India in a fig leaf

In India, sexuality and feminist movements are increasingly present in the public space. But gender sometimes masks other social categories of domination such as caste, and media discourses tend to sanitize sexual violence.

In the 1990s, India, which was opening up to the global economy, also experienced a significant expansion of the media and cultural industries, while activism, particularly at the local level, gave rise to new debates around sexuality. Carmel Christy has studied the presence of these debates around sexuality in the public space since this period.

Inscribed in the tradition of media And cultural studies Anglo-Saxon academic currents that define themselves more by their field of study than by a particular disciplinary tradition, the work is interested in the cultural register, in the cultural and media translation of social experiences. Law, language, media, literature, cinema and artistic performances, in that they (re)constitute meanings that participate in maintaining power relations, are all components mobilized in this mapping of the institutional and discursive space of sexuality made by the author.

Christy’s work, while filling the dearth of work on gender in media and cultural studies in contemporary India, is largely limited to the state of Kerala. The local scale allows for consideration of local socio-cultural specificities and uses of the language – Malayalam. For example, some debates (such as the one in the early 1990s around pennezhuthu (women’s writings)) and cultural practices (such as mimicry (imitation performances) popularized in the 1980s) are unique to this region. Moreover, the “Kerala model of development,” so-called because of the country’s best development indicators in terms of women’s health and education, has the paradox that while the ideal of the educated, even professionally active, woman prevails, the ideal woman is nonetheless domestic and cannot legitimately enter the public space for reasons beyond the roles assigned to her.

The chapters are drawn from scholarly articles, leaving much room for preliminary theoretical debates. They focus on the study of two particularly high-profile events, the Suryanelli gang rape case and the publication in 2005 of a sex worker’s autobiography. In doing so, the book also highlights broader processes of Malayalam cultural transformation, including the evolution of media language.

Gender at the expense of minorities

Among the major events that helped structure post-independence Indian feminism (chapter 1), the Shah Bano controversy (from 1978), named after a 62-year-old Muslim woman divorced from her husband after 40 years of marriage, divided feminists. They called for the adoption of a Uniform Civil Code – in place of a Family Law based on the scriptures and customs of each religious community – and certain Muslim organizations. Despite a critique of Western ideals, as well as an attempt to bring out an Indian feminism very different from Western feminism, the emphasis has long been on gender, ignoring the diversity of women’s situations in India (https://laviedesidees.fr/Repenser-le-genre-en-Inde.html). This event gave rise to reflections on a feminism situated at the intersection between communities, castes and gender, and the 1990s saw the advent of a Dalit feminism (non-caste, the term “dalit” meaning “oppressed”) with the creation of new feminist groups such as the National Federation of Dalit Women, All India Dalit Women’s Forum and Bahujan Mahila Parishad.

In the late 1990s, it was the debates surrounding the Women’s Reservation Bill that divided two categories of position against the implementation of a quota of seats reserved for women in Parliament and Legislative Assemblies: while women campaigned for more fundamental social transformations in the struggle for gender equality, another group – including many Dalit and lower-caste men – relied on the argument that quotas would democratize the political sphere only to women from higher castes. These discourses reinforced the presupposition that women were high castes while Dalits and lower castes were men, while revealing the contradictions in the demands of high-caste women and the crushing of caste by gender.

Historically, sexual practices in India have been largely shaped and sustained by the caste structure, with endogamy being necessary for its continuation. While the chastity of upper-caste women is protected, sexual violence is predominantly directed at lower-caste women by upper-caste men, allowing the caste economy and its structural hierarchy to be maintained.

However, the invisibility of caste, which runs through both the feminist activist sphere and legitimate representations of women’s sexual bodies, leads to an understanding of gender in India that tends to reduce women’s identity to that of the upper-caste Hindu woman – and this has been the case since the beginning of Indian feminism. Also, secular, progressive and liberal feminism, whose discourses are not marked by caste, is synonymous with upper castes, whose ideal female figure would be the only legitimate one. It excludes the daily struggles of women whose experiences are marked not only by gender, but also by their community affiliation.

The historical rereading of feminism in India and the ideal of the middle-class Malayalam woman lays the foundations of the intersectional feminist posture which runs through both the choice of study subjects and the analytical grid used in the work.

