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The Erotic as an Aesthetic Category

Dawn [Prabhâsa], the daughter of Prajâpati, took the form of a celestial nymph and appeared before them [Fire, Wind, Sun, & Moon, her brothers]. Their hearts were moved by her and they poured out their seed. Then they went to Prajâpati, their father, and they said, 'We have poured out our seed. Let it not be lost.' Prajâpati made a golden bowl, an arrow's breadth in height and in width, and he poured the seed into it. Then the thousand-eyed god with a thousand feet and a thousand fitted arrows arose.

From the Kausîtaki Brâhmana, translated with an Introduction by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty,
Penguin Books, 1975, p.31, cf. Hindu gods

The erotic, both as representation and as response, can be classified as a separate aesthetic category, or axiomatic category of value in the polynomic theory of value, if it varies independently from other domains and if it contains specific characteristics to distingish it from other domains. The erotic qualifies in each of these respects.

The purpose of the erotic is sexual arousal. This is the response, ranging from mild titilation to full arousal and to sexual relations of various sorts. As representation, the erotic can involve images or descriptions of the human body, of sexual attributes in particular, or descriptions of sexual activities, in isolation or as parts of larger stories. As a response, the erotic, leading to sexual intercourse and conception, is essential to the continuation of life. As representation, in art and literature, let alone in more vulgar presentations, sexual arousal is a purpose that is often condemned as inappropriate, represensible, or immoral. While nudes have been a classic art form, even in periods when public nudity was non-existent and the public display of any flesh (particularly female) was strongly restricted, what the nudes were never supposed to be was actually erotic. Yet there is no doubting the appeal and popularity of the erotic, whatever is allowed, despite its rarity at different times and places. It is well known in advertising that "sex sells"; and after the dotcom crash, it looked like the only real profitable on-line businesses were those selling pornography. The condemnations of erotic art and of pornography in particular as cases of anhedonic moralism are considered separately. Here the erotic is considered in its own right.

As response and as representation the erotic has a dual existence as (1) "intuitive value," i.e. pleasure, the result of sexual response, arousal, and consumation, and (2) as an aesthetic feature of objects. The erotic is a natural feature of objects in that human bodies display physical sex differences, principally the secondary sex differences developed at puberty (including the maturation of primary sex organs, which have differentiated in the womb), whose display tends to effect an erotic response and which are the source of all erotic representations, even if sexual organs are not explicitly shown or described as such. Where anhedonia suppresses sexual representation, the original presentation of physical sex differences may be suppressed also, with clothing that conceals or disguises the attributes, with the extreme of the veil or chador for women that even prevents display of the female face, let alone any recognizable characteristic of the female form. The male form can also be concealed in various ways, as in the ruling by some Islâmic jurists that trousers on men were immodest because they failed to sufficiently "gird the loins."

The fundamental form of aesthetic value is beauty, which is how the domain of value is defined in the polynomic theory (whose degree of obligation is the optative). However, Edmund Burke and Kant provided classic studies of the difference between beauty and the sublime. Also, Rudolf Otto identified the ways in which religious value, numinosity or the holy, differed from other aesthetic value. It is sometimes said that the sublime already provided for the characteristics that Otto identified in numinosity. This is not true. The sublime may be frightening, but it is not uncanny. The sublime may be dangerous, but it is not inauspicious or a portent of good or evil. Holy things may be beautiful, or sublime, or neither. The fetish objects of ancient or autochthonous religions can be quite unprepossessing, or positively ugly. If the holy can occur without being either beautiful or sublime, with its own characteristic valences, like the uncanny or Otto's mysterium, then the numinous must be identified as a polynomicly independent category of value.

We see the same thing with the erotic. It is common to think of the erotic as necessarily associated with beauty, and certainly the most conspicuously successful and esteemed vehicles of erotic appeal are accompanied by beauty, but there is no doubt that vast amounts of erotic stimulation, and sexual activity, occur without what anyone would think of as out-of-the-ordinary beauty. Indeed, it is not clear that anyone has ever thought of rock star Mick Jagger as particularly handsome -- he comes in for identification as an example of the interesting category "sexy ugly" in the movie Kissing Jessica Stein. Another noteworthy example is the contrast between a men's magazine like Playboy, whose eroticism is tasteful, elegant, and restrained, with the most beautiful women possible (to Hugh Hefner's taste, anyway), and another magazine like Larry Flynt's Hustler, which is crude, vulgar, and tends, in short, towards the ugly. Perhaps more to the point, the less expensive prostitutes do not tend to be very good looking, but their ability to draw business is a continuing problem for locations where this is regarded as a nuisance, a crime, or a public health danger. This can also be seen in early, or even now in low budget, pornographic movies, where the willingness of actors and actresses to have sex on film, or their ability to maintain a performance, has little to do with their looks. One thinks of the legendary but very ordinary looking Ron Jeremy, while in the 1972 movie Behind the Green Door, Marilyn Chambers was billed as the most (perhaps even the first) beautiful porn star.

