Who am I? How do I understand my existence? Several times these questions relating to my ‘self’ haunts me and make me dilemmatic about: “Should I hear my inner voice or should I subjugate it for the voice made for me in this androcentric world?” As Simone De Beauvoir rightly pointed out “One is not born a woman but rather becomes a woman”. I wonder, what is real and what is imaginative in these concrete categories revolving around the concept of ‘gender’? Beauvoir further pointed out “Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male." Within this absolute imposition of what we are provided with and how we have to behave in particular according to the gendered norms and expectations is something on this women’s day we need to engage with.
Although we cannot deny the fact that the women of the world represent themselves in educational, legislative, and employment spheres. They prove their efficiency while handling domestic chores with professional careers and have enrolled themselves in writing, art, and creative projects. In a pandemic, they were the major source of inspiration whether seen at the level of fulfilment of management, organization, and leadership roles. They were actively handling the physical, mental, and health pressures of their close ones along with their subjective concerns. Now, what is it that is left behind if they are represented well in the mainstream? The main concern for society is to change the perception towards the ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘objectification’ of women when dealing with contemporary times.
In the academic and non-academic spaces, we often observe the stereotypical portrayal of images of women as ‘sacrificial’, ‘sympathy provider’, ‘forgiver’, ‘can be good either professionally or domestically, ‘should bear the responsibilities of kids’, ‘hierarchy of male and female-centric visions for professional and personal careers’ and what not? Like Virginia Woolf, pointed out “professional women can often be seen been struggling in the domestic world versus the professional world where often her identity is sabotaged and not well represented in the mainstream”. The intersectionality within the feminist movement brings in complexities and diversities at class, race, gender, caste, and political level. While closely observing this trend I do feel we have to bring in hybridity and fluidity contextually, as hybridity is significant to provide the way through which things could be seen and to have a position to speak and fluidity provide certain forms of knowledge production for challenging hierarchical positions. Communication through media must open for self-representation and voicing one’s concerns that must not be seen as hatred towards androcentrism. There is a need to define empowerment and understand it closely in association with the ‘Feminism, Writing and Politics of Identity’. To be deprived of words means deprived of writing for further depriving us of having any agency. Without voicing our concerns and penning them down how we will be able to express our lived experiences?
Writing is a matter of personal development and in Virginia Woolf’s terms “the subconscious inner voice of women must reproduce in the form of their writings where it reflects the idea of rejection and resistance”. According to Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry’ gives shape to our honest explorations and to our hidden and dark realities that often get lost in everyday life. Doing poetry is an act of expressing our ideas and it does have political control over our silences and the ways of challenging while using language as a tool, ideology as the imagination of our inner minds and lived experiences. Percolation of those ideas into viable actions just like writing and publishing. It works within the structures being imposed by the society on one hand and what we feel and how we express it through writing and a constant process of self-reflection in form of ‘DOING POETRY’ and using it as a medium of conversation.
Hence, I would urge all of us to write while making use of one’s own vernacular language as our journeys in form of unvarnished stories bring us all together and we must not afraid of the complexity in our paths rather working in balance within the inter-sectional frame.
“In losing our voice something in us dies”
(Elif Shafak).
-Bhawna Shivan
Bhawna Shivan is an Assistant Professor at Department of Sociology, Bharati College, DU. She is pursuing Ph.D. from CSSS/SSS, JNU, Delhi. Her interest areas include caste and mobility, identity and popular culture, and social science research studies