ABSTRACT ON RUTH VANITA'S 'THINKING BEYOND GENDER IN INDIA'

ABSTRACT ON RUTH VANITA'S 'THINKING BEYOND GENDER IN INDIA'

• The man-woman relatinship is premised upon a normative heterosexuality, geared towards reproduction of a dominant group (men) and a subordinate group (women)
• She criticizes certain Western feminist approaches towards India as they kind of focus on issues like sati to foster syndromes of Eastern patriarchy posed as worst than the Western one.
  • This leads ordinary woman not to complain about 'softer' violences under the sub-optimal logics of 'it could be worst' – what just legitimize rather than undermine the structures of male-female relationship.
    • She exposes that this subliminary logics of Western feminism is pushing feminists organizations in India into mere marriage counsellors.
      • This keeps heterosexual structures intact as they are permanently repaired by feminist groups (which she claims to be serving as 'unpaid relief workers')
        • In the overall there's the understanding that heterosexual monogamy is the least worst, which disables them from shaking the patriarchalists aspects of this institution itself.
          • She quotes the disregards of feminists organizations towards other sexual structures as two girls decided to marry taking advantage of the loophole of the Hindu Marriage Law – which doesn't specifies the sex of the partners involved – but ended up being pressured not to carry on by the authorities.
          • She also recalls that “different communities in India have practiced polygamy and polyandry, practices now outlawed. The undesirability of the economic and other inequalities built into these practices tends to be confused with the practices themselves; a residual puritanism makes these inequalities more visible than those that are built into heterosexual monogamy”
          • She also mentions how the desire to abolish verbal talaq (divorce declared by Muslim men to their wifes, with immediate effects) overshadowed that one such practice can be used with emancipatory horizons as one should not be forced to live with somebody else against one's will.
            • She claims that what feminists should be focusing was the only masculine usage of this device, but not necessarily the practice in itself.
              • She remembers that Islamic law has a provision for women getting immediately divorced as well, the khula – in which case she has to pay the mehr, just like the men is supposed to do in case of talaq
                • I made some research on my own to see the practical usages of that and appearently only Egypt enables, but in such cases the womas is automatically renouncing any financial share of the wealth of the couple. I also found that it has been proposed in Pakistan by some Muslim Council, but it didn't got operational (I couldn't get rather it wasn't yet been voted or if it was voted against).
                  • Speculating about the possibilities, however, she points that, introducing the khula with economic safeguards, what matches the contractualist nature of Muslim marriages, could transform Muslim marriage law into the most progressive law in the country – India.
                  • She reminds that in India, if separation is not consensual the one willing to leave has to prove that the other is an undesirable person rather than alleging simply incompatibility.
        • “Because the near-universal assumption that heterosexual monogamy is the best practice makes it easier for people to accept the idea of imprisioning men within monogamous marriage in the same way as women already are, but difficult to accept the idea of providing women and men with easy escape routes from marriage”
      • She points that any women's movement at some point has to repair the structures of heterosexual marriage but also combine this with the task of rethinking gender and sexuality to liberate both women and men into developing different kinds of family or collective living
        • Women's movement in India have just centered on the first task as people are just taken as victims instead of agents, and questionment smade on bases of equity rather than liberation
          • She points that liberation is about not being a man nor a woman in the sense that woman is just a complement for the man.
            • She points alternative sexualities such as Hijras (eunuchs), bhakta ans sant poets, besides European Saints
            • Radhaswami Satsang is an inheritor of bhakta traditions