The erotic thus appears to vary rather freely across the spectrum of the beautiful and the ugly, though which is preferred seems to be a matter of individual taste. Indeed, for some people, their conscious and reasoned preference for the beautiful, and for good taste, often seems to war with a desire for a much cruder and uglier eroticism -- one may think of the diffident English actor Hugh Grant, who strayed from his stunning girlfriend, lovely actress Elizabeth Hurley, for the backseat ministrations of a street walker, Divine Brown (who then definitely got her fifteen minutes of fame). The coolness of the merely beautiful, however, can be supercharged by the sublime or even the numinous. If beauty is great and charismatic enough, it begins to take on attributes of the sublime -- the nobility, the majesty, and awesomeness. Where the knees tremble and the breath becomes short, this may be an ordinary social awkwardness, or it can be a fear as in the presence of an overpowering natural phenomenon -- as when Ed Bundy met Jessica Hahn on the television series Married with Children. A divine and numinous eroticism is no longer familiar in religions without goddesses, but it is still perfectly identifiable in religions that have had, not only goddesses, but goddesses particularly of love and beauty, like Aphrodite, Ishtar, or Hathor. The uncanny or magical aspect of this is remembered in the word glamour, which now is trivialized into an aspiration for all beauty but tends to be applied particularly to those celebrities whose charisma seems to rise to superordinary levels, where glamour returns to its original meaning of a spell.

Not only the nature of the physical response but the valence of erotic representations differs by sex. Most of the vast industry of popular sexual images caters to men, whether they are heterosexual men seeking images of women or homosexual mean seeking images of men. Women seem to appreciate a bit more social context and consequently patronize the publishing empires of romance fiction. These sex differences are considered in more detail elsewhere.

An important feature of the erotic is how it varies across good and evil and even across pleasure and pain. The bondage and rape fantasies examined elsewhere represent practices that in the real world would cross over into crimes. Where crimes involve pain we get an overlap with the vast area of sadomasochism, where countless ways of inflicting or enduring sexual pain have been explored ever since the Marquis de Sade. Why pain should be sexually desirable may be explained by the circumstance that with sufficient sexual arousal, all stimulation, even pain, may be experienced as sexual pleasure. Tickling or spanking are mild versions of this that may be relatively common. However, sadomasochistic fantasies involve no actual contact or stimulation, and these often seem to possess an independent power, an action-at-a-distance, to effect arousal. This is not only puzzling but also the kind of thing that provokes the strongest moral and ideological backlash. That rape fantasies should please, either for women or for men, often seems improper, dangerous, or vicious.

What this shows, for one thing, is that the erotic as an aesthetic category does indeed vary independently from the other forms of value. Why it should, however, is then the question. Rape fantasies may be understandable in that they imagine away the barriers that ordinarily interfere with the consumation of sexual desires in the real world. Feminists, of course, claim that this shortens the distance between rape in fantasy and rape in fact. The awkward thing in that respect is that rape fantasies are not beyond the imagination of women also, as in Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty triology of sexual bondage and slavery novels. For those, Feminists can only fall back on Marxist accusations of "false consciousness" -- where the oppressed identify with the ideology of the oppressors. The erotic imagination, however, has never responded well to ideology. Most rape fantasies, on the other hand, with both men and women, tend to involve the feature that the union is desired prior to the "rape" anyway, even if unconsciously. Again, this allows for a loss of the barriers that in ordinary life impede or even derail courtship and consumation.

If the loss of barriers, however, is what eros desires, this renders perplexing the literature in which bondage and other practices inhibit consumation. Where a victim of a rape fantasy is bound and helpless in order to be unable to resist sex, this is one thing. Where the bound and helpless victim, however, is denied sex, and perhaps bound even to prevent masturbation, is something else. There is a genre of pornographic literature for men, "femdom," where "female domination" is frequently a matter of denying consumation to males. At its extremes, the fantasy may even be of permanent denial of consumation, where we get into the "forced feminization" variety of femdom, where men are unmanned with feminine clothing and discipline, hormones that inhibit erections, and even castration and sex changes. There is actually such a story in the Thousand and One Nights (not the kind that is excerpted for children or made into a Disney movie! but just the kind of thing that attracted Richard Burton to the Nights), where a young man is pulled into a marriage by a forceful and independent young woman. Out on an errand one day, the young man is forcefully seduced by another woman. When, on his return, his wife finds out, she amputates his genitals, sealing the wound with, of all things, hot cheese, and expels him from her house. As in many such stories, little details of importance in the real world, like how he urinates while the wound heals, are glossed over.

