The Media(ted)Woman: Gender Politics vs.

Cultural Dynamics
ABSTRACT---In today's world of advanced technologies, mass media with its capacity to standardize, homogenize and transform ideologies plays a great role in the formulation of femininity as a set of social expectations created and nurtured in any patriarchal society. As in imaging women, the media has the potential to image/imagine nations too. This paper is an attempt to foreground the suppression, injustice and double standards, which are cleverly masked in the celebration of our national identity. Who is an Indian? What constitutes Indianness? In posing these questions my project in this paper is to foreground the suppression, injustice and double standards, which are cleverly masked in the celebration of our national identity. In todays world of advanced technologies, mass media with its capacity to standardize, homogenize and transform ideologies plays a great role in the formulation of femininity as a set of social expectations created and nurtured in any patriarchal society. As in imaging women, the media has the potential to image/imagine nations too. Benedict Anderson points out that all nations are imagined and the mass media has a crucial role in this creative imagination (Anderson 20). Media has the ability to make what are in effect national symbols part of the life of every individual and thus to break down the divisions between the private and local spheres, and the public and national ones (Hobsbawm 142). The degree of womens liberation is still one of the most controversial debates raging in contemporary Indian society especially in the backdrop of Indian nationalisms problematic relationship to the womens question. The abstract notion of nation is concretized through the repeated use of certain icons, motifs and images. But the same images can be used differentially to have variant meanings within a particular nationalism. Somnath Zutshi points out how Indian nationalism has used the image of women in this contradictory manner. From its very earliest nineteenth-century beginnings, the Woman Question has haunted nationalist thought. Moreover, the casting of woman in the role of nation resulted in ideological struggles being fought out on the terrain represented by woman. Though ostensibly the debate touched upon every aspects of a womans being, the hidden agenda was always that of control. Behind this urge for control lay a fear of the powerful forces that lay buried within woman as well as nation -- sexuality in the one case and the demand for social justice in the other forces that could easily become overwhelming. Resolving the Woman Question in this sense meant that control of the nation (the body politic) was linked to the control of the woman (the female body). Further, the image of the woman as other could be drawn from the same reservoir of popular consciousness as the image of woman as nation. It has thus the immeasurable advantage of being able to stand for both self and other, both that, which has to be controlled/excluded, as well as that which stood for the fruits of control/ assimilation. (Zutshi 85). From the very beginning of Indian nationalism the image of the woman, the so-called Bharath Matha supercedes by far all other images created by such an ideology. Romila

Thapar speaks of the remarkable popularity of the Mother Goddess cults in various forms during the brahmanical renaissance of the Gupta and post-Gupta period. Thus history illustrates that the project of sacralizing its women has always been one of the primary agenda of all nationalisms (Thapar 260). Tagore mocks this nationalist preoccupation in his novel Home and the World where the firebrand nationalist Sandeep idealizes the heroine as Mother, the very image of Mother India, thus ensnaring her in the chains of her own glory and martyrdom. Nikhil her husband wants to educate and liberate her soul from the shackles of convention. In casting India as a sacred holy land, a female deity, a Mother Goddess; one could discern the ideological preoccupations of the upper and middle class male Hindu. He, as the one who speaks for the nation, is also highly conscious of the fact that his secure masculine identity is to a large extent dependent on the servility and dependence of his womenfolk, so much so that even his day to day needs from food and clean clothes to a cosy home most often rests on the services of his mother, wife, sister or daughter. Thus the average Indian male has very little doubt regarding the absolute nature of his superiority. But this casting of woman as Mother incorporates only one kind of experience of womanhood and thereby excludes all other women. Moreover while India itself is Mother India all Indians are sons of India. Thus the experience of being an Indian is categorically male, the female reality being elided over. At the same time women are idolized, placed on a pedestal and worshipped, provided they become Mothers and sacrifice their sexual identity. The muting of their sexual space provides a one-way ticket to glory. This gender hierarchy organizes, modulates and charts all relations between men and women in India and has permeated deeply into all our discourses, institutions, rituals and practices so as to have become a cultural system. Historically speaking, Indian nationalism too in demarcating a political position opposed to colonial rule, took up the womens question as a problem already constituted for it: namely, as a problem of Indian tradition. (Chatterjee: 1993 page 119). It is the over determined gender coding of a patriarchal culture which holds the woman responsible for upholding the values of a nation. In a land where the woman has been brought up believing with great pride that she is the symbol of the nation and its honour, womens education and her capacity to leave the domestic sphere to find work is not the same symbol of liberation as it is for the western woman. Her liberation is fraught with guilt, as also double labour as she has to take up the challenges of being the ideal wife, mother and daughter in law; at the same time fulfilling the challenges of her career. Under changed economic conditions the monetary security afforded by her job coerces her to cling to her employment, thus often making one wonder whether this indeed is freedom or oppression. Just as the nation, home is another place, which has been zealously guarded by the man. An intensely private space, it is also a place of complete patriarchal autonomy where the rights and liberty of women can rarely be ensured from outside, unless in extreme cases. As Schneider points out The decision about what we protect as private is a political decision that always has important public ramifications (Schneider 978). It is maintained by many sociologists that there are more rapes committed inside our homes than outside.

