epistemic subjects and looking at the world from our own origins and lived experiences, we can critique the Western imperial discourses that created the institutions of knowledge that became the measure of all possible knowledges. The question then is how to maintain a transversal dialogue between the North, the South and the different blurred zones in between, how to hear each other and find intersections? One option is to make our own body-politics and geo-politics of knowledge, being and perception transparent as a premise for a successful decolonising of gender, of thinking and of sensing. This would mean starting precisely with one’s own positioning – ‘I am where I think’ (Mignolo, 2011).

Global coloniality is always manifested in particular local forms and conditions, as well as personal histories and experiences. In our case, Madina is a postcolonial and postsocialist scholar at once, being born and raised in the USSR but originating from non-Russian and non-European colonised minorities, and thinking, writing and participating in various forms of activism as a decolonial feminist for the last fifteen years. This border positioning in between academia and activism proper, as well as in between scholarly and fictional discourses, enables engagement with political art activist projects and the public sphere. This happens through participating in various learning events outside the university, organising workshops and decolonial events in spaces beyond academia such as museums and radical art festivals, writing op-eds and giving interviews in mass media and, most importantly, writing fiction. This kind of activism focusses on decolonising minds, bodies and sensibilities and initiating a major shift in the way people see the world and their place in it. In Madina’s experience as a postcolonial post-Soviet feminist other, the situatedness of epistemic coloniality is multiple and non-homogenous. Its overlapping configuration includes Western/Northern academia which usually refuses to see her colonial difference from Russia, or her shifting and unstable ethnic-national belonging. Paradoxically, this optic also sees Madina as problematically European, while in Russia she is always automatically racialised as Asiatic and/or Black and therefore subhuman. Another level of epistemic coloniality in Madina’s experience then comes from the Russian caricature of Western coloniality. Ethnically non-Russian scholars like Madina are allowed to contest Russian systems only if they appeal to some Western (and not postcolonial!) authorities in whose presence Russian colleagues feel insecure and colonised. In both cases of the global and local coloniality the ethnically marked feminist other is confined to her place of local informant supplying materials for Western or Russian theorists. Several times when Madina has introduced her own terms into the Russian academic context her colleagues have asked her which Western theorist produced these terms. In their view, her role was merely to apply someone else’s ideas to the analysis of the post-Soviet reality. Finally, Madina has experienced epistemic coloniality through a harsh rejection of her work by certain local ethnic-national postcolonial elites and academic circles in the Caucasus and Central Asia including those of local gender studies. These groups confine knowledge production to their own nationalist, purist and primordialist forms of reviving traditionalist gender models, which are often religiously marked and essentialist. In the latter case again (as in the Soviet colonial times) one can be pardoned from this prescribed academic identity only if she is able to secure a stable place in Russian academia and/or media. For instance, when Madina started receiving invitations to talk-shows on national Russian TV, her critics in the Caucasus changed their negative opinions about her postcolonial feminist fiction and radical feminist writing.

The Eastern European configuration is a bit different, though likewise marked by global epistemic coloniality. Thinkers from Eastern European countries (which used to be socialist, often against their will) demonstrate extreme Eurocentrism and over-exaggerate their (in fact, rather precarious) European belonging, including the epistemic one, by remaining oblivious to and dissociating themselves from theorists and activists of the Global South. Being multiply and ambivalently positioned in Western academia as a feminist scholar who grew up in Soviet and then post-Soviet Estonia but who now lives and works in Sweden, Redi often finds herself identifying with postcolonial voices. Growing into feminist studies in the Anglo-American context, her relation to feminism has largely been shaped by English language and academic contexts, dominated by canonical texts written by white Western scholars. Always feeling slightly off or out of sync, she spent most of her graduate studies unwittingly clinging on to the largely unquestioned ‘catching up with the West’ mode of thought that has dominated Estonian society since the 1990s, with the push and pull to restore its so-called rightful place as part of Europe, to claim the West as its destiny and site of belonging. She came to challenge this through confronting the limits of the feminist studies’ field imaginary. Paradoxically, her position is often read as similar to the West but not similar enough, while also registering as different yet again not different enough to fit into the category of the third world ‘other’.