Stories of sexual frustration may involve another aspect of the erotic response: Orgasm is more intense as arousal is more prolonged. The purpose of stories of sexual frustration is not indeed sexual frustration, but greater sensation in the consumation. The bondage or discipline fantasy thus may be the other side of the coin from rape fantasies -- the prolonged arousal rendered unnecessary in the latter returns in the former. Together they reveal desires and dynamics that in real life are sometimes contradictory. Thus, the married couple whose sex may become routine, dull, and infrequent, may need to construct a bit of play acting (or sample a bit of erotica) to revive something like the levels of arousal that for young lovers happen all but spontaneously. With the extremes of "femdom" fantasies, however, something more may be happening.

The experience of the erotic in art or literature (of whatever level of quality or taste) tends to the auto-erotic and narcissistic. This is because a partner is not necessary to achieve arousal from viewing pictures or reading, and consumation can be achieved through masturbation without ever having a partner present. With no real partner, the unconscious is free to play. If the unconscious, as Jung believes, contains templates or archetypes of the opposite sex, this affects the kind of fantasies that are prefered and even makes it possible to imagine the responses and preferences of the opposite sex -- or to confuse everything together. Thus, Deirdre McClosky, in her story of becoming a transsexual, Crossing, a Memoir, relates how as a young boy she(/he) began to enjoy cross-dressing as a means of erotic arousal. For many years the pleasure of women's clothes was simply a private secret. The narcissism of this is obvious. Nor do I mean that as a condemnation, moral or otherwise. It was auto-erotic, and there is no particular reason, outside of a very conserative religious morality, why the auto-erotic should not be as enjoyable as other-directed eroticism. Eventually, however, McClosky began to imperceptibly drift towards the idea that it would be rather nice to actually be a woman. The fantasy began to take over. He acted on this, which resulted in a great deal of trouble, since his family (he was married, with children, and other relatives) thought he had become mentally ill. I tend to think that McClosky can do what he/she likes, as long as others are not wronged, and I hope that her life has been improved by the transformation. I also think there is a reality involved: short of great advances in genetic engineering (possible and likely but not coming soon), true sex changes are not possible. Men becoming women do not have wombs, menstruation, conception, or childbirth. Although plastic surgery now can do wonders to feminize a masculine face, some things are harder to deal with: large hands and feet, height, broad shoulders, and a deep rib cage. Women becoming men do not have semen or ejaculation, let alone a penis that is likely to function like a natural one. In time, the limitations probably will be overcome, but meanwhile some women's groups are actually rather hostile to the idea that male-to-female transsexuals, born without wombs or ovaries, are really to be considered women [note].

While it is common now to say that transsexuals suffer from "gender-dysphoria," and psychologically are truly the mind of one sex in the body of another, which seems to me to be quite possible, given the variability of hormones acting on the brain in utero (where the fetal brain is sexualized, as is the fetal body), my interest here is in more general, ambiguous, and mixed cases. If Jung is right and the mind contains arechetypes of both sexes (even as the brain could be variably sexualized), which the imagination, dreams, and fantasy can energize and project, then the occurrence of more than simple gender-dysphoria is what I might expect. I would call such mixed cases the "Teiresias Syndrome," after the Greek seer who was turned into a woman (after encountering copulating snakes) and then, after eight years, was turned back into a male (after encoutering such snakes again).

The Teiresias Syndrome would cover cases like deliberate she-males (who carry physical feminization up to but not including genital surgery) or simple cross-dressers, like the 2003 winner of the Turner Prize for contemporary British art, Grayson Perry, who appeared to accept the award dressed as his little girl persona "Claire" -- seen at right with his (presumably understanding) wife and son. Cross-dressers themselves can be relatively normal heterosexuals, like Perry, or homosexuals. A wide variety of preferences, practices, and purposes emerges in all this. In the Teiresias Syndrome, someone, without feeling alienated or unhappy with their own sex (unlike the dysphoriacs), may just like the other sex, its aesthetic and its experience, enough to feel rather deprived that life doesn't much allow for crossing back and forth and living, alternatively or in mixtures, both. This complexity seems to me to bespeak the psychological complexity of sexual archetypes and gender identity; and where we can never be in a body other than our own, the imagination strains against this limitation. Imagination can make us anything, and, even if a Teiresias Syndrome leads to no overt acts, literature can make us anything and put us anywhere. Whether Deirdre McClosky was born a true gender-dysphoriac or just acted out a strong Teiresias Syndrome seems to me irrelevant. Although physicians may only consider it ethical to treat the former, I don't think that morally there is a problem with sane and competent adults doing with their bodies what they like. They just better be sure, since Teiresias's own experience cannot (yet) be duplicated, that they know what they are doing.

