Regarding the whole of Krishnan’s essay, I think it is simply pointless to divide patriarchal ideology in “ours” vs “their” – in the final analysis, patriarchy is simply unacceptable. I would like to live in a world, as Zizek puts it, where one has to argue FOR patriarchy and rape, and be isolated, instead of arguing AGAINST patriarchy- because the difference in the two situations is unexceptionable. One does not have to apologetic about, or “understand” the patriarchy of the oppressed. Perhaps, one might do a Hegelian “reflexive determination” here- we, the leftists, accept the fact of sexist brutality in “our” basic classes, do you, the communal-bourgeoisie of the likes of RSS and Congress, accept “your” patriarchy? Regarding sexual violence, a reference to culture does not have to be coming from the right, it can also be a “cultural materialist” point, coming from the left.

Finally, even if all the charges against CPI (M) are true- of supporting death sentences, of rapes in Nandigram and elsewhere (and I personally believe them to be true), the anti-CPI (M) mindset of some of the people writing on this page is breathtaking- it is, pathological jealousy, manifest in Nazism (even if some of the Jews were exploiters, the Nazi critic of them was racist and pathologically motivated). As is the case with most of the reports about rape coming from lower strata (the media’s fanasizing of the lower strata doing all the crime), the same is the case with an anti-CPIM leftists- for them it is “a subject supposed to loot and rape”. Unfortunately, even the “polemic” against Patnaik seems to be coming out of this mindset.

As for “patriarchal oppression”, it depends on how you’re defining it. Labor was often divided based upon sex in ancient societies, that’s absolutely true. Is that inherently oppressive? Not necessarily. There were other divisions based upon sex, as well. Again, I don’t see these divisions as inherently oppressive. It depends entirely upon the esteem granted the roles assigned to men versus the roles assigned to women. If the status or esteem given to male-associated roles was greater than that given to female-associated roles, and women were denied status and value within the group because of it, that is oppressive. If that is not the case, it is not necessarily so.

On the aftermath of this rape, an interview of Ashish Nandy(taken by Anup Dhar) was published in a significant Bengali magazine called Charcha, where Nandy tried to explicate his analysis of the kind of violence that was witnessed in Delhi, delineated by Dhar as something which is “beyond the known and comprehensible” periphery of our cultural circumscription. Here he contended that “possibilities of such ‘inhuman’ violence is comparatively less within settled, closely-knitted, sedentary communities and social collectives, since such relations are punctuated by a kind of conscious or unconscious cultural history.” Nandy denotes our present times, in the language of George Orwell as a situation of “the decline of English Murder”, giving way to the “American murder”, where no specific reason working behind such heinous violence can be deciphered, a society premised on the tenets of individualism and self-seekingness. He relates it to the kind of violence we witnessed in concentration camps during the 2nd world war where human beings were slaughtered like entities of an industrial belt, resonating the notion of a ‘factory of death’. He deems this as a situation when genocide becomes possible since human lives are “abstracted” and “quantified”, and he reads this rape as a continuation of such kinds of abstracted violence, informed by capital’s logic of abstraction and quantification.

The second instance is from the Justice Verma Committee Report itself, inspite of its impeccable suggestions, also falls into the trap of this very warped cause and effect chain as far as violence against urban women is concerned. In an endorsing manner, it quotes an article from The Hindu which says, “For a second context to hyper-violent masculinity, we must look at culture. Increasingly, cities have no recreational spaces for young men. Films, long one of the few cultural activities that a working-class audience could participate in, now target élites; movie theatre prices exclude large parts of the youth population. There is diminishing access to theatre, art, music and sport. In its place, the street becomes the stage for acting out adulthood, through substance abuse and violence. It further goes onto quote from the same article, “There is a crisis of sexuality. Few men, working class or rich, have access to a sexual culture which allows them sexual freedoms or choices. The crisis is exacerbated by the fact that sections of urban élites participate in a sexual culture which is relatively liberal — a culture that young men can watch on television and in public spaces, but never hope to participate in. For some, the sexually independent woman is thus enemy to be annihilated…. Economic policies, he argued, had not just impoverished the poor; they also tore apart community networks, diminished public spaces and closed the door to political participation. In India, women’s bodies appear to have become the principal terrain on which male rage is venting itself.” However, it does at the same time hasten to add the disclaimer that, “Lacking agency isn’t, obviously, the cause of sexual violence: women aren’t responding to their disenfranchisement by attacking men; men with power can, and do, rape.”

