Feminism and Cultural Studies in Asia

Tejaswini Niranjana Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore

Cultural studies named as such in Asia came to prominence in the 1990s, and is today poised to enter diverse institutional settings, from academia to publishing to the popular culture industry. Here are some thoughts on the emergence of this interdisciplinary field, with a focus on the implication of feminism in its beginnings.

In the South Asian context, the term feminism is selectively used. The more commonly used terms are the Womens Question (in historical contexts) and the womens movement (referring to more contemporary formations). Often a gender perspective, especially as mediated through developmental discourse, has referred solely to a womens (or womens studies) perspective.

I The history of cultural studies in India, as it has been outlined over the last few years by several scholars, is somewhat different from Western contexts, although it is similar to Korea or Taiwan in the kind of legacies to which it can lay claim. i I speak here about the feminist legacy, and about feminism as an intellectual-political project.

Glancing at the preoccupations of cultural studies in England might provide an interesting starting-point. Two interruptions have been noted in British cultural studies in the 1970s, one created by debates around feminism, and the other around questions of race. Stuart Hall has written about the way feminism broke and broke into cultural studies: As the thief in the night, it broke in; interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies. He adds that:We were opening the door to

feminist studies, being good, transformed men. And yet, when it broke in through the window, every single unsuspected resistance rose to the surface ii

Hall says that the intervention of feminism was decisive and ruptural for cultural studies, reorganising the field in many significant ways. It opened up the question of the personal as political, thus helping to change the object of investigation in cultural studies. It radically expanded the notion of power that had earlier taken shape only in the context of the public domain. It also re-opened questions of the subjective and the subject which cultural studies thought it had done away with, and with its rearticulation of psychoanalysis it addressed once again the relationship between social theory and the theory of the unconscious. Hall refers here to a situation where cultural studies preexisted feminism. What is distinct about the British situation is that cultural studies was already establishing itself as a new kind of academic practice (coming out of sociology, social history, Marxism, and the critiques of Gramsci-Althusser) when feminism burst onto the scene, bringing its uncomfortable questions with it.

The situation in many Asian contexts seems to be rather different. Instead of feminism being an interruption of already established ways of studying culture critically, it is foundational to the emergence of the new area of cultural studies, as I hope to show.

I used the phrase named as such in the opening sentence of this paper while referring to the emergence of cultural studies in the non-West. This is not to say that we in Asia are simply following fashion (or picking up something already two decades old in the West). I would want to argue that we are naming in hindsight and consolidating a field of questions and research problems. The naming of/as cultural studies in India happens around 1995 or so. iii Nearly two generations of cultural studies work was in place by that time, not to mention several decades of work in critical cultural-political analysis upon which we still continue to draw.

The culture question is posed in the third world or more broadly non-Western societies as part of a colonial contestation; in India for example the term sanskriti translates culture,

is emblematic of a system of representation that calls Indian culture into being. Here the culture question is an intimate part of the formation of a national(ist) modernity, but culture in modernity tends to be represented as something that remains outside of modernity. This curious relationship between culture and modernity in the colonial context may give us some indication as to why women occupy the place they do in discussions about culture, when in the West for example the opposition, as Mary John has pointed out, is indeed between women and culture, with women being placed in nature. iv

II Although I have been referring specifically to the Indian situation, we might speculate on the similarities with other Asian settings in relation to the feminist stakes in the culture question. The stakes involve issues both of political as well as symbolic representation.

As Kumari Jayawardenes book Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World argued many years ago, feminism and nationalism in the non-West share a close relationship. v On the other hand, the culture question also becomes a national culture question, with serious consequences for women. So while nationalist movements enable womens political participation, they also create for them a fixed position in national culture. As in Japan or Korea or India, the New Woman and the Modern Woman were sought to be differentiated, with the first privileged over the second.

A standard criticism of feminism across Asia derives from a charge that it is disconnected/alienated from our culture. This is a charge that is seldom made against any of our other political frameworks which are far from having a clearly identifiable indigenous source. The implicit accusation seems to be that feminist demands are modern demands, and modernization means the erasure or giving up of Indian culture and the adoption of western values and ways of life. Why should this be a problem only for women? What is the special connection of women with the culture question?