Suruchi’s postcolonial positionality was shaped through the legacy of her parents’ anti-colonial activism, which she began to only appreciate once she came to the UK for doctoral studies. The spatial-colonial contexts of academic institutions in the UK together with the nationalist biographical trajectories that she shared with her parents in India gave postcoloniality an emotional and political salience. She developed strong perceptions of ‘white privilege’. The conflictual identities and understandings ascribed to her by others helped to shape a narrative of the self which was more aligned to her experiences. In the process of avoiding a form of ‘mental colonisation’, Suruchi came to question how the production of knowledge was infused with relations of power which rendered some experiences legitimate and some illegitimate. This academic journey also made her realise that spaces of dissent can be created through collaborations with people who share similar commitments, such as postsocialist scholars.

In sum, the key phrase describing our sensibilities is ‘in between’; a liquid negotiating bordering realm where new meanings, symbols, concepts and tactical identifications are generated to destabilise and erode the established and fixed geo-cultural, disciplinary and epistemic models, be they Western, non-Western, Northern or Southern. In all three configurations, different groups of people demonstrate colonised and colonising minds and attitudes that can – as we explore below – be contested and decolonised through various transformative strategies, among them border thinking and disidentification.

Feminist border thinking

Global coloniality, as our biographies start to show, traps us all and does not allow us to be outside it or critically describe the modern/colonial matrix of knowledge. Yet border thinking as a specific form of epistemic response from the exteriority (Dussel, 1985) nevertheless emerges from the lacunas of modernity and escapes its control. Its initial impulse is often a discrepancy between having to live in the colonial matrix and never really belonging to its memories, feelings and ways of sensing. We have felt the growing gap between our affective experiences or, in decolonial terms, the body-politics of knowledge and perception, and the established mainstream feminist theories. This prompted our initial negotiating border thinking and acting. Our feminist consciousness is grounded in being the border which cuts across one’s own self, not merely crossing borders and observing them from some detached vantage point: as Gloria Anzaldúa writes, ‘to survive the borderlands one must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads’ (Anzaldúa, 1999: 217). This position builds an inter-subjective model that potentially leads to coalitions between interrelated gendered others.

Feminist border thinking is a horizontal transversal networking of different local histories and sensibilities mobilised through a number of common, yet pluriversal and open categories. The positive impulse behind border thinking replaces the negative stance that entraps women in multiple oppressions with the re-existent position of building an alternative world in which no one will be an other. Personally, each of us has her own struggles, though we share certain nodal points crucial for our pluriversal border thinking. For example, Madina has been from the start at the border of the Western, postsocialist and postcolonial feminisms each of which remained blind to one or more sides of her specific post-Soviet and postcolonial experiences and ‘infinite layers’ of identification (Minh-ha, 1986: 93–94), intersecting race, ethnicity, religion, class, language and sexuality. Moreover, border thinking and acting in Madina’s case was initially far from any coming back to the roots or any indigenous cosmologies. In other words, it was not a dichotomy of Ariel and Caliban. She opted instead for a trickster as an essentially border persona, a cunning player who deceived power by having learnt – like Caliban – to speak its language. Yet in contrast to Caliban, feminist tricksters master the colonising tongue not to curse and condemn, but rather to overcome the suffocating system existentially, intellectually and affectively. Ironically, destabilising from within opens additional opportunities and life models both for docile assimilating Ariels and for indignant, often essentialist Calibans. Madina has acted as such a negotiating and metamorphising trickster on several levels – from teaching and academic writing to her feminist decolonial fiction subverting the Russian language and high literary canon, and questioning rigid ethnic nationalist attachments and local colour patriotism.

Many phenomena situated between feminist art, academic discourses and social and political activism cannot be properly understood without border thinking grounded in pluritopic hermeneutics (Panikkar, 1975) because otherwise they become distorted or simplified. We cannot assume that the other has the same self-understanding as we do, that they belong to our ‘horizon’ of pre-existing values and categories, that we start the interpretation process before any hermeneutical circle has been formed. This does not mean that the other is completely opaque and impossible to understand without violating their right to be different. But such an understanding has to be performed through a dialogic and experiential learning which in the end strives to eliminate otherness as a category invented by the same and grounded in exclusion.