What is brutally utilized here is the womans economic and emotional dependence on her home and family. Is this the reason why even educated women disavow being feminists today? They know that they are under surveillance and power of a wide range of collective institutions, and thus are products of a disciplinary power, which make docile not only their bodies but also their minds. The supposedly philanthropic anxieties for the amelioration of the womans condition started in the 19 th century with the rise of nationalism and received great popularity through the mass media. But modernity was acceptable to the Indian man only as long as it confined itself to science, technology, economics, management or administration. The moment it engages in cultural criticism or gender issues, he develops a paranoid aversion for it. Though themselves the creators of modern society, middle-class Indian men vented their spleen against modernity for its ability to create the educated independent woman, capable of overturning traditions without any qualms whatsoever (Zutshi 137). Thus it is that our newspapers, television, or cinema, even while seemingly celebrating womens liberation, are careful to delimit it through the criterion of normal female sexuality as defined by them. If one closely observes our media one can see the efforts, both covert and overt, to uphold institutionalized male supremacy. Often we fail to recognize this, for power vested on the male has reached a stage where it passes itself off as normal instead of power itself. This gender hierarchy automatically controls not only the production of knowledge but also its form, content and circulation. An example which comes immediately to mind is the cover story in a popular magazine in Kerala of the four adolescent girls who indulged in a little bit of wild fun by taking semi nude pictures of each other in their hostel rooms. The story in the magazine was replete with pictures and tales of the wanton ways of our girls. The report brought to my mind the concept of the panopticon where one is watched by power structures without being able to see the one who watches. Foucault describes the panopticon as a laboratory of power (Foucault 202). This blatant exercise in social control is something constantly felt by our women today. One is subjected to surveillance and one can feel the omnipresent, omnipotent panopticon gaze. In the case of the four young girls, the eyes of the camera became the center of the panopticon, which intruded into their private space and converted it to a spectacle. Even as society lewdly and lip-smackingly enjoys this spectacle, it at the same time reconstructs it as surveillance, which obviously leads to control and punishment. It is high time we ask ourselves why the same surveillance cameras become blind stone gargoyles in the boys hostels in India. If we examine the language of our media, we can decode our cultures preoccupations, its values and ideological determinants. Language is not neutral. Our media perpetuates our sexist language and our sexist stereotypes. Let us take the example of the Indian Express of Friday, 10 August 2000. On page 7 is a 4-column article titled Actress of Substance. The article reads thus What else do our heroines do in films except look pretty, lip-sync to a few saccharine dripping songs and gyrate with the heroes? It is obvious that the question is a rhetorical one. The reporter then goes on to record the protest of an actress who says that she is on the look out for substance in her roles. But the title Actress of