Now, although the larger point that the report was certainly trying to make here was that rape is not a ‘crime of passion’ but rather an “expression of power” and also how different subcultures use rape against women as a weapon to assert their identity; and moreover, it also hastens to add that “Lacking agency isn’t, obviously, the cause of sexual violence: women aren’t responding to their disenfranchisement by attacking men; men with power
can, and do, rape.”, I was wondering how would you respond to such texts (like the ones I stated above) which are nuanced, comes off as mere ‘analysis’, and yet, make the same point?

Thanks

Manu

Any analysis of rape, it appears to me, must engage with a complex network of problems, or an intersection of them: for, it’s not only the act of rape that we must discuss, but also how rape is configured in discourse. One of the problems in the said network is masculinity and its relation to patriarchy and rape. It is my argument that in patriarchal societies, masculinity (or at least the dominant definition of masculinity) is a repository of power. That is, it is by access to the factors which define the hegemonic masculinity, is the status-quo of patriarchy maintained (my analysis, though indebted to R.W. Connell, is not limited by it). Of course, when it comes to the issue of urban/power-less rapes, i.e., lower class/caste men raping middle/upper class/caste women, this configuration is problematic. But this is precisely why we must focus on the issue of representation/discourse of rape. Because in this domain, we can more clearly elucidate why rape is configured in the way it is.

For instance, let’s take three examples:

1) The class/caste of the perpetrators of the Delhi gangrape-murder was very clearly highlighted, drawing comments even from the PM.
2) Asaram Bapu’s comment that “rapes happen in India, not Bharat” is in the same vein. And,
3) Anti-rape campaigns which seek to redefine the parameters of masculinity and manhood.

In the first, there is an attempt to create a social (and alongside, biological) etiology of rape. That it is base, brutal desires that cause men to rape women, and that a certain type of men are more prone to raping, than other. This legitimates the state’s intervention in policing these uncouth and (as Shilpa Phadke et. al., argue in their book, ‘Why Loiter?’) undesirable bodies.
The second is far more insidious because it pushes the definition of rape into the domain of the culture – thereby creating another sort of legitimation: that in so-called Bharat women’s bodies are bound in sexual servitude to their husbands. But this is not rape; this is, for them, culture.
As for the third, as many contrary opinions have pointed out, are the men who commit rape not “real men”? The larger and more pertinent question thus, keeping with the idea that if masculinity is indeed a repository of power in patriarchy, is this: the idea of “power” is more important than the categories that encapsulate it, viz., masculinity and patriarchy.

In all three cases, there is a definite power-game: by defining rape, sexual identities, bodies etc. in particular ways, they are arranged in systems of power. And here is where I do see a merit in R.W. Connell’s idea of hegemonic masculinity being operational by policing of lesser, non-hegemonic masculinities, which is then based on the repression/subjugation of women.
This dynamic of power-subjugation is inscribed in rape – which, in turn, is configured in other discourses of surveillance, policing and so forth. It is, also, a political tool against dissent: it is an articulation of violence, of intolerance, of the severest insensitivity; of patriarchal governmentality’s recourse to extrajudicial means to crush any and all levels of transgression, political, social, or otherwise (rape as a war crime contextualizes this assertion).

Rape needs to be seen as a problem situated in the intersections of these issues. all other attempts to define it, reduce it are inadequate at best, or a vilification of it, at worst.

In Maya John’s position, what I found particularly egregious was the implied absence of agency in the purported sexuality of working class individuals. In her analysis, working class women have no desire, and working class men have no ability to harness their desires.