One phenomenon grounded in border thinking is the Yerevan Queering Collective (YQC) from the post-Soviet republic of Armenia (Queering Yerevan, 2014). YQC slips between the usual taxonomies and can hardly be called a social or political movement in a traditional sense or an art movement as it resides precisely in between all of these concepts. Collective members’ concept and practice of ‘slant activism’ is a good example of border activism-cum-art. By queering they do not just mean raising awareness about LGBT issues. As active member Shushan Avagyan puts it,

the task of the collective has been to disturb habitual perception or to defamiliarize, in a purely Shklovskian sense, by rendering the familiar in unfamiliar terms in order to slow down automated perception […] This slant activism differs from conventional acts of intervention that use direct or straightforward language to get across a certain message, or elicit a specific response. (2013)³

Taking into account the extreme heteropatriarchal nationalism of the Armenian state and its corrupt ideologies of belonging that silently allow the emergence and thriving of various anti-LGBT reactionary groups, YQC refuses both to be co-opted into the state political system (as they find such co-optations ineffective and always leading to harmful compromises) and to come into a direct confrontation with the state (which would simply mean incarceration and other forms of prosecution). Instead YQC chooses a border trickster positioning of outsmarting power and overcoming censorship through the multiplicity of indirect (slant) interpretations and multi-semantic actions. YQC is grounded in horizontality, anonymity and volatility. Balancing individuality and collective invisibility, the group reproduces the basic principles of anarchist feminist movements and/or indigenous radical feminism (for example, the Zapatistas). Importantly, they are political activists who see art as one of the most powerful ways of decolonising our minds, bodies and sensibilities, increasing civic engagement, challenging the status quo and radicalising others into action, following the ground-breaking path identified by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa in This Bridge Called My Back (1983) over three decades ago.

Political art is particularly in high demand when all other existing concepts become ineffective for our efforts to define what is happening. Media Impact, another art activist initiative from Moscow, stated in their recent manifesto that ‘beyond the exhausted forms of political resistance and beyond fashion and consumerism, including the consumption of others, that we reject, in the midst of resistance, in the space liberated through collectivization, there emerge new grounds for the communal life’ (2015). Similarly, YQC performs rigorous feminist critique in an indirect artistic language impossible to taxonomise within the existing forms of political activism. Their activities include guerrilla art performances, the planting of trees in various politically significant spaces, graffiti of feminist poetry in social housing environments, stencil art in different public spaces and unsanctioned museum interventions that confront the official state supported art exhibitions. In short, this means transforming urban spaces on a micro-level, reclaiming them as decolonised and disidentifying with the ugly state distortions. The YQC is a border phenomenon both in its media and in its political and social positioning which is critical of the Armenian neo-traditionalist state as well as the Western neo-colonialist habits of objectification, salvation and assimilation, stripping people of their agency. Arguably, YQC’s defamiliarisation and queering exemplify not only border thinking but also disidentification, a praxis to which we now turn.

Feminist disidentifications

Another theoretical tool that could facilitate critical yet non-polarising dialogues is disidentification. This has been used to further understanding of gendered and sexualised identity formation (Butler, 1993; Muñoz, 1999; Medina, 2003) but also to grasp intersections of gender and generation and to critically conceptualise political tensions among different feminist ‘waves’ (Henry, 2004; Dean, 2008; Tuin, 2011; Scharff, 2011). Moreover, this concept has also been related to intersectional processes of de/colonisation (Fuss, 1995), to Marxist critiques of ideologies (Pêcheux, 1983) and has recently been explored as an intersectional writing strategy (Lykke, 2014).

Performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz sees ‘disidentification’ as a ‘third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology’ (1999: 11, emphasis ours) but in a way that does not erase differences. As a so-called third option between identification (as assimilation under the pressures of dominant ideology) and counteridentification (such as utopianism which, through its oppositionality in its attempt to break free, validates and reinforces the dominant ideology), disidentifying emerges as a workable strategy for a postsocialist as well as postcolonial feminist positioning within transnational feminist discourses.