Substance with the photo of the scantily clad actress in a highly provocative posture has already spoken the message out loud and clear, for the innuendo just cannot be missed. The reporter here can only collude with an ideology that denigrates and trivializes women, mainly professional women, and especially actresses at that. Through the title and the photo the newspaper communicates that a woman of substance is different from a man of substance, at the same time illustrating what a womans substance is really all about. This is one way of how an apparently innocent discourse can constitute a woman. Though one speaks of a non-sexist approach to issues obviously for public relations and political correctness, sexual semantics continues to haunt our media. Our Cinema and our television reinforce the power relations that exist in our homes. They are complicit in enhancing the exploitation that is tacitly woven into our domestic relationships. By highlighting and idealizing the sexual division of labour, they effectively naturalise these domestic ideologies and nurture them in the new high-tech age. In fact as Kumkum Sangari points out, the non-market sphere of domestic labour was, and persists as one of the spaces or meeting grounds where some of the adjustments between pre capitalist and capitalist ideologies and practices with their underlying essentialism and characteristic pressure against womens individualation come to acquire a new domain of effectivity and, in the process, are themselves reshaped. (Sangari 286). Thus when our advertisement industry focuses on woman as the primary consumer, it in fact very condescendingly offers a colonial, capitalist rationale for all forms of unpaid labour. For example ads like If you love your wife, buy her an X brand pressure cooker, very covertly reiterates an apparently obsolete domestic ideology of marriage as the site of a convenient congruence of male provision and female labour. In their attempt to legitimize womens role as unpaid domestic labourers, they also realize that the institution of the home is crucial to this role and its status quo should be maintained in order for capitalism to survive. Thus what we see today is the consensual arrangement of patriarchal cultural indigenism with capitalism to effectively check any subversive play of gender politics. Even as the construct of India as nation is too vast and heterogenous to claim one language as national or one ethnicity as common, what it indeed shares is the other construct of gender. On the threshold of the 21 st century, this gendered approach to ethnicity continues to bind us as a social organization. It has become a shared reality among the imagined community of Indians and the onerous task of our cultural boundary setting continues to pivot on our idealized womanhood. In a society, which has always striven to make mothers of its women, gender becomes a mark of proto-nationality. The other to the trope of mother as nation is the modern woman where modern denotes Western. Thus through this otherisation nationalism implies that the threat from cultures outside India is more critical to the woman as the representative of the nations traditions and its spiritual essence. Critics like Partha Chatterjee argue that such a paradigm is in fact not a dismissal of modernity but an attempt to make modernity consistent with the nationalist project (Chatterjee 1989 page 240). The new woman defined in this way becomes subjected to a new patriarchy (Chatterjee 1989 page 244).

A desire for this other can be seen in our fascination with western models of the feminine, as is to a large extent exhibited in our cinema, advertisements and soap operas. The westernized woman is a sex object and therefore illegitimate according to the norm. Thus signs of illegitimacy become the sanction for behavior not permitted for those who are normal (Chatterjee 1993 page 132). Though inferior, it is the alternative subject position of this other that privileges or even legitimizes the continued presence of the mother as the ideal of Indian womanhood. It is precisely the deviant status of the other, her marginalized and ambiguous identity that is celebrated by our media. As the other to all that is normal according to the nationalist ideology, she has a freedom, a wantonness, a promiscuity that is too tantalizing to be resisted by the commercial media. Thus it seems to be the otherness of Indian womanhood that is commodified, packaged and sold in the market today. Feminisms in India can become meaningful endeavors if and only when they rip the mask off this spiritual humbug. As long as the chastity of the woman remains one of the primary constituents of our national honour we will be a society eternally striving to gain legitimacy for our women citizens even at the high cost of buying them wifedoms, so that they can eventually become the glorified mothers of our culture. Deconstructing the gendered inception of Indian nationalism and its collusion with Orientalism and of late, paradoxically with capitalism, should make one see how our media is effectively tapping all these terrains and is in turn used by these ideologies to gain control over the woman both as Mother and Other. Thus both tradition and liberation, used as binaries, are wielded by our media as required of the situation to mediate a compromising resolution to the womens question. REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1990. Chatterjee, Partha The Nationalist Resolution of the Womens Question in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History eds. Kumkum Sangari,Suresh Vaid. New Delhi: Kali, 1989. Chatterjee, Partha The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Foucault, Michel Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prisons. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Sangari, Kumkum Politics of the Possible: Essays Narratives,Colonial English. New Delhi: Tulika, 1999. on Gender, History,

Schneider, E. The Violence of Privacy in The Public Nature of Private Violence Ed. M. Fineman. New York: Routledge, 1994. Thapar, Romila Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations. New Delhi:Orient Longman, 1978. Zutshi, Somnath Women, Nation and The Outsider in Hindi Cinema in Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India eds. Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir. Calcutta: Seagull, 1993. Contributor: Meena T. Pillai MEENA T. PILLAI. Teaches in the Institute of English, University of Kerala. Recipient of two international awards the Fulbright Fellowship to Ohio State University and Sastri IndoCanadian Faculty Research Fellowship to Concordia University, Montreal. Interested in Womens Studies and Media Studies. meena t pillai, the mediatedwoman, gender politics, cultural dynamics, women, mass media, homogenize, ideologies, patriarchal society, national identity, benedict anderson, femininity, somnath zutshi, nationalism, indian, female body, body politic, bharath matha, tagore, middle class, hindu, masculine, idolized, sexual identity, gender hierarchy, partha chatterjee, culture, schneider, panopticon, foucault, kumkum sangari, heterogenous, orientalism, capitalism, mother