The genderscapes of hate

Maa main jeena chahti hoon …

These were Jyoti Singh Pandey’s words addressed to her mother on a slip of paper as she fought hanging on to her fast ebbing life after being gang raped, disembowelled and brutalized in a moving bus on the night of 16 December 2012. Since Indian law disallows rape victims from being named, an English daily conferred the name Nirbhaya meaning ‘without fear’ to honour and humanize the victim and the case subsequently became known as the Nirbhaya case. To this author the name might also symbolize that distant utopia where women could actually walk without fear.

The Nirbhaya case provoked a nationwide outrage and brought back into focus the issue of gendered violence, more specifically sexual violence against women in India. The unprecedented public demonstrations were followed by a slew of measures aimed at stemming the recurrence of such violence. However, despite these, incidents of horrific sexual violence continue to be perpetuated, almost as if they are occurring in a vacuum, unaffected by the debate, outrage and legislations.

Months after the high-profile Nirbhaya case where, according to media reports, the young woman was raped with a rusted L-shaped metal rod, beaten and wilfully disembowelled, the media reported on the Gudiya case. Here, a five-year-old was raped, brutalized with a plastic bottle and stones, strangled and left to die. This was followed by the rape and murder of two teenaged girls in Budaun, Uttar Pradesh. Rather disturbingly, instead of intensifying the debate on gendered violence and its intersections with caste, this case sparked off a discussion about the need to build toilets to keep women safe, equating the ugly gang rape to a simple lack of toilet facilities (see intervention 1 in this issue for a detailed discussion). Other high-profile cases in this time were the Bangalore National Law School gang rape (October 2012), the Shakti Mills gang rape in Mumbai (August 2013) and gang rape of the Danish tourist in Delhi (January 2014).

The latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data shows that 93 women are raped in India everyday (NCRB, 2013). To provide a perspective, this amounts to 4 women raped every hour or about 33,000 in a year. The figure is about three times more than the number of people killed in terror attacks worldwide in 2012 (Country Reports on Terrorism, 2012). NCRB data throws up other disturbing trends as well. Among these is the fact that the incidence of rape and other forms of violence against women has been increasing rather than decreasing. Both child rape and gang rape present an alarming increase, suggesting the conversion of individual violence into group violence and the co-option of younger men (often juveniles) into these incidences of group violence. Other than this, involvement of minors in such heinous crimes is also an indication of the percolation of misogyny to younger age groups.

In the Nirbhaya case, for example, the most barbaric acts, including enticing the victim unto the bus, beating and raping her with the iron rod and pulling out her intestine were all attributed to the minor involved in the crime.

While gendered violence is universal, the ugly form and proportions it has assumed in India is definitely spatially segregated and needs to be seen within the frame of what I term the ‘genderscapes of hate’. In using this term, gendered violence is equalized to a spiral of recurrent hate crime where every fresh act of violence is also an act of deep-seated gender prejudice. The genderscapes of hate in my view, originate from this prejudice and are maintained through a steady flow of violence directed at women over their life course in their everyday lifeworld and lived spaces. The genderscapes of hate then are the lived spaces over which women are constantly devalued, degraded, humiliated and subject to different forms of violence hinging from such discrimination and devaluation within what can be termed a culturally sanctioned misogyny.

Genderscapes have been defined in my earlier work as the fluid and multilayered space that contains the performances, perceptions and portrayals of gender (Datta, 2011). Drawing principally on the works of Appadurai, Lefebvre and Sack, on ideas concerning space, the term genderscapes underline fluidity, image and imagination (Appadurai, 1996). They denote in Lefebvrian terms the lived space produced (Lefebvre 1974, trans 1991) by the performance of gender (Butler, 1990) through a repertoire of everyday ordinary acts as well as extraordinary incidents. Both of these eventually implicate each other in reproducing prejudice and consequent violence to maintain a genderscape of hate. I would like to argue here that gendered violence is an integral factor in the process of place making, creating a lived space where such violence is itself normalized.