As non-Western and not-quite-Western gendered others, we are in many ways working ‘on and against’ the majority discourses in order to transform ‘the cultural logic from within’ (Muñoz, 1999: 11–12), decoding cultural fields from the perspective of our marginalised subject positions. Such delinking takes place on various levels in our disidentifying praxis, from academic activities such as writing articles or designing critical courses, to the public sphere of collaborations with social movements and art activism. In her work on Anna-Stina Treumund (Koobak, 2013), Estonia’s first artist to put lesbian sexuality centre-stage, Redi addresses problems with time and space within transnational feminist discourses. In particular, she pays critical attention to the artist’s photographic self-portraiture so as to not reinforce the normative story of Eastern Europe’s time lag in relation to Western progress narrative. Having left firmly behind in the 1980s a sexual politics premised on a desire for visibility and recognition, Western feminist theory seemed unable to provide a framework for this visual artist who would not place her work within the more generalised discourse of Eastern European belatedness. Reading Tremund’s art through Muñoz’s idea of working on and against Western influences to produce a disidentification with western hegemonic timeframes offers a viable alternative. For example, Treumund’s self-portrait Drag (2010)⁴ depicts a woman performing a man performing a woman and shows the act of photographing as a moment of subject formation. This piece can be read through intertextual connections to other artworks in Western as well as Eastern European contexts. By citing Nan Goldin’s Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi (1991) and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe’s Monroe (1996), this piece reappropriates citational practices to comment on the here and now of the photographic act and to resist discourses of the backwardness of Eastern Europe. These citations are all temporally charged and thus offer ways to reconfigure normative timelines prevalent in transnational feminist discourses. Treumund is not simply following the path of a ‘good subject’ towards a clear and linear identification with the Western discursive feminist and queer discourse. Neither is she a ‘bad subject’ who entirely resists and rejects the images and identificatory sites that are available through the hegemonic Western discourse that dominates current global understandings of feminist and queer politics and artistic practices. Instead, through applying a mixture of intertextual references, she disidentifies with dominant Western discourses of feminist and queer activism, neither willing to assimilate under the pressures of dominant ideology nor trying to break free of its inescapable sphere.

Furthermore, we suggest that just as a person’s identity cannot be reduced to a single identification, that very same identity cannot be reduced to a single disidentification. Instead, it is multilayered and inflected with power dynamics at each level.

To provide an example of the different layers of disidentifications, we will analyse the dialectics of different representations of a particular case of sexual violence. Following the gang rape and brutal assault of Jyoti Singh Pandey, a twenty-three-year-old medical student, on 12 December 2012 in New Delhi, India, unprecedented public protests ensued with urban youth taking to the streets. There were clashes with the police, and finally the government imposed curfew orders in parts of the city. After Jyoti succumbed to her internal injuries the government set up an independent commission, led by former Chief Justice of Supreme Court, the late J. S. Verma, to recommend amendments to the Indian Penal Code and the Criminal Law.

In the events that unfolded we can understand disidentifications at three levels. First, the nature of the protests raises questions. The dynamics of class, caste and religion are integral to the forms and methods of sexual violence against women. However, the participation of urban upper caste women in feminist protests is contentious as they ‘seldom extended their solidarity to marginalized groups who, […] in the context of the untouchables, “have no press”‘ (Dutta and Sircar, 2013: 295). Why have there not been similar protests in relation to caste based sexual violence? (Kannabiran, 2014: 2). Exceptionalising the Delhi gang rape case runs the risk of eliding the equally brutal experiences of women from marginalised communities. Are some rapes more worthy of feminist concern, national outrage, sustained media coverage and collective mourning? Are some women constructed as the ‘perfect rape victim’ to generate national sympathy (Sen, 2013: 1)? As Kannabiran states, ‘while all murders result in loss of life […] targeted murder against members belonging to a social group that is vulnerable […] reflects a systemic pattern that systematically re-inforces power and subjugates entire communities through violence’ (2014: 2). What we see here is the disidentification of urban upper caste women with Dalit politics, a disidentification buttressed through the official discourse that does not recognise caste-based sexual assaults as violence.

