The Little Red Book of Feminism?
As she puts it in
Mary E John
H
ere is a rare book about femi-
nism, produced as a deceptively
small paperback with a bright
brick red cover that catches your atten-
tion right away. Written in a highly
engrossing style, it takes on very serious
issues while also frequently making the
reader smile. Nivedita Menon has man-
aged to condense some of the most com-
plex challenges facing the womens move-
ment in contemporary India and else-
where in the form of a series of short
reflections that are organised within
six chapters. Her writing engages those
who have been part of the very struggles
she analyses, while as effectively reach-
ing out to readers for whom the issues at
stake may not be altogether familiar. In
this day and age, when academia and
popular writing march to very different
drummers, the one weighed down by its
own arguments and evidence, the other
competing in the publicity-driven world
of the 30 second sound byte, the ability
to combine scholarship with punch and
wit can only be enviable.
The book starts off with a very short
discussion of its title. A take-off on James
Scotts Seeing Like a State, Menon uses
the metaphor of vision (one much used
in fields like feminism and womens stud-
ies) to argue for the need to see beyond
what appears natural, so as to reveal the
gendered modes of power that maintain
things as they are. But while the State is
so engaged to keep control, a feminist
lens works quite differently according to
Menon (one that a person of any gender
can acquire). Adopting a position of mar-
ginality not only makes it possible to see
better but can even be used to subvert
power, and not just of gender relations
more narrowly, but of all hierarchies that
sustain the social order.
The Family
Without further ado, ready to show her
reader what this actually involves, she
24
book review
Seeing Like a Feminist by Nivedita Menon (New
Delhi: Zubaan and Penguin India), 2013; pp xii + 252,
Rs 295.
plunges into the first chapter the family.
It is actually not easy to provide a
satisfactory account of the issues she
raises because of the way in which she
does so. Many feminists and fellow trav-
ellers (such as the early socialist Robert
Owen who said it all two centuries ago)
are aware of the inequality structuring
the family, which today is patrilineal,
necessary to ensure the perpetuation of
property ownership from fathers to
sons, which in turn demands the most
stringent control over womens sexuality.
But interwoven with the more well-
known themes (the sexual division of
labour, the menace of dowry, the media-
tion of the public and private through
the family) are the vignettes that set
Menons prose apart the subversive
potential of Valentines Day, the invisible
role of exploited domestic servants in
the reproduction of the family, and the
potential of new reproductive techno-
logies for challenging patriliny.
The next chapter is on the body. Here
we are treated to an extraordinary welter
of topics the temporally and spatially
differentiated emergence of the modern
individual in western and non-western
societies; the rise of a strictly binary con-
ception of two sexes in 17th century
Europe compared to its unitary prede-
cessor; the presence of minimal notions
of gender difference in certain pre-
colonial societies (her examples are
from Nigeria) and of fluid gender prac-
tices elsewhere (Bhakti movements,
men as the best performers of wom-
ens roles on stage); changing scientific
and feminist theories of sex and gender
identity; the problematic nature of sex
segregration in sports; the disciplining
may 4, 2013
of masculinities for men.
her conclusion to this chapter, her pur-
pose is to show that the last bastion of
sex difference, the body itself, is revealed
to be not simply given by nature, but
made visible in specific ways by differ-
ent kinds of discourses (p 89).
What follows is a short chapter on
desire. Menon revisits and takes for-
ward her earlier engagements in the field
of sexuality through an assessment of the
current state of play, beginning with a
short account of the production of hetero-
normativity in colonial India. It is in the
decade of the 1990s, with the entry of
HIV/AIDS agendas including discourses
of safe sex, that and quite unexpectedly
for the status quo a new counter-
normative politics emerged among groups
hitherto at the margins of both society
and movements such as the womens
movement lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans-
gender, hijras and sex workers. The most
interesting part of this chapter reflects
on the difficulties now accompanying
the scope of a distinctively queer poli-
tics that attempts to expose the structur-
ing of what is considered normal and
natural, including efforts to connect its
agendas to those of a left-wing politics
more generally. In the context of a move-
ment that has successfully brought about
the reading down of Section 377 of the
Indian Penal Code in less than two
decades, and will probably soon see its
erasure altogether, Menon says that
the fissures and differences within the move-
ment will become more visible. There are
those who are content to be gay or lesbian
without fear of opprobrium, and dont want
to be political at all; there are queer, poli-
tically aware people who are Hindu right-
wing or pro-capitalist or anti-reservations;
and, of course, there is queer politics that is
opposed to all of these. This is the coming of
age for queer politics(p 109).