Erotic literature is thus bound to explore every possibility, even those possibilities that someone might regard as appalling, morally, socially, or psychologically, but that curiously contain the power to arouse. If this reveals something about the unconscious and about the natural terms of the erotic response, it would be wise to be aware of it and deal with it. Or, as Jung might say, the unconscious can become too energized with it, and acting out an irrational response becomes more possible.

Whether or not this is a real danger, it still behooves human curiosity to see what is going on and represent truths, however disturbing. The erotic as an aesthetic category does mean that, like other aesthetic categories, the requirements of morality, although independent, are not otherwise suspended. Art, literature, and fantasy are one thing, action is another. Some people confuse them, both that fantasy spills over into action, and that the limitations of action are thought to require the suppression of fantasy. A good recent example of a fantasy that one really does not want to correspond to any reality is the 2000 movie The Cell, with Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D'Onofrio. This movie was reasonably well received critically but did not do very well at the box office. It contains dream images of stunning beauty, but it is also about a particularly sadistic necrophiliac, played by D'Onofrio. The images of his practices are stunning too, but also disturbing beyond what most audiences may have wanted to deal with (some stronger images and sequences were cut from the theatrical version). And the ending may be a little bit silly. The director, however, Tarsem Singh, clearly has a powerful aesthetic vision. That the movie was about a serial killer Singh says was perhaps an artifact of the 1990's. In the 70's it would have been about a burning building. A burning building, however, would not have had the erotic connection -- or provided a striking image of a nude, staring dead girl bleached white like a doll.

Singh's reference to serial killers in the 90's is supremely to Hannibal Lecter of the novel (by Thomas Harris, 1988) and Oscar winning movie Silence of the Lambs (1991). Hannibal himself does not seem very interested in sex, but the principal killers of Red Dragon (1981) and Silence of the Lambs, when Hannibal is mostly in jail, both were sex killers. What is noteworthy about the series is less the erotic dimension, though it is there, but the triumph of a moral aestheticism in the third book, Hannibal (1999). Hannibal goes from being the anti-hero of the first two books, contrasted with the goodness of the agents who had to deal with him, to being the out and out hero of the third, to the extent of converting agent Clarice Starling to his way of life. The makers of the movie Hannibal (2001, directed by Ridley Scott) recoiled from this development and released an ending in which Hannibal simply gets away again (selflessly sacrificing his hand for Clarice!). This was absurd. Harris has obviously lost it and been won over by his fictional villain; but if this is what has happened, it is ridiculous to try and patch it up in Hollywood -- though such cosmetics are not without precedent.

The danger of moral aestheticism when dealing with representations of wrong is well appreciated by Camille Paglia, who even celebrates the Marquis de Sade, but not without an understanding that right and wrong are not thereby suspended or superseded. But dispute over erotic representations is not at root about the extremes of representing sadomasochism or other paraphilia, but about erotic representation at all. In her book Sexual Personae, Paglia addresses this issue with a detailed argument that all Western art, from the prehistoric to the present, is pornographic, even devotionalistic Catholic art (as, at right, in Bernini's St. Teresa of Avila, who seems to be having an orgasm). This may overstate the case, but there is no doubt that erotic themes turn up in unexpected places. More to the point, the ancients, and particularly the Greeks and the Romans, were more comfortable with explicitly erotic images than most moderns are. When phallic objects and paintings of sexual intercourse were discovered at Pompei, the judgment tended to be that there really were a lot of houses of prostitution, or that these were the obscene expressions of a decadent civilization, or both. Most of the pornographic art found in Pompei, however, was in private homes, often displayed in places of honor. Nor did this sort of thing, stretching back to the Gold Age of Greece, have much to do with where the civilization was on some sort of arc from dawn to decadence. The truth is that Greeks and Romans found human bodies and sexual intercourse beautiful, interesting, and wonderful -- and funny. And if its representation effects an erotic response, so much the better -- a divine gift. This may not be agreeable to religions that mandate tightly circumscribed sexual expression, but, for better or worse, modern life has broken through such restrictions. Promiscuity and disease are not good effects of this, but then one discovers that the Greeks and Romans thought no better of promiscuity than we might. Their sexual explicitness did not imply sexual license, an accommodation and a balance that has not yet been struck anew in popular or elite culture. Mere disapproval or alarm at erotic representations will not do this job. An anhedonic moralism that would suppress them instead would contribute nothing to the richness of human life.