The answer should not be (as is usually put forward) to say that our culture oppresses women, but to investigate how that idea of culture was put together. One of the starting

points of this investigation would be to understand how narratives of the nation-in-themaking were premised on the assertion of cultural difference from the West, with women often represented as the embodiment of that difference. Nationalist discourse in the nonWestern world thus produces an antithetical relationship between modernity and culture at the same time as it aligns women with the cultural and the authentic. vi

While the specific modalities of nationalist negotiations might differ, the broad contours of the discursive moves that relegate women to culture in different kinds of colonial conditions can appear startlingly similar in the non-West.

Starting in 2000, I was privileged to be part of a series of feminist discussions in different Asian locations through the Inter-Asia Cultural studies conferences described below. vii

FUKUOKA, December 2000 A panel discussion on feminisms in Asia included presentations from four very different locations. We talked about the question of gender in relation to the Communist state in China, where gender difference was made invisible by state policy in the workplace. We discussed issues around womens labour and sex work in the post-colonial situation of Bangladesh; state feminism in Taiwan and the fraught history of the womens question in a newly democratising society. The Sisters in Islam, a group of Malaysian women with a distinct religious identity spoke about their engagement through law and media with the state. The central question here seemed to be the often contentious relationship of women with the state, although characterised in different ways. viii

BANGALORE (Feminisms in Asia conference), October 2001 This conference brought together Asian women who discussed women and the state (in Iran and Singapore), womens engagement with civil war (in Sri Lanka), feminism and religious identities (India, Malaysia), cultural minorities (India), queer citizenship (in Taiwan and China), women and the law (Bangladesh, India). An important concluding panel explored the critical vocabularies formulated by feminisms in Asia, and the tensions of translation from Western contexts. We talked about the implicit burdens

feminists carry if they own up to the name. Is this a specifically Asian burden, we asked. What happens to feminisms political legitimacy if it is identified as alien and Western? What narratives of cultural authenticity do feminists have to contend with and how? ix

BANGALORE (Alternatives Workshop), December 2001 Coming in the wake of the Feminisms conference, this workshop aimed at an assessment of the political-theoretical ground on which we stand. In a key panel, we explored the current dilemmas of feminists regarding contemporary political initiatives, and investigated issues of cultural practice and feminist analysis. x The discussion of feminist politics was framed by the workshops concern with critiques of globalization (coming from Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan), challenges to hegemonic nationalist formations (Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka) from citizens groups or from initiatives foregrounding anticaste struggles.

SEOUL, July 2005 For women, what might it mean to see Asia as an inter-citational, inter-referential discursive community, as Korean participant Kim Eunshil put it while discussing feminist pedagogy and the institutionalization of feminist practices? While we all used terms like gender, family, and patriarchy, the referents might be very different from each other. The presentations on this panel I had organized at the Inter-Asia cultural studies conference in Seoul made it abundantly clear that feminists in different locations even in the same Asian region were confronting different sorts of phenomena.

In Bangladesh, for example, feminists are beginning to take popular culture seriously in their attempt to understand Indian hegemony in the region; another concern for them is the growing Islamization of the society and its consequences for women. In South Korea, the sex-workers movement which feminists are arguing about supporting is leading to the production of new subjectivities. Redefinitions of labour and womens work have been sought by some feminists; sexual agency/violence/exploitation are other important issues to be re-thought in this context; crucial questions are being raised as to whether all womens migration is to be seen as sex-trafficking as suggested by international agencies.