Second, the situation was compounded by a litany of insensitive and to some extent misogynist statements made by religious leaders and legal advocates following the rape (Ghosh, 2013). For example, defence lawyer of perpetrator Manohar Lal Sharma stated ‘until today, I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady’ (Bennett-Smith, 2013). This in many ways corroborated the attitudes held by the accused as well. In the documentary India’s Daughter (2015), director Leslee Udwin interviewed another accused, Mukesh Singh, who said: ‘When being raped, she shouldn’t fight back. She should just be silent and allow the rape. Then they’d have dropped her off after “doing her” and only hit the boy’. Here, disidentification works differently. In disidentifying with the rape victim and her mannerisms, the lawyer, religious leaders and the accused inadvertently hail ‘rape’ as a tool for correcting an inherent immorality of the victim.

Third, the reaction in national and international mass media reports also brings up various levels of disidentification. Whilst the ‘victim’ was projected in international mass media reports as a new modern and empowered ‘third world woman’, the assailants were cast in a familiar colonial refrain – as backward, traditional and barbaric (Joseph, 2013; Kristof, 2013; Purves, 2013). This was corroborated in a statement made by the Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, who sought to blame migrants to Delhi for crimes like rape: ‘And these migrants who settle in city’s north-west colonies carry a kind of behaviour which is unacceptable in any modern city. So crimes [such as rape] do take place’ (Economic Times, 2010). Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also told Indian Police Service probationers: ‘We have a large number of footloose young men who come to urban areas from rural areas in search of jobs, in search of livelihood strategies and if they do not get well absorbed in the process of development in rural areas, they can become a menace in society’ (Hindustan Times, 2012). Thus, while Jyoti was projected as ‘liberal and upwardly mobile’, the accused were ‘misogynist, working class and rural’ (Roychowdhury, 2013: 284). Such reductionist understandings of modern vs traditional, rural vs urban reduce the complexities of gendered violence in everyday life and obliterate the workings of neoliberal capitalist and patriarchal frameworks within a global economy that India has embraced since liberalisation. While disidentifying with the economies of rural working class populations, they inadvertently create further stereotypes of rural/urban and west/the rest, reflecting reversed orientalism.

It is also not surprising that such statements emerging from within the nation would be misinterpreted or used selectively within a global economy of knowledge that implicates Delhi as the world’s ‘rape capital’. For example, a German university professor’s rejection email to an Indian student’s application for internship, citing the ‘rape problem in India’ as reason, sparked an online furore. The letter she wrote in response to the application read as follows: ‘Dear Sir, Unfortunately I don’t accept any Indian male students for internships. We hear a lot about the rape problem in India which I cannot support. I have many female students in my group, so I think this attitude is something I cannot support’. Subsequently, after an intervention by the German ambassador to India, Michael Steiner, Leipzig University biochemistry professor Dr Annette G. Beck-Sickinger posted an apology on the German embassy’s website (Campbell, 2015). This relates to Muñoz’s (2000) argument about the conventions of majoritarian public sphere and the ‘official’ national affect it sponsors (associated with white middle-class subjectivity) by foregrounding the moralism of affective normativity. This is juxtaposed with the minoritarian ‘affect’ which, in our example, is the sexually excessive Indian identity.

In another instance the Harvard College’s Women’s Centre, headed by Diane Rosenfeld and Jacqueline Bhabha, convened a Policy Task Force, ‘Beyond Gender Equality’, to offer recommendations to India and other South Asian countries in the wake of the New Delhi gang rape and murder. The aim was to produce a ‘working paper that advises on the implementation of the recommendations from the Verma Committee’ (Menon, 2013). How would such a border crossing be useful without any collaboration or conversation with the many scholars and activists working on sexual violence in India? This action both ignores the long-standing women’s activism in India and reduces the ‘problem’ of sexual violence to a national epidemic rather than an issue that affects women globally (see also Vance, 2013). Rashmee Roshan Lall’s provocative piece suggests that ‘India has a woman problem’ (2012). In these kinds of actions, cultures are presented as neat and prediscursively individuated from each other, while the insistence on ‘difference’ that accompanies the ‘production’ of distinct ‘cultures’ appears unproblematic. Culture then becomes a pejorative term and it is used as a signifier for a set of hierarchical distinctions (Volpp, 2001: 1194–1197). For a fruitful North-South dialogue, a culturally grounded feminism, one that critically evaluates national-societal responses towards violence, is needed.