Where a curious balance was struck in another historic culture was in India, where naked ascetics, Jains and Hindus (men only), have wandered the country, and Jain and Hindu temples have often been decorated with explicitly erotic sculpture, displaying sexual positions that are sometimes puzzling to the uninitiated. Prior to the advent of Islâm, traditional Indian dress, as seen at left, did not even involve concealing female breasts. Nevertheless, other kinds of public eroticism are not allowed, and it was not long ago that romantic kissing wasn't even permitted in the movies. The balance, indeed, is between extremes, the erotic sculptures on one side and very serious asceticism on the other. The latter, although part of traditional Christian practices (with celibacy surviving in Catholic and Orthodox Churches), nevertheless tends to now be regarded as peculiar and unnatural in the West. The idea that there is a place for everything is what it takes to strike a balance. The modern West might be more comfortable with the erotic if its place were more settled, and perhaps if there were more respect for its opposite -- instead, celibate priests are now often expected to be child-molesters.

Finally, there is the question, which might have been addressed first, why the erotic would be in particular an aesthetic category. In the polynomic theory of value one might expect that the erotic would belong to euergetic or hortative value rather than the aesthetic or optative. Indeed. The aesthetic is usually characterized by disinterestedness, the hortative by interest. The horative, as part of ethics, is what is good-for human life. The erotic definitely qualifies there, as its interested character is conspicuous. Perhaps it is just that I am getting too old, so that for me the erotic is more of a spectator sport than a matter of participation, or even arousal. Very possibly. The point would then be, however, that it does indeed appear valuable to the spectator. This is an aesthetic quality. More importantly, the essence of the aesthetic is that it is good in itself. If the erotic is a matter of the beautiful and the sublime, as well as the good life, this earns it aesthetic status. Except for those frightened or moralisticly disapproving of the erotic, I think this is beyond doubt. There is, as it happens, a broad overlap between the hortative and the aesthetic. The most humble utilitarian object, whose aesthetic value might be nil, can be made a thing of beauty as well. In subsequent years, when its instrumental value may vanish, it can qualify for an art museum as well as an archaeological or technological museum. The erotic tint of the aesthetic, however, involves an irreducible interest: the erotic is only really going to be erotic to those whose eros can be moved by it. Thus, human eros is only for humans. What apes or octupi or salmon find sexually attractive to each other doubtlessly is a powerful matter to them, but (perhaps fortunately) it is entirely lost on us. The idea that extraterrestrials, for instance, would want to mate with humans is all but an impossibility. As Carl Sagan used to say, a human being has a better chance of mating with a petunia than with an extraterrestrial. On the other hand, we do find petunias, and most flowers, attractive, even though they are the sexual organs of plants. Well, aesthetically attractive, not erotically attractive. There may be sexual fetishes involving flowers, but I haven't heard of them. The erotic as an aesthetic category, therefore, does have an essential connection to the hortative.

On further Reflections: "Diary of a Nymphomaniac"

how much can you read from those eyes?
how far can you tread the path?

Reflections: "Diary of a Nymphomaniac"

The picture you see here is by no means a very exceptional framing. I know that. In fact, the film - whose title will read something as "Diary of a Nymphomaniac" in english - itself has several other better frames in terms of the beauty of a picture, a frame. But what makes me select this frame in particular is my association with this film. The name may suggest, but please DON'T sit to watch with the 'expectation' of, it as one of those sleazy 'pornos'. Yes, there are ample moments in this film which may (though I am not at all sure of this, honestly) satisfy one's libidinal instincts. But, this film is much more. No, wrong. The film is much different. Much removed from such accepted genre of pornographic films, or simply put, pornos. Going by the post-antipornographic movement in the feminist history, it may perhaps be labeled under the genre of Erotica(a), though I have always had reservations about naming in such a manner or fixing under/within/into some particular compartment. This is an work of art and why should we be so foolish to attempt and name them always?(b)


I would not go for an elaborate, or even brief, description(c) of the film. Just a few words for the particular frame from the film that I have chosen here.