In Indonesia, where the term feminism has a class connotation and womens politics is preferred by activists, there has been a critique of the authoritarian states economic policies through the question of motherhood in the late 1990s. The seemingly progressive processes of decentralization and democratisation are also producing new local patriarchies. The religious identities of middle class young people in universities are taking shape alongside the ubiquitous language of liberal feminism in the popular media. Young feminists have to face women of their own generation to engage with mediatic representations and show how their political questions are differently framed from those circulating in popular cultural genres. xi

Bringing feminist issues into an Inter-Asia cultural studies frame has: foregrounded the culture question and the specific negotiations all women in Asia (and feminists in particular) undertake; opened up the question of colonial modernity/Asian modernities (including questions such as what is western about colonialism? Is colonialism only Western?); prompted an investigation into the problems of translation in relation to the formation of the vocabularies of social criticism; urged us to re-think the political (what are our investments in the political? Is a seeming decline of interest in the political an indicator of a resignifying of politics in our time?)

Feminists are major interlocutors in the debates around culture in all of these Asian (and more broadly, non-western) spaces, engaging in a host of different campaigns and initiatives. It is not surprising, then, that feminist political intervention and research has fed directly into cultural studies.

III In this section, I discuss the impact of feminist concerns on the disciplines in India, where womens studies courses became the earliest location within the university for the

elaboration of cultural studies concerns such as the analysis of signifying systems, or how to understand the production of cultural meaning. Womens studies contributed to the rupturing of the disciplines that enabled the emergence and strengthening of interdisciplinary scholarship, eventually contributing to the formation of cultural studies.

Conventional disciplines such as English literary studies, history, sociology, economics, and to some extent political science were shaken up by womens studies questions. Critiques of colonialism, nationalism, developmentalism (in relation to modes of representation, epistemological frames, conceptual-political histories) which have been crucial to the emergence of cultural studies in India, have found elaborate articulation in womens studies, or more precisely, womens studies has been a significant early site for the working out of such critiques.

A glance at the kind of scholarship we have been drawing upon in cultural studies shows that much of it comes out of womens studies concerns (and is, by and large, by women scholars). This is clearly not an exhaustive list, and is all the more impressive for that reason. Landmark anthologies with important introductory essays, like Women Writing in India (Tharu and Lalita), Recasting Women (Sangari and Vaid), or A Question of Silence? (John and Nair), provided glimpses of feminist scholarship across disciplinary boundaries. In historical writing, the significant contributions of Tanika Sarkar on 19th century Bengal and the making of the bhadramahila , Uma Chakravarthi on the Vedic dasi, Lata Manis pathbreaking work on the discursive formation of the sati, Janaki Nair on devadasis and on women and colonial law, S.Anandhi on women in the non-Brahmin movement, G.Arunima on transformations in the matrilineal family, Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasins work on partition, and women and the Hindu right; in literary studies, the work of Susie Tharu, Jasodhara Bagchi, Kumkum Sangari, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, whose writing covers the range of cultural-political issues in our time, as do V.Geetha, Vidyut Bhagwat, and Kavita Panjabi (caste, oral histories, women and violence) all of these scholars have produced work that has impacted cultural

studies syllabi. In art history, Geeta Kapur and Tapati Guha-Thakurta have written insightfully on women artists; in sociology/anthropology Veena Das (on women and cultural rights, and women and violence), Patricia Uberoi (on cinema, popular art), and Sharmila Rege (on dalit women) have produced path-breaking analyses, as have womens studies scholars like Mary John on feminist theory and the genealogies of womens studies amidst the disciplines, or Vasanth and Kalpana Kannabiran on contemporary legal/cultural-political issues.

In political science, we have the major study on Muslim women by Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, and Nivedita Menon on politics and the law; in legal studies there is the wideranging scholarship of Flavia Agnes, Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, Ratna Kapur, and Madhu Kishwar; and in economics the pioneering work of Saradamoni, Govind Kelkar, Bina Agarwal and Padmini Swaminathan. In the very different area of film studies and cultural theory, there is the work of Lalita Gopalan, Shohini Ghosh, and Ranjani Mazumdar among others, while in film-making there are a host of feminist directors such as Deepa Dhanraj, Madhusree Dutta, Reena Mohan, and Paromita Vohra, just to mention a few. In addition , there is a whole new generation of scholars in history, economics, literary studies, legal studies and political science who are already publishing their work. Some of these include Praveena Kodoth, J.Devika, Rekha Pappu, K.Srilata, Uma Maheshwari B., P.Suneetha, Vasudha, Deeptha Achar, Jayasree Kalathil, Sharmila Sreekumar and Anupama Roy.

