What is feminism to you? — Thinking over Unlimited Girls (2002)
Feminist theoryCaste and genderLabourFilmMovements
Content warning: An essay that starts with a question. And there are plenty of them coming up, so bear with me.
What does it mean to be a feminist? It sounds like an easy question until you start listening to people answer it. For some, feminism is about independence while for others it is about equality, freedom of choice, or the right to live without being told how a woman should behave. And then there are people who believe in equality but find the idea of feminism itself a little too loud, too extreme, or too inconvenient. _____________ Watching Paromita Vohra's Unlimited Girls (2002) I found myself less interested in picking at one definition of feminism and more interested in people’s perception on understanding it. Through Fearless, the narrator, this documentary brings together different voices and beliefs, often allowing their contradictions to speak for themselves. And well, there isn’t any tidy answer for it. Instead, it left me with questions about the world that is built, the expectations that are normalized, and the people who get to decide what freedom should look like. _____________ Above all, the most interesting question isn't simply what feminism means, but why the idea of equality becomes so complicated the moment it begins to challenge everyday life. _____________ Freedom with conditions: Seema Kazi, in the film describes feminism as “a critical awareness of the world around you as a woman.” I keep returning to this idea because a woman can have a job, dress however she likes, remain unmarried or choose to become a homemaker. None of these decisions by itself tells us everything about her understanding of equality. _____________ The trouble begins when we confuse having choices with living in a world where everyone has the freedom to make them. When did feminism become another set of expectations women have to fulfil? _____________ Consider the woman taxi driver, Kanchan Gawre who says that once she gets into her cab, she no longer thinks of herself as a woman. Yet, when discussing her home and children, she describes looking after the household as every woman's first duty. _____________ There is something revealing about these two ideas existing together. A woman can enter a profession traditionally associated with men, earn a living and enjoy a sense of independence, and still carry the expectation that domestic responsibilities belong primarily to her. Her wings may have expanded but the rules waiting for her at home have not necessarily changed. _____________ So, if a woman is free to work but remains responsible for almost everything at home, how complete is that freedom? Equality cannot mean simply allowing women into spaces from which they were previously excluded. It must also mean questioning why the responsibilities they leave behind are so rarely redistributed. _____________ The comfort of not having to fight: Ananya, another woman our narrator interviews in the documentary, distances herself from bra-burning as a form of feminism. She speaks about wanting to be valued as a person, having opinions that matter and being able to stand up for herself. These are legitimate desires. But what happens when the discussion shifts from wanting respect for oneself to judging the people who demand it for others? _____________ The bra-burning story surrounding the 1968 Miss America protest became a media myth: despite the familiar label, bras were not actually burned at the event. The image of bra-burning became a catchy way to portray feminism as outrageous and extreme. And when a movement is reduced to its most sensational image, the difficult questions it raises become much easier to ignore. _____________ Her covered views raise an interesting question on how we can dismiss a movement based on a popular image without first examining whether that image accurately represents it? _____________ More info on the bra-burning myth: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/feminist-bra-burning/ _____________ While calling herself as selfish, Ananya also blames people as selfish. She continues, “I would call people very selfish, who are feminist, who shout on top of their voices, go there, tell 1000 things to their lady, come back and (she and her husband Sirish): get the media footage and come back.” _____________ Fighting for equality isn't always clear or agreeable. Sometimes people raise their voices because nobody listens when they speak softly. Because of which protests become disruptive when the systems being challenged have little reason to change on their own. And those who are comfortable within the existing arrangement see the disruption more clearly than they see the injustice that caused it. _____________ This doesn't mean every activist is right or every protest is effective. But there is a difference between questioning a movement and dismissing the people who are willing to challenge something. It is easy to enjoy the results of change without wanting to deal with the discomfort that produces it. But if equality matters only when it doesn't disturb anyone, how much change are we really willing to accept? _____________ I wonder whether this tendency to reduce women to labels and assumptions is limited to discussions about feminism at all. This made me think beyond the documentary too. Recently, I heard about a woman who intervened in a conversation to challenge what she felt was a misrepresentation of an idea. She was not defending a friend or someone she personally knew, she was responding to the argument itself. Yet when the video of the exchange appeared on social media, she was described as a “fan girl.” She was limited to a label, and it is crystal how quickly the discussion shifted from what a woman