It's a grandma and her grand daughter, the latter being the protagonist of the film, the nymphomaniac (d). In the film it's just moments before the old woman breathes her last and, to borrow from the protagonist's soliloquy in the film, she loses the "only person who's ever understood me". Yes, the world fails to understand the lady. Her workplace, her friends, her lovers (or, it would be better to call people who have sex with her, and she also with them...), all fails to understand her. And, as the film draws towards end with a dissolve into the end-roll from a long shot where she walks down a road, alone, we come to realise, yet again, that the world is bound to fail in understanding her. Reason? She is a woman. She loves as a woman, she wants like a woman. She lives and thinks like a woman. Taking itself to a level beyond the feminism of sameness, to a level beyond the perceived notion of some sexless, timeless, universal humanism, The Diary notes down and points towards the difference, the feminism of difference, without concretely essentialising anything in particular.(e)

As we see in the still from the film above, that's the last time the lady is holding her grandma's hands in her hands. This is the grandma who once told her that the world has decided only two roles for women: marriage and prostitution. It's that grandma who asked her to enjoy her life to the fullest and live it in her own terms. May be the grandma, thus, snatched all her possibilities of a 'happy', 'peaceful' life... after all, show one single woman who has managed to have a happy peaceful life by living the way she feels and wants it...as a woman...not the other half, but a woman only... it's that grandma who had no inhibitions in letting her granddaughter know that if given another chance to live her life from the beginning she would, to quote from the film, "fuck as many men as she wanted"...

May be readers would accuse me of oversimplifications at some instances... may be I will be accused of having sort of jot down some of my incoherent thoughts. but i love incoherence. And, all I can say is - see the film and see if it talks to you... if it engages in a dialogue with the person that you are...


NOTES
(a) Feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine Mackinnon are famous for their anti-pornogrpahic stance. They, along with several others, raised the consciousness as to how and why all sexually explicit materials prove to be defamatory for women. It was precisely this moment in Feminism that saw a demarcation of the erotica from the thanatica. By erotica was meant depiction of women enjoying sexual encounter and often finding enjoyment and fulfillment from such sexual encounters. Thanatica, on the other hand, referred to sexually explicit images of women being involuntarily physically possessed (by men) and dismembered in sexually coercive situations.

(b) May we remember that Mallarme for a while, "...to name is to destroy..."

(c) I am of the belief that films cannot be described, least through words. To know the film, we have to see the film. And, isn't that just too obvious?

(d) Strange coinage, this nymphomaniac. In fact, the film itself also problematises this nomenclature and the politics behind such sexist nomenclatures, in general. "If a guy wants more sex, he is macho. If a girl wants more, she is a slut" reflects the female protagonist of the film during one of her intriguing conversations with her grandma.

(e) As a matter of fact, ever since the poststructuralist critical thinking has made its presence felt in feminist poetics as well - which has often been seen by many as the wave of French Feminism; Third Wave Feminism for some; also the feminism of difference - whatever it be, there has been this growing concern over the question of essentialism. It has been accepted, more or less, that men and women are NOT equal. We may talk of Luce Irigaray's The Question of the Other, or Cixous's The Laugh of the Medusa, and an entire corpus of feminist writings from and since that period which try establishing this feminism of difference. But none is without its own set of problems. Whenever we utter the statement - men and women are different, then (i) there is always this fear of universalising the 'categories' men and women; in fact, the very act of categorising something eventually leads to universalisation, homogenisation. That, for us, is quite a grave problem in itself; and (ii)it risks being echoed as the mouthpiece of the centuries and millenniums old argument of patriarchy. And this despite the repeated warnings echoed by the likes of Irigaray and Cixous among others. Taking off from this situation, I feel, Elizabeth Grosz's reading of French Feminism in form of the book Sexual Subversions - Three French Feminists and another very insightful essay by her - Sexual Difference and the Question of Essentialism - can be quite significant in this regard; in our dilemma over the risk of essentialising in attempt of seeing the difference. In fact, a lot much needs to be thought and talked about in this regard. For me, personally, too this becomes one of the most important questions to be dealt with in today's time. I will come up with other separate posts in my attempt to deal with this problematic.

Matrubhumi revisited but "there is some company at last"

This one is going to be a rather dry piece where I will be writing about a news report that caught me, yes, with bewilderment. Horrified as I went on reading the report, I was constantly reminded of the film Matrubhumi that I saw a few years back where a girl gets married in a village where there is not a single woman. This story, this reality is… Well, let me QUOTE excerpts from that news report published in The Times of India (Kolkata edition, Tuesday, 16 February 2010, Page 8).