Sexual Violence
From the constructions of heterosexu-
ality and its potential destabilisation
through non-normative desires, the next
chapter comes from the other direction
by taking on the subject of sexual
violence. Here is an old struggle for
feminism, one that in fact was the
vol xlviIi no 18 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

springboard for new womens move-
ments the world over during the 1960s
and 1970s, but which Menon chooses to
reflect on more than half way into the
book. Through the contradictions of
rape, this chapter tacks between patriar-
chal and feminist modes of opposing
this particular crime. For the former it is
a fate worse than death for which women
must share the blame even as good
ones deserve certain protections; for the
latter the tasks are much harder. Femi-
nists have to question what makes rape
so heinous compared to other forms of
assault and injury (namely, the role of
female sexuality in family and mar-
riage), provide an alternate frame for
just forms of punishment, and, more
importantly, demand life and survival
beyond rape, including for raped men
and transgenders. Issues of sexual har-
assment in universities and workplaces
also figure here, including Menons worry
that a single national law against sexual
harassment (not yet passed at the time
of writing the book) would displace
carefully evolved and specific arrange-
ments in tune with different contexts
and working conditions. There are many
more examples and case studies that are
probed in this chapter, whether it be the
position of the prostitute or slut, false
complaints, or rape in situations of con-
flict, in order to question what usually
gets taken for granted in the hierarchies
of good and bad women.
Islam and minority identities are fore-
grounded in the subsequent chapter enti-
tled Feminists and Women. Here too
there is a revisiting of older debates the
Shah Bano case, the controversies over a
Uniform Civil Code and the battles of sec-
ularism and Hindutva in order to un-
derline the heterogeneity of women. In
another section she brings two disparate
dress codes together the veil and the
miniskirt, the one so imprisoning and
the other so liberating within a com-
mon critique of the pressure to dress in
certain ways, and the need to think afresh
as to what would empower women in a
particular context. This chapter also has a
very short discussion on caste, beginning
with the stand-off over the Womens Res-
ervation Bill. Menon rightly criticises sec-
tions of the womens movement for not
Economic & Political Weekly EPW may 4, 2013
accepting the sub-quota for Other Back-
ward Class (OBC) women, and their unease
in acknowledging different patriarchal con-
straints to political participation. She also
notes other conflicts produced along
caste lines, in the controversy over bar dan-
cers in Mumbai and those raised by dalit
feminists to an upper caste movement.
Questions of Agency
Finally, Menon takes on debates and dis-
agreements among feminists in relation
to questions of agency. After a prelimi-
nary discussion faulting feminist criti-
ques of womens commodification she
addresses six issues sex work, the bar
dancers, trafficking/migration, commer-
cial surrogacy, pornography and sex
selective abortion. What all of these
obviously share is a sense of victimhood,
so that banning them appears as the way
forward: For many feminists sex work is
slavery and violence, and bar dancing
only a variation on it; anti-trafficking is
conflated with prostitution, and can lead
to concerns that all womens migration
must be controlled; feminists worry over
the relative powerlessness of the woman
offering her womb in a surrogacy arran-
gement. Menons strategy in each case is
not therefore to simply refute such posi-
tions in favour of claims of womens
choice. Indeed, she begins by openly
criticising decontextualised notions of
consent, and demands recognition of the
fundamental constraints within which
most choices are made. What she does
then do is to query common sense
assumptions about victimisation so a
survey on sex workers reveals that they
were engaged in this kind of work be-
cause it was in fact better than other op-
tions and offered more economic gains.
Or again, laws to censor obscenity may
in fact only empower the state and can-
not take note of changing meanings of
pornography, sexuality and desire. In
the section on abortion, Menon traces
the shifts in the long campaign against
sex selection from the language of foeti-
cide, and demands that a woman must
have an unqualified right to abortion,
given her lack of choices in most situa-
tions, including giving birth to an un-
wanted daughter. The cause of the
skewed sex ratio would be better served
vol xlviIi no 18
BOOK REVIEW
by fighting gender discrimination as it
exists among living women.
By way of a conclusion, Menon briefly
contrasts feminist activism in south Asia
with the depoliticisation produced by
most development agendas, given their
production of the self-sacrificing compli-
ant woman. It is the many outsides of
patriarchy that characterise this part of
the world, whose feminisms keep on
coming and in such unpredictable ways.
This overview has no doubt done a
grave injustice to a text that is able to
cover so much ground and so smoothly.