The list, partial though it is, is a substantial one by any standards. The names mentioned here are not simply there because they are academics who happen to be women, but because they are involved in developing feminist perspectives on contemporary and historical issues.

Now I turn my attention to the problem of gender in the cultural studies classroom, which is a different proposition from talking culture in the womens studies classroom.

I was involved in the early 1990s in teaching womens studies as an optional course for humanities and social science students. The teaching was done in a stimulating atmosphere at a politically volatile time. We were carrying forward the legacy of the 1980s womens movement and participating in the ongoing political debates of the 90s. Raising culture questions in the womens studies classroom was an exhilarating activity, and like in many Asian contexts formulating critiques of our culture from a feminist perspective was a compelling task.

Raising gender questions in the cultural studies classroom, however, provided a different sort of experience. The setting had changed. Students showed some discomfort at being confronted with these questions, and responded by dismissing or sidestepping them. The pedagogic problem appeared to be that the emergent common sense of cultural studies, sometimes coinciding with feminist political correctness, was seen as constricting by some students, while the same questions might have been earlier perceived as enabling. Metropolitan women students who have benefitted from the achievements and struggles of the womens movement but are not interested in claiming the politics and conceptual vocabularies of feminism are visibly an early 21st century phenomenon in India. This is a phenomenon which needs to be understood in the context of the simultaneous disavowal and professionalization of feminism (the latter manifested in new career options such as gender trainers and gender sensitizers).

In the absence of a vibrant political movement around feminist issues, it is difficult to focus on conceptual questions without a sense of the urgency that animates these questions. We encounter students saying they have done too much feminism (this doesnt mean involvement in campaigns or issues, but exposure in workshops or seminars to feminist vocabularies). Some students could also be reacting to what they see as the strident nature of feminist protest, or expressing discomfort with questions of caste with which in India feminist politics has engaged for some years now. The implicit critique of feminism here may well stem from a separation of the political from the conceptual and a privileging of the latter, so that feminism comes to be criticized and dismissed for its seeming conceptual inconsistency.

In order to grapple with the pedagogic problem, we need to have a better understanding of the relationship between feminism and modernity. The question that interests me in particular is: what happens when we complicate our narratives of modernity, as cultural studies has been doing? What sort of impact does this have on our feminist initiatives? Although feminism has impacted the formulation of research problems in cultural studies, we do not yet have a complex, multi-layered, multi-linguistic history of contemporary feminism, whether in India or across Asia. What historiographical problems in relation to claiming the past are we likely to encounter? Maybe it is now time to initiate systematic reflection on this question, while acknowledging that the claim to feminism in the cultural studies classroom by cultural studies students is made on much more uncertain ground than in the womens studies classroom of the 1990s. An aside: in a local university, the optional courses in the English Department are offered in such a way that a student can do gender studies OR cultural studies but not both.

IV From discussing the linkages between questions of cultural analysis and questions for feminism in the classroom, I move to a brief account of what cultural studies has been theorising in relation to gender, and what it might theorise in future.

In the 1990s, cultural theorists as well as feminists tried to theorise religious identity questions (the demand for a Uniform Civil Code, the incorporation of women in rightwing Hindu majoritarian politics); the caste question (the anti-Mandal, anti-lower caste agitation, Dalit feminism); institutions such as the law, and the university. Now we occupy a significantly reconfigured terrain in the early 21st century. Our preoccupations include sexualities, masculinity and the public sphere, conjugality, feminist epistemology, and the exploration of the emergent possibilities for women in a globalizing space. It is not as though the earlier questions have disappeared. However, the ways in which they have been reconstituted onto newer terrain is something we have yet to elaborate.