Female Infanticide the norm, village gets 2nd ‘baraat’ in 120 years

It’s a proud moment, not just for Panna Singh’s family, but for the entire Devda village. For, on Tuesday, it will welcome a baraat – only the second time in 120 years. Panna’s daughter Shagun Kanwar will wed Shailendra Singh at this Rajput village, which had earned notoriety for the very high incidence of female infanticide.
The only other time a baraat came to Devda was in 1998, when Shagun’s cousin Jayant Kanwar became the first girl to get married in over a century in this village…
There’s a century old reprehensible custom of killing the girl child in these parts. It was almost an act of revolt by Inder Singh Bhati and his wife who, 29 years ago, went against the wishes of the community and decided their baby girl will live. While everybody else around killed their daughters, the Bhatis, who had lost three sons before Jayant’s birth, could not bring themselves to follow the bizarre village ritual with infant girls.
“I don’t remember what we were thinking but it was my wife who took the decision. I supported her,” recalls Inder.
What he remembers is how difficult it was. “We were often taunted. People talked behind our back and, initially, my daughter, Jayant, was also shunned. But gradually, she was accepted,” he said.
Later, Inder’s brother Panna too decided not to kill their girl child and that’s how Shagun managed to live. Panna admits it was a giant step his brother and sister-in-law took to keep Jayant alive. “It was unthinkable then and even today it takes courage to do so. After we ensured our girls lived, there was a rise in number of girl children in Devda,” said Panna. He is glad that marriages are being welcomed in the village.
Despite that and despite the fact that there are over 70 Rajput families in the village, there are only 12 Rajput girls in Devda. Apart from Shagun, Chandra Kaur (17) is the only girl in Devda above 10. She says: “It’s a relief to see the Rajput families finally respecting their girl children. No doubt they are only few in number even today but at least, they are there. Now one doesn’t feel absolutely lonely, there is some company at last.”

As the report goes, what horrifies here, the village has lived with it for centuries. What is of hope, there has been, of late, the stray “act of revolt” and now “but at least they are there… there is some company at last”.

May be it tends to send one numb. But that is not what we can afford to do. This is India, the country we live in and are often proud of. Come, let’s know our India. Come, let’s change it.

On Motherhood [in the Land(?) of Mothers(?)]

This piece I owe to a volley of questions that I had rather benevolently been showered with at a recent conference where I presented a paper. Though it has always seemed impossible for me to spell out it a few clear words (i) as to the exact point of any such paper (as this one), yet, broadly speaking, that paper dealt with masculinities in Indian context and, at some point, I also tried to see how women have been imagined as a subordinated other vis-à-vis men. One of the scholarly people, whom I was privileged to have as my distinguished audience, raised vehement opposition to this latter point. Her contention was that I was being too “western” (yes, I quote it from what she said) in my views as my talk did not care to mention the higher pedestal and prestige assigned to women in India since time immemorial; that I was not taking into purview the fact that women have never been viewed/perceived as the subordinated other in the Indian context; and, in defence of her argument, time and again, she uttered phrases such as stree-shakti, nari-shakti, and the like. What I would like to mention and take off from there is not what I had to say in reply to her questions and comments on my paper1, but the points she further raised while we were having a conversation over tea during the break.

While we were chatting over numerous issues and my points were seemingly heading further distant from her, I mean to say, our perspectives and outlooks were seeing further dissimilarities, she, at a point, raised the issue of motherhood. She asked me to imagine how great a thing this entire phenomenon of being a mother is. By that, and a little more, what she wanted to hint at was that I was not ready to accept the greatness associated with this idea of motherhood, and so on. In fact, this is what I would like to talk about in the present paper: my take, if I may say so, on the entire notion of motherhood.

This is not at all a new thing to me. I mean to say, even earlier, on numerous instances, I had chats, and that includes serious debates as well, with my friends over the question of motherhood. So, I have always felt the necessity to retrospect on the entire issue and clarify (to my self?) my position on it.