It would simply not be possible in the
short space of a review to respond to the
myriad issues and topics that are ad-
dressed, and I have tried to be faithful to
her arguments in order to give readers a
glimpse of the scope and depth of her
claims. Some of the topics are themes
that she has discussed at greater length
in her earlier writings, only to come
back to them once more through a com-
bination of summary and reformulation,
thus giving us a sense of a scholar and
activist who is constantly prepared to
rethink her own positions, and never
treat them as closed or resolved. This is
a rare and admirable mode of feminist
theorising. One can see this, for in-
stance, in the discussions on the Wom-
ens Reservation Bill, sexual violence,
and sex selective abortions.
A Response
Let me therefore attempt to respond
somewhat differently, and at a more con-
ceptual level. At the very outset, Menon
sets up her task as one of revealing the
default codes of power that lie beneath
the everyday reproduction of the social
order. It is as much a strength as a weak-
ness, I would suggest, that the workings
of this very order are seen to rely over-
whelmingly on conceptions of the natu-
ral. The strengths of such an approach are
obvious in the very edifice that gives the
book its coherence. It is what enables her
to begin with the family, move on to the
body, and from there to desire and agency.
Over and over again, woman is revealed
to be a fiction and much of mainstream
feminism is equally guilty of setting its
strategies in consonance with what is
normal. Hence the reluctance to take on
25
BOOK REVIEW

the challenges of sexuality whether of
sexual desire or sex work which are at
best seen to be secondary to the main prio-
rities of the womens movement. Then
again there is the frequent worldwide
drive towards a universal womens agenda
at the cost of the very real heterogeneities
and conflicts that structure womens lives,
which at so many points in the book she is
able to brilliantly lay bare.
The weakness, however, lies in Me-
nons core strategy of questioning the
natural as the principal means of sub-
verting the social order. Much of the
natural, moreover, seems to concen-
trate on one specific version of it, name-
ly, biological determinism. This, as the
term suggests, is the idea that human
behaviour and achievement is caused
by biological characteristics in a one-way
relationship blacks are inferior to
whites by virtue of certain racial traits,
women are emotional and incapable of
logical reasoning, and so on. Menon
claims that this has been one of the
most important legitimising mecha-
nisms for the oppression of women over
the centuries. The challenge to biolo-
gical determinism is therefore crucial
for feminist politics (p 61). I think this is
somewhat misleading, especially in a loca-
tion such as India or south Asia. After all,
the oppression of women goes back as far
as the beginning of history and the crea-
tion of patriarchies (multiple, diverse, con-
tingent without a doubt), when there was
no biological determinism in place.
As she herself has noted, the very idea
of nature and biology as foundational to
gender identity has a very specific mod-
ern western history, and, one, I may add,
that has been constantly updating itself.
So strict biological determinism no longer
reigns supreme. The nature/nurture de-
bate has been around for quite some
time, in which it is widely acknowledged
that a complex and multiple set of rela-
tionships mediate biological and social
processes. This is not to deny that espe-
cially in the western world during the
1970s and 1980s the distinction bet-
ween sex and gender, nature and
culture offered ammunition to feminists
eager to prove how historical and chan-
geable patriarchal structures have been
and therefore how open to transforma-
tion they could be. But, and this is really
my point, it is quite unclear how the
proof of changeability per se, even flu-
idity (to use a rather loose term that is
frequently deployed in the book), is in
itself subversive of any social order. In
what ways were medieval rulers who
took on what today would appear to be
highly feminine modes of deportment
subverting power? It is only from a per-
spective that sees fixity as the central
problem that fluidity appears to have
some sort of automatic emancipatory po-
tential. But the problem is surely much
larger, namely, that of both revealing
and undoing gendered modes of power
in all their historicity. As the case of colo-
nial India amply attests, power could
take on quite fluid forms, which is why
the civilising mission of the British and
their desire to improve the low status
of Indian women has been the subject of
so much feminist critique, controversy
and debate. Therefore, I would turn the
problem on its head: What is most in
need of explanation is the peculiar, ex-
ceptional and (historically speaking)
short-lived creation of a binary notion of
two opposite sexes which must be mir-
rored in society by men and women.
This is a conception that came into its
fullness in Europe during the colonial
period and has been losing ground at
least since the mid-20th century.

Economic Reforms and Growth in India

Essays from the Economic and Political Weekly
Edited by PULAPRE BALAKRISHNAN
This volume investigates the nature of economic growth in India, its pace over time, its relationship to changes in the policy regime and
the role of the external sector, and uses data to evaluate the policies that have implicitly underpinned the changes.