From Sack’s concept of relational space (Sack, 1992), such genderscapes can be seen as being constituted through the realms of nature, meaning and social relations (Datta, 2013, 2012, 2011; Sack, 1992). The realm of nature or natural landscape determines to an extent initial traditions related to the degree of permissiveness for women to be in public space and participate in productive work (see Datta, 2011). The realms of meaning and social relations together emphasize and reinforce male power, privilege and entitlement within what Kandiyoti has labelled classic patriarchy (Kandiyoti, 1988). In the context of India in particular and elsewhere in general, rites, rituals traditions, colloquialisms and popular culture centre on the productive aspects of patriarchy and continue to reinforce male privilege. Gendered violence becomes a tool to contain real or perceived transgressions and maintain this culture. Sex-selective abortions, female infanticide, neglect of the girl child, daughter discrimination, dowry deaths, honour killings, stalking, acid attacks, harassment in the workplace, are all part of this chain of degrading gendered violence that women in India are subject to over their life course. Not only does each such incident reify the existing genderscape of hate, but in doing so, it also sets in motion precursors to the next act.

The role of media and popular culture in nurturing these genderscapes of hate cannot be overstressed. Portrayals of women are rarely in opposition to the productive aspects of patriarchy. This has the effect of reducing them to objects of desire devoid of any actual agency. This devaluation and circumcision of agency in media is matched by the moral policing of extralegal cultural organizations and community leaders in the name of preserving traditional values. Viewed in this frame, the responses of several public figures in positions of responsibility to horrific instances of gendered violence do not seem bizarre any more. These have ranged from blaming incidents of rape on the victim’s clothes, use of mobiles, failure to invoke fictive kinship with the rapists, her Westernized lifestyle, and so on. Parallely, the actions of rapists have been viewed far more indulgently – for example – that they rape due to their consumption of fast food or their adolescent masculinity definitely undeserving of harsh punishment currently mandated by the new rape laws.

In the same vein, a woman chief minister has routinely decried all reports of violence against women in her state as political conspiracies while protestors against rape have been termed ‘dented and painted’ women by no less than a sitting MP. In another instance, an MP threatened the women of his political opponent’s constituency with rape. Routinely God men and other community leaders have issued similar statements while commenting upon women’s safety or instances of rape. Such statements appearing bizarre and out of place, begin to make sense when read as just another form of violence that is both a product and precursor to the genderscape of hate that is proposed as an analytical framework in this essay. These public stances have an important role in maintaining the genderscape of hate almost in opposition to any positive interventions to dismantle the same. They do so by serving to trivialize the issue of gendered violence, strengthen misogynist attitudes and further devalue women. In the same vein, group violence against women, seen to be on the rise, can be thought of as a silent and tacit patriarchal pact especially when viewed against women’s rising literacy, mobility and participation in paid work. The implicit relationship between the two becomes clear when viewed within the framework of genderscapes of hate.

Institutionalized interventions to gendered violence usually take the form of more comprehensive laws or harsher sentences. Being punitive rather than preventive, they apply ex post facto but do not address more implicit forms of gendered violence that create the genderscape of hate through a realm of meaning and a popular culture that continues to devalue rather than dignify women. In this situation, informal responses to the genderscapes of hate make a compelling statement about gendered resistance and agency in everyday contexts.

Women have formed vigilante groups, used informal networks and emasculated their tormentors using their bodies as instruments of protest. The disrobing of the Maira paibis (literally women with the lamp, a traditional women’s group in Manipur) to protest custodial violence unleashed through the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Manipur is a case in point. Similarly, a group of women under the leadership of Sampat Pal in Banda, Uttar Pradesh, began wielding lathis (wooden staffs) and intervening in cases of domestic violence. Distinguished by their pink attire, they are known as the Gulab Gang. Following a spate of attacks on women in pubs and calls to boycott Valentine day celebrations by a right wing group, women in Mangalore responded by banding together a “consortium of loose, forward and pub going women” and called upon the public to support women’s freedom by sending pink underwear to the leader of the right wing outfit. The campaign came to be known as the pink chaddi campaign. Pink underwear arrived in truckloads to the right wing group’s headquarters from all corners of the country. In the same vein, SlutWalks, silent marches, street plays and efforts to reclaim public spaces through the subversive act of loitering have been some of the other responses aimed at protesting sexual violence and generating awareness, though mostly in urban areas.

The need of the hour is to view the issue of gendered violence not as a development issue but through the lens of culture and recognize that it is also rooted in the praxis of everyday life. Dismantling these hatescapes therefore, necessitates going beyond legislation to include the strategies of resistance and search for gendered agency in the praxis of everyday life, media spaces and in popular culture. This is what the framework of genderscape of hate proposed here creates space to think about.