To begin with, let me put this in clear unambiguous words that I have always remained a vehement opponent of over-glorification2 of the phenomenon of motherhood. I have got at least that much training in biological sciences to know the events that result in procreation, in one’s giving birth to a child, in one’s becoming a mother (and a father). I am also well aware of the fact that women, after having conceived, have to go through a process that gradually becomes painful and often causes a good deal of suffering to the pregnant woman that ultimately leads to the event of giving birth which, in its turn, causes a lot of physical pain to the mother-to-be. Even the entire period succeeding the procedure of giving birth, when often the new mother has to undertake a lot of physical pain as well as self-restrain, too has never gone unnoticed. I am also often delighted by the magnificence of the idea of nurturing a life within one’s life system; you are sharing your air and nutrition with a life that is yet to be; you are undertaking all the sufferings and pains so that, after the end of those nine months, you may allow a new life to see the first light of the world. What can be more beautiful than this! Yes, this idea of the life within life does amaze me, sweep me with an emotion filled with utter delight. But, that amazement, that delight, that glorification, just like any other thing in our lives, too have to know its limit. Else, it will go – and, in fact, it does go – a long way in being yet another instrument that may only strengthen the patriarchal logics. It will be criminal to ignore that it plays against the liberation that women yearn for; the emancipation that women of all parts of the globe, with all their differences and all their uniqueness, have so far and so hard yearned for.

I know what I said just now calls for an elaboration; an explanation. I will do exactly that.

People who, like me, are taken by utter amazement by this magnificent phenomenon of life within life but, unlike me, move a step or two further to advocate the over-glorification of the phenomenon of motherhood, actually emanate an idea that being mother is one of the greatest, if not the greatest markers of womanhood. Their emotions, at times backed by their sets of theoretical formulations, tend to equate womanhood with motherhood. Just consider the ways in which cultures in India have been imagined and it becomes even clearer. Take the instance of a father or an elderly uncle (or some other elderly male) addressing some (younger) woman as ma. I get to hear such form of addressing almost everyday and almost everywhere – at out homes, at shops, schools, and so on. Now, this form of addressing women as mother – ma – is considered to be a manifestation of our adoration and affection towards the woman thus addressed. After all, that eight or ten year old little girl is not your biological mother. It is just a call out of your love and affection. This call of ma is filled with the warmth of your emotion. Isn’t it? It is, so to say, a part of our culture. It has become a part of our culture; it is our culture. But does not it constitute itself as a nuance of the culture that equates womanhood with motherhood? If we take some time out and think solely over this particular thing, does not it become all the more evident that this form of addressing actually, while examined further critically, declare the idea of being a mother as the greatest symbol of any woman? We may not like to admit but it is the fact that our culture, through nuances such as this, declare motherhood as the epitome of womanhood.

From this logic, it follows that the ability to be a mother also proves a woman’s ability to be a complete woman (Women do not need to wear the Raymonds suits to be complete women. That is for the men folk to follow). All they need to do in order to posit them as being complete in themselves is being mothers. Now, with slight alterations, we may now state that if you do not become a mother, you cannot proclaim yourself to be a complete woman. And, if you cannot become a mother, you will never be a complete woman. No wonder then that it is in our this very culture that married women who have not given birth to a baby or who have been unable to conceive and deliver are kept out of active participation in pious occasions such as marriages and pujas. I know well that those very theoreticians who tend to over-glorify the idea of motherhood and go to the extent of advocating an equation of motherhood with womanhood would try to differ with and oppose this logical conclusion drawn by me. They would, at least on humanitarian grounds if not anything else, like to draw some kind of exception in this regard and try positing some different set of logic so that those unfortunate women may be included in the scheme of things; may be as exceptions. However, they would still go on stressing the importance of being mothers – they would still go on to show how it attaches a sense of completeness to any woman. And, as they do so, I would like to ask about those women who have not yet reached an age when they may conceive or have passed that age and entered what is described as the menopause. What about those women, I would like to enquire from them, who have never wanted to become mothers? I personally know several such women who have never cherished the idea of being a mother. I also have encountered such women who have been forced to conceive and be mothers. Are they, then, incomplete women? Are they lesser women? Just as a man lacking in sperm-count is a lesser male! If that be the case, there should not be any hue and cry over exclusion of such lesser women from the pious festivities in life. Is it not so? What does your common sense3 say about this?

One suggestion: You may watch one of Satyajit Ray's films at least - DEVI. I think... well... up to you...


NOTES:

a Now, whenever I write this - this CLEAR WORD or clear language or unambiguous language, or something similar in meaning, I feel utterly uncomfortable because I have always loads of reservations regarding the clarity of language. I have grave doubt whether any word in any of the named languages actually means what it is supposed to(?)mean... Yet, despite all such reservations, I happen to use such phrases. May be, it is what calls for the sous rature ('under erasure').

i To be very honest, I must confess with all my humility, that I really do not feel any need to further point out how this idea of nari-shakti et al, and assigning the pedestal of the Devi to Indian women has been a much more subtle and much more nuanced form of ghettoising and thus marginalising women… I really do not feel it necessary anymore. Even then, if someday I feel the need and