Presenting a range of approaches, views and conclusions, this collection comprises papers published in the Economic and Political Weekly
between the late 1990s and 2008 that are marked by an empirical awareness necessary for an understanding of a growth history. The
Pp xiv + 454 Rs 445 articles reflect a certain groundedness in their approach in that they privilege content/context over methodology.
ISBN 978-81-250-4271-6 This volume is an important addition to the literature on post-liberalisation economic growth in India. It will be useful to students and
2011 scholars of economics and management.
Authors include Deepak Nayyar Rakesh Mohan Atul Kohli Arvind Panagariya Kunal Sen Neeraj Hatekar Jessica Seddon Wallack Pulapre Balakrishnan
Ravindra Dholakia Ramesh Chand R Nagaraj Montek Ahluwalia Shashank Bhide Amit Bhaduri Pranab Bardhan
Readings on the Economy, Polity and Society
This series is being published as part of a University Grants Commission project to promote teaching and research in the social sciences in India. The
project (2010-12) is being jointly executed by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and the Economic and Political Weekly. The series is meant to
introduce university students and research scholars to important research that has been published in EPW in specific areas. The readers draw on the EPWs
archive of published articles.
Also published: Environment, Technology and Development: Critical and Subversive Essays ed. Rohan DSouza
Village Society, ed. Surinder S Jodhka, The Adivasi Question, ed. Indra Munshi,
Decentralisation and Local Government, ed. T R Raghunandan, Gender and Employment, ed. Padmini Swaminathan
Higher Education, ed. Jandhyala B G Tilak,
Forthcoming titles: Caste and Society, ed. Satish Deshpande
Orient Blackswan Pvt Ltd
www.orientblackswan.com
Mumbai Chennai New Delhi Kolkata Bangalore Bhubaneshwar Ernakulam Guwahati Jaipur Lucknow Patna Chandigarh Hyderabad
Contact: info@orientblackswan.com
26 may 4, 2013 vol xlviIi no 18 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

On Sex Segretation in Sports
It is in Menons discussion of sex segrega-
tion in sports that the overkill in her em-
phasis on biological determinism becomes
particularly evident. We have been re-
sponsible for a very lopsided approach to
the body, giving far too much attention to
questions of sexuality and beauty, and too
little to other aspects of our embodied
selves, such as the labouring body and the
body at play. So bringing sports into the
picture is certainly welcome. Given the
complex mix of genetic, hormonal and
genital criteria that are currently markers
of sex identity, which make gender tests
more or less arbitrary, Menon argues not
just that such tests should be stopped (I
wholeheartedly agree), but that sex segre-
gation should be done away with alto-
gether and be replaced instead by appro-
priate physical categories relevant to the
sport in question. While this would bring
to an end the humiliations and stigma as-
sociated with such tests, especially for
those with intersex characteristics, I fail to
Economic & Political Weekly EPW may 4, 2013
see how ending sex segregation would en-
hance womens participation in sports as
it exists, given the systematic disadvan-
tages evident even for high performing
women athletes. What physical criteria
would now be put in place? After all,
whatever the uni-sex body-type (based
on, say, height or weight) that would be
chosen, the top male versions of that body
type will enjoy a biological advantage
over the best performing women. More
importantly, what about the myriad forms
of discrimination that women face in every
sphere including sports, all of which only
add to their disadvantages (and which
have made us fight for quotas for women
in so many areas)? Is such a demand com-
ing from sportswomen themselves? This
is only to say that we therefore need a
much more extended engagement with
the world of sports, of bodies in play, so
that we might do more to break hege-
monic male standards, and question the
very criteria that currently determine suc-
cess and failure.
vol xlviIi no 18
BOOK REVIEW
Among the most stimulating parts of
the book is the discussion in the final
chapter on the victim/agency conun-
drum. It marks an advance over the un-
helpful polarisations (such as the sex
slave vs the empowered sex worker) that
have stymied feminist debate in so many
instances. There is considerable potential
here to take the arguments beyond the
constraints of the natural into a more ac-
tive consideration of issues such as caste
and class, which only make fleeting ap-
pearances in the book. To conclude then,
Nivedita Menons not so little red book
offers a surfeit of opportunities for enga-
gement, whether in delighted agreement
or in the mode of contestation. Readers
will be carried forward by the wide range
of topics and themes, the catchy style,
and above all the invitation to see like a
feminist and to discover for themselves
what a difference this can make.
Mary E John (maryejohn1@gmail.com) is with
the Centre for Womens Development Studies,
New Delhi.
27