Disidentification as a transformative tool must incorporate plural speaking positions, each articulating similar concerns (such as violence) but accounting for the specific embeddedness of the realities of these positions and recognising implicit contradictions. On the national front, we disidentify with some governmental responses, though not disengaging with the recent government which seems to have re-awakened on the question of gender rights in India. Arguably, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance (2013) of the union government overlooked the recommendations of the Justice Verma Commission (Teltumbde, 2013). As Mohanty suggests, the ordinance was a ‘containment and subversion of people’s struggles against the culture and practices of sexual violence’ (in Alcoff, 2013). Yet the 2013 amendment broadened the definition of rape to extend beyond penile-vaginal penetration, which is a positive sign. Reducing rape to a problem of ‘uneducated’, ‘rural and footloose men’ ignores how the ‘growing culture of rape is a social externality of economic reforms […] where everything has a price and nothing has value’ (Shiva, 2013). Labels such as ‘rape capital’ position men as the cause of gender-unequal practices in India. This is not true. In fact, one of the significant features of the Delhi protest was the participation of young men for women’s rights – a recognition that women’s issues were gender issues affecting both men and women.

Experiences of disidentification get compounded when engaging with international discourses. The misinterpretations and appropriations of these discourses allow us to see how coloniality of knowledge is manifested in different forms in contemporary society. We disidentify with western feminists who occupy a moral high ground (evident in the Harvard research group). There is a need for new transversal dialogues that are not only able to locate similarities but also see contextual and historical differences of colonialism and imperialism, and understand gender and sexual relations alongside white heteronormativity. Finally, it is important to point out that ‘disidentifications are dependent upon previous identifications, however faulty and stereotypical’ (Ratcliffe, 2005: 62). While Muñoz rightly suggests the liberatory potential of disidentification from the perspective of the marginalised, we also need to understand the everyday articulations of power by the dominant through the very same processes of disidentification.

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored ‘feminist border thinking’ and ‘disidentification’ as transformative tools coming from different genealogies and disciplinary cultures. While they are based on the same ground and outlook, border thinking works on a more general epistemological level, whereas disidentification acts more as an immediate praxis. Both deliberately blur boundaries between agency and knowledge, although structurally they pertain to differentiable planes. Border thinking often requires and leads to disidentification as a mode of political agency in order to be fully embodied and realised. Both these concepts facilitate a dialogue between the Global North and the Global South while critically considering the positioning of postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe within the North-South hegemonic axis prevalent in transnational feminist discussions (see e.g. Cerwonka, 2008; Tlostanova, 2010; Suchland, 2011; Koobak, 2013; Koobak and Marling, 2014).

For us, it is important not to fall prey to the familiar catching up discourses or to play according to the Western/Northern epistemic rules. We believe that delinking from the Western agonistic principle of making theories and practices compete for dominance enables us to retain a more global viewpoint and to build coalitions to (re)create a more flexible feminist discourse, able to account for local logics and specific conditions yet correlate with other voices of the world. We need to find a way for successful dialogues and intersections within feminisms, grounded in the right to opacity. To quote Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant: ‘Agree not merely to the right to difference, but […] agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand this truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components’ (1997: 190).

To paraphrase Lugones in our epigraph, border thinking realised through disidentification is a structurally pluriversal (universal in its plurality) theory grounded in transculturation principle (Ortiz, 1995) within which cultures interact but do not melt into each other, defying a complete synthesis, translation or merging. Thus, many worlds interact, co-exist co-relationally and communicate with each other, restoring the right to be different but equal. Border thinking and disidentification can shape a horizontal transversal mode of disinterested, open-minded and decentered communication and interaction of Western and non-Western feminist theories and practices.

Footnotes

Notes

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