Another area where feminists can contribute critical perspectives is pornography. In the womens movement in the 1980s and 90s, groups often called for the banning or withdrawal of films, hoardings and other visual representations considered degrading to women. Today we are confronted with situations where the demand for banning produces unanticipated effects. In the recent dance bar controversy in Mumbai, for example, we saw that a Hindi films item number was not censored by the film certification authorities, but a bar dancers performance of it was criticised, and used as the pretext for shutting down dance bars. Feminists were divided over support to the bar dancers, with issues of morality contending with those of labour. What did it really mean for feminists when the Tamil film New was recently banned for obscenity because it narrated the story of a young boy in an adult body; or when there was a nationwide call for controls over new technology during the MMS scandal, where a schoolboy took pictures of himself making love with his female classmate and transmitted it via MMS, starting a career for the images on the internet? What is the work of censorship? How are women (and feminists) implicated in this work? On whose behalf do we then speak? How are questions of culture and of modernity being articulated in the censorship debates?

I would contend that today we need more ethnographic work, to enlarge our sense of female lives, focussing for example on the relationship between women and popular culture; or dealing with changing institutions like family and marriage. In literary studies, there is still a prevalence of images of women criticism, a critique of which could lead to greater focus on issues of representation. In visual culture studies and film studies too, we need the development of stronger feminist research questions. In all these endeavours, the Asian examples would help to enlarge our frames of reference, and enrich our conceptual-theoretical resources.

My presentation has attempted to sketch the interconnections between cultural studies and feminist critiques in non-Western contexts. My intention was not to say that all work in cultural studies is inspired by feminism (nor would we want feminism or womens studies to exhaust the field of culture). But tracing the short history of cultural studies as an emergent critical arena in the non-West shows us the extent of the cultural studies debt

to feminist scholarship and activism, to the way of asking a question which comes from feminism; a way of holding scholarship to account, and a way of reminding us why we do what we do; in short, the cultural studies debt to a history of passionate and engaged scholarship.

Notes
See Niranjana, Sudhir and Dhareshwar (1993) and the special issue of Seminar. Hall, Cultural studies and its Theoretical Legacies, p.282. iii An important reference point here is the establishment in 1995 of the annual Cultural Studies workshop organized by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, which is open to research scholars and junior faculty. The majority of participants are from India, although of late the workshop has had a significant African, Latin American, and South-East Asian presence. iv John. Give ref. v Jayawardene. Give ref. vi It is the narrative of the nation that stitches together women and tradition, women and national culture, making women emblematic of that which is uniquely Indian. The 19th century reconstitution of Indian tradition created distinctions between home and world, private and public, inner and outer. As new patriarchies came into being, women increasingly took up the burden of maintaining the distinctiveness of Indian culture, while men negotiated the worlds of commerce, higher education, and governance on terms set by colonialists. This is a quick overview of the impressive scholarship and arguments of Indian cultural theorists and historians of the 19th century. For more detailed discussion, see among others Tharu and Lalita ( ), Chatterjee, Banerjee, Sarkar. In my own recent work (Niranjana 2006) on how Indian indentured women in the Caribbean came to be disavowed by the nationalist discourse, I suggest that these women in the subaltern diaspora function as the constitutive outside of the formation of normative Indian femininity in India.
ii i

The Inter-Asia Cultural studies project is a critical enterprise spanning many regions in geographical Asia, its mandate being to problematize the concept Asia even as it articulates the possibilities of intellectual-political connections across that space. The loosely-knit group around this project meets every year in different Asian locations to discuss and further their critical initiatives. One of these initiatives is a journal, Inter-Asia Cultural studies, now published four times a year, and which is in its sixth year of publication. viii Thanks to Dai Jinhua, Ding Naifei, Firdous Azim, and Sisters in Islam for their presentations on the Fukuoka panel. ix I am grateful to all the participants from different parts of Asia at this conference for their inputs. x At the Alternatives Workshop, the feminist contributions came from Kim Soyoung, Malathi de Alwis, Samina Choonara and myself. xi I am indebted to Firdous Azim, Melani Budianta, Kim Eunshil and Go Kaphee for their contribution to the panel I organized at the Inter-Asia Conference in Seoul, 2005.

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