Both seem to be ‘victims’ (how perverse it is to imagine the rapist and the raped to be both ‘victims’) of impulses and powers beyond their control. If Capitalism destroyed the last vestiges of humanity in all proletarian persons, with what hope or temerity would one imagine the possibility of other ways of life. Not even Capitalism can rob every man or every woman of the capacity to desire and be desired in a way that is ethically responsible. If that were the case, there would be a very good reason for mass suicide.

The increasing instances of reportage of rape are not necessarily an index of a rising incidence of rape, they are also an index of the willingness of women and those close to them to talk about rape without succumbing to shame and silence. Working class women and all kinds of women are reporting rape and sexual harrassment, and are willing to talk about it, and this shows that there is a growing sympathy and support for their stances, some of this sympathy and support must also be coming from at least a lot of the women some of the men who happen to be a part of their lives, as members of the family, as lovers, as husbands, as brothers, as friends, colleagues and comrades.

The fact is, the majority of working class men do not rape women, not even the women who are in close proximity to them. Rape within the household, by fathers, uncles, brothers has no class specificity, as Kavita points out, and in the workplace, rape and sexual harrassment is always an index of a power dynamic. A lot of non-working class men are raping a lot of working class and non-working class women and men, girls and boys, and a a lot of working class men are not raping anyone at all.

And if they are not, then, how do we explain the ability of this large number to ‘withstand’ the onslaught that Maya John describes as occurring on their desiring selves (through the proliferation of erotic provocation) which inevitably turns some of them into rapists. If the exposure to available erotic provocation, including, as John says, the presence of desirable (because of dress or behaviour) but inaccessible women in the public domain, is enough to turn some working class men into rapists of the women available to them (without their agency coming into the picture – otherwise they would not be the helpless ‘victims’ of their own twisted urges in the sense that John makes them out to be) then, how can we account for the majority of working class men who happen to be non-rapist husbands, lovers, colleagues, comrades, brothers, comrades, friends and neighbours. Is their unwillingness (John might even say, ‘inability’) to rape also a result of their lack of agency?

How can we also account for the fact that countries like Iran, where the opportunities to wear what for John would be ‘provocative’ attire, are somewhat minimal, rape, remains a real social issue.

If, it John concedes that it is not a question of the non-rapists ‘lack of agency’, (that is they do not rape because they have agency) then, how do we explain the agency of the men who do rape? Either both have to have agency, or both must not have agency. We cannot have agency considered for the non-rapist, and non-agency offered as an explanation for the rapist.

But John does not see things this way. Both rapists and non-rapists in the working class survive within the same bleak environment, and if in some cases their circumstances deprive them of their ethical and humane senses entirely, turning them into rapists, then given that the circumstances do not change, we have to assume that those others who do not rape are either about to do so, or simply afraid of being caught, or devoid of sexuality. In other words, if you are a man, you had better not be a working class man, or if you are not a man, you had better avoid encountering a working class man.

Either way, John condemns the working class man to a kind of poverty of the spirit and an unthinking zombie-hood that even the worst kind of anti-working class or anti-subaltern prejudiced individual would find difficult to express in public.

But John’s self-confessed “Marxism’ allows her to air her paranoia, and her thinly disguised class hared under the garb of concern and sympathy.

So thank you Kavita Krishnan, for enabling this debate to take place.

regards,

Shuddha

I just had a question regarding one of the minor points you made, where you mention “organized reaction against conceding the right to abortion or same-sex marriage in the US is an instance of how much the capitalist class still invests in the family institution and the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction within it.” With specific reference to the debate on same-sex marriage in the US, I was wondering whether your statement implies that pro same-sex marriage groups in the US are less neoliberal or more socialist than their opponents? In fact, to the contrary the mainstream discourse on same-sex marriage in widely read journals or channels, was presented in typically neoliberal terms as a “business case” (see: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/02/the-economic-closet-the-business-case-for-gay-marriage.html), whose benefits were measured in terms of the billions of dollars to be earned by the marriage industry (http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/24/pf/gay-marriage-economic-impact/index.htm). Also, logically, same-sex marriage also reproduces a neoliberal logic of self-managed family units, so why would the capitalist class be opposed to it?

(I realise this isn’t the main argument in your piece, but it was the only unconvincing bit in your otherwise excellent article.)