The Suryanelli case through the prism of the law, the media and cinema: the caste subtext

The Suryanelli case (Chapter 3) marks the beginning of the media’s fascination with sex scandals. In 1996, a 16-year-old Kerala schoolgirl was left for forty days by her boyfriend in the hands of a sex trafficking ring; when she was released, she filed a complaint against her 42 attackers. Following numerous legal twists and turns, the Supreme Court sentenced 34 men to prison in 2014.

While at the beginning of the case, the headlines in the written press express a certain empathy for the victim, the tone suddenly becomes sarcastic, and the young woman a dubious subject, not to say suspect, illegitimate to take legal action, when she disappears during the trial without informing the police. Many articles in Malayalam dailies then focus on the precautions to be taken to avoid any similar case of sexual harassment or assault, insisting on the responsibility of the family, especially mothers, to educate their daughters “properly”.

The Kerala public space is historically formed in XIXe and at the beginning of the XXe century around movements for social reforms focused on the eradication of inequalities and caste oppression and then by the influence of “progressive forces” such as the Communist Party. While Kerala’s progressive image was challenged by minority groups in the 1980s, the public sphere did not radically change its discourses on caste, gender and sexuality: it only masked or disguised caste as class, in addition to normalizing the middle-class Keralan woman. This absence of explicit discourses on the existence of a caste-based hierarchy partly masks its existence as a factor of differences between people’s experiences and visibility; caste is therefore the object of an “absence-presence”: it is implicitly present in the form of a clandestine consensus that nevertheless functions as the constitutive principle of the public sphere.

In the Suryanelli case, caste is not directly mentioned but is implied by references to “deviant” acts. The High Court judgment suggests that the victim’s family is unstable, with an alcoholic father and a deviant mother, and mentions that the young woman spent Rs 450 on personal needs rather than on her education. The law acts as an extension of the socio-political world in its logical understanding of family and caste, as the chastity and virtue of low-caste women tend to be questioned by the judiciary, thereby delegitimising them.

The film Acchanurangaatha Veedu (2005), based on the facts, imagines a young woman from a Dalit Christian family. The ambiguity of caste is transposed into certain characteristics of the subject: “misbehavior,” deviance, “irresponsible” parents, far from the image of the “ideal woman” embodied by the chaste bodies and purity of the high castes. It helps to construct cultural registers through which the figure of the Dalit or low-caste female sexual subject – historically represented as sexually available – is imagined as vulnerable and debauched, stigmatized, and immediately delegitimized.

Media Compromises

As they make subjects such as caste and sexuality visible, the media are innovating to legitimize the taboo content they offer. Chapter 2 shows that far from disrupting the social order in terms of sexual violence, the written press supports it.

In addition to scattered references to victims’ past behavior, other mobilized elements create meanings that exceed the limits of objective information. The layout of newspapers can be subtly suggestive: articles relating to the Suryanelli case often appear in italics in the center of the front page, a place usually reserved for articles about film releases; italics, on the other hand, are usually reserved for so-called softmarking a difference from hard news (considered of major interest to the readership).

C. Christy is also interested in language as a producer of categories through which we organize desires, practices and identities, while it undergoes important changes, traveling through the media and generating new meanings. Neologisms are thus the culmination of the efforts produced to adapt the discourse on sexuality by drawing on the existing discourse, in such a way that it is marketable.

For example, rape, previously called balatsangam (i.e. “report” “with force” or “forced report”), becomes sexual offense: the term peedanam which is preferred to it means “to cause harm” or “to torture”, referring rather to psychological harassment or physical aggression. Also, from the 1990s, peedanam is used to describe significant sexual violence, including rape. The term perpetuates the taboo surrounding rape, which is not discussed explicitly but through a generic term. The neutralizing element carried by the word, which is not associated with sexuality when it is not used in a context of sexual offense, opens up a permissiveness that legitimizes sexual harassment in public spaces and thereby reinforces existing gender relations in public spaces.

C. Christy thus demonstrates that the visibility of sexuality reproduces, rather than contests, the existing ideological system, and that in fact, in terms of opening up to discussions, we are witnessing a “sanitized” sexualization of the public space.