She who stumbles

For a long time I’ve wondered why I keep getting approached in public by South Asian men, being asked where I’m from, what I study, where I live, etc. Nobody else seems to do it, and street harassment from non-South Asian men tends to be of a less conversational nature, so I always assumed it was about me looking Indian and them being lonely (and assuming that I, as a woman, am gonna be more accommodating than the other South Asian men in the vicinity).

The number of South Asian migrants to Australia is increasing as a proportion of the total immigration intake. Partly, this is fuelled by changes in South Asia (I know that it’s becoming easier for Indians to travel, work, and repatriate money from overseas), partly by changes to the workforce in Australia that have increased the number of short-term immigrants who come to Australia to work. The majority of these immigrants are male.

The area I live in has a large South Asian population. The proximity to the city and availability of decent units are a drawcard. And if the conversation of these South Asian newcomers is anything to go by, there are a fair few newer migrants moving in.

But until I read Annie’s post in Known Turf about being harassed in Delhi by a man claiming to be from Melbourne, I didn’t connect the behaviour of these men to norms within South Asia. The salient quality to me was their desire to find some shred of familiarity with their homeland, which, as a migrant myself, I do understand and have sympathy with. But I’ve always been vaguely baffled by their choice to approach me rather than anyone else, and so kept my irritation with their sense of entitlement to myself.

Knowing the age and background of these men, I can imagine that they’ve absorbed the same norms as men in South Asia who engage in “eve-teasing”. Which isn’t to make some kind of special case out of the sexism of South Asian men — because, like I said, I get harassed by non-South Asian men too — but to point out that it has distinctive characteristics arising from its social circumstances, and that it manifests itself in different ways to other types of sexual harassment.

So, right after reading Annie’s post, I switched over to Sepia Mutiny and read Ennis’ disingenuous dismissal of Richard Gere’s sexual harassment of Shilpa Shetty.

My problem with it isn’t his attack on the prudish morality of the court case being brought against them; my problem is the focus on the overblown sexual morality of the Indian response to the case and the minimising of the sexual harassment involved.

Ennis wrote:

An embrace and a smooch on the cheek is tame compared to stuff in Bollywood lately.[...]

Why not say, I’m sorry you all are offended, I’ll ask him not to do it again, but really it was just a kiss on the cheek. It wasn’t on my lips, and there was no tongue involved. None. Now if you’re done with the lawsuits, I have to get prepared for my sexy Bollywood movie …
[emphasis mine]

So according to Ennis, the non-consensuality and force in the incident are less problematic than the conservative response to it? And it’s okay to paint Shetty as a hypocrite because she makes money from sexually suggestive films?

By removing the issue of consent, Ennis has just played a rhetorical trick that equates sexual harassment with consensual “kissing” — removing the issue of female agency altogether. Male agency defines and constitutes what is sexual, while women’s agency is a non-issue.

Gere and Shetty didn’t “kiss”. Gere manhandled her. She did not consent to it. In fact, she was very uncomfortable during the entire incident.

So defending the incident in a climate where conservative Hindu moralists have made it into an either-or issue (EITHER stand up for Indian autonomy by condemning both Shetty and Gere for their licentiousness OR allow foreign men to plunder “our” women at will), invoking a patriarchal nationalism that has superficial anti-imperialistic connotations, is a bit tough. That’s hardly an excuse.

Buying into this logic means ignoring the sexism of the incident as well as the moralistic response to it. Both responses involve ignoring the fact that a woman’s bodily integrity was violated to produce this “obscene” display.

A comment from an article I read the other day has stuck in my mind all week, and I think it applies here:

culture is structured according to the circulation of women among men according to historically and culturally specific patterns. Feminist critics have highlighted the ways that such “trafficking in women,” to use Gayle Rubin’s term, establishes and institutionalizes the oppression of women.
[...]
In addition to a sex-gender economy that organizes men into social groups through the distribution of women, there is an economy regulating the distribution of women so as to construct and perpetuate racial groupings.
- Gwen Bergner, ‘Who Is That Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks‘, in PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 1, Jan. 1995.

The two issues — street harassment and public harassment by celebrities — both tie into this issue, I think. The use of women by men according to logics of capital, race, empire, and “culture”.

Both sides of the dichotomy that have been created by the comments of Judge Gupta are about what kind of sexual economy women are ‘circulated’ within. Evaluation of women’s behaviour in terms of obscenity versus chastity opposes two different systems of sexual ‘circulation’ — one based on patriarchal familial bonds that extend and reproduce the patriarchal family, or one based on male-dominated capitalism in which women’s sexuality is commodified. There’s a certain amount of agency that women have in either system, depending on a variety of things (including their freedom of movement between the two systems), but overall these overlapping systems dominate women.

In the case of street harassment by recent South Asian immigrant men, it’s that they’re treating me, and women like me, as repositories of both exciting sexuality and familiar culture — as inhabiting both the white public world of the labour market, academia, and politics, as well as the private world of hearth and home (in the immigrant context where “culture” is rendered part of the private sphere).

It’s kinda depressing that women going about their business — whether walking home from the train station or addressing a gathering to combat AIDS — are doing that business in spaces overdetermined by patriarchal domination (as well as other kinds of domination). When will our actions, words, thoughts, feelings and bodies be our own?

Since my visit to India this February I’ve been thinking hard about my Hindu faith and how it sits with my commitment to social justice.

I think perhaps the only thing I’m sure of regarding the status of Hinduism is that it’s very, very contested. Reading about it only serves to confuse me, because every discourse is underpinned by a political position, all of which reflect positions in a material reality. Given the complexity of the subcontinent, the length of its history, the size of its population and the very density of practices, values, discourses within it, I’m reluctant to approach them. After visiting India, and comparing my point of view from there to mine here, I know that distance distorts these issues. Reading isn’t a substitute for participating in a society.

But of course, as a Hindu Brahmin woman from Bangalore, with a strong intention to return there to work in “aid and development” (a set of terms which, to me, is a respectable way of talking about fighting imperialism and capitalism) I need to understand what all that history, practice and social complexity means.

Until now, most of my knowledge about Hinduism has been religious — explicitly religious and not historicised or taken in its political and social context. This is the identitarian logic of how Hindu groups seem to operate in Australia. Knowing how heavily Hindu revivalism has influenced the practice and discourse around religion, this blindness now strikes me as gratuitous. How can we talk about morality without politics?

At the same time, I feel like a hypocrite for being so invested in Hindu spirituality while at the same time feeling defensive about being a Hindu where Hinduism is a minority religion.

I can’t win, but I don’t have to.

It’s in this spirit that I read these articles about contemporary Hinduism:
Whatever Happened to the Hindu Left? by Ruth Vanita
Hinduism Versus Hindutva: The Inevitability of a Confrontation and A Billion Gandhis, by Ashis Nandy.

While these make me feel better about being Hindu as well as left-wing, I’m not so sure they’re helping me understand the responsibilities of my social position. I know that overcoming privileged guilt (and turning it into practical self-knowledge and conscious action) is an important part of being a good ally, though. I wish I knew what would become of these confused sentiments.

More later, with added Fanon!