was trying to say to who she was supposedly saying it for. Her argument became secondary to an assumption about her loyalties. I don't know whether the same label would have been used for a man in the same situation. But it made me wonder why a woman's attempt to speak can so easily become a story about what kind of a person she is rather than the attempt to engage with what she actually wanted to say. _____________ When love becomes an excuse: One of the documentary's most disturbing encounters involves former police officer Ramesh Jhende, who discusses a film script about men who commit crimes after being rejected by women they love. _____________ Ramesh speaks about heartbreak and shares his own experience of loving a woman who eventually married a wealthier man. His pain is understandable as the rejection leads him to a devastating experience, and men should not be expected to pretend otherwise. _____________ In the script of his movie, in one courtroom scene, a female lawyer argues that women who leave men for wealthier husbands drive innocent, heartbroken men towards crime and alcoholism. The man's actions become a consequence of the woman's supposed wrongdoing. The scene later shifts to a different scene where a man says to his former lover that he does not want to harm her and that “Woman is the sacred essence of devotion and tenderness. She must be worshipped, never violated.” _____________ Later, when Fearless asks how men can beat their wives if women deserve to be worshipped, Ramesh compares women to children. He suggests that a husband returning tired from work might slap his wife if his meal isn't ready, claiming that such an act could make love grow. _____________ This is where idealisation becomes a poor substitute for equality. A woman can be worshipped in theory yet their autonomy seems to disappear when they fail to meet men's expectations. Calling her precious does not make her an equal if she is still expected to obey. _____________ A person has the right to feel heartbroken. They do not have the right to punish someone for rejecting them. A husband can be exhausted, disappointed or unhappy without violence becoming an expression of love. Both can co-exist together when the person behind puts their mind to choose what is right. _____________ It was quite triggering to watch how easily responsibility shifts towards women. Instead of asking why a man believes he is entitled to commit a crime or hit his wife, the justification is forced to focus on what the woman did to provoke him. _____________ Equality for whom? : The documentary introduces another contradiction through a user in the chatroom (urvashibutalia) and the question of class privilege. She dropped in the chat that, “...you couldn’t sit there as a middle class housewife with a rich husband who gave you a driver and a car which enable you to be feminist and then go home and not pay your cleaning women the minimum wage you need to pay her or not recognize that she had problems in her house as well.” _____________ It is an uncomfortable example because it shows that being disadvantaged in one part of society does not prevent someone from benefiting from inequality in another. This leaves us with more than hypocrisy as it reveals how inequality can operate between people who are themselves unequal in different ways. Gender does not erase class, and being a woman does not automatically make someone sensitive to every other woman's circumstances. _____________ When we talk about women's freedom, whose freedom are we talking about? The woman who can afford to work because someone else manages her household OR the woman who performs that work and returns home to her own responsibilities? _____________ The point is not that anyone who benefits from privilege cannot care about equality. It is the very point that equality becomes limited when we examine only the disadvantages we personally experience and overlook the advantages we receive. _____________ Questions matter more than the Label: I admire that the documentary includes such ordinary dilemmas of feminism that do not exist only in public debates. It enters our homes, friendships and relationships often in ways we would rather not examine. _____________ So, this is why I don't think feminism can be understood simply as an identity we claim. It is not enough to say we believe in equality if we never examine how inequality works around us, whom it benefits or whose discomfort we consider acceptable. The documentary doesn't resolve all these issues and I don't think it needs to do it. It’s values lie in making familiar ideas seem unfamiliar again. _____________ Chamkiigirl, another woman from the chatroom, in the ending scene shares wise words by Marcel Proust: “The journey of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Maybe that is what critical awareness means, isn’t it? The world does not have to change before we begin questioning it. Sometimes we simply need to look more closely at what we have accepted as normal. _____________ I started thinking about Unlimited Girls with the question of what feminism means. And now, I am left with a different one; what happens when the idea of equality stops being comfortable? The answer I believe to be is that feminism isn't a question we answer once and then put aside. It relies on the way of looking at the world that keeps revealing how much remains unquestioned. _____________ (Note: Had to skip out several other vital moments from the documentary, simply because including them all would turn it into something much larger than an essay. The intention here is not to summarize, but to explore some of the important questions it raises. The real essence of engaging with these ideas lies in watching the original documentary and reflecting on its nuances by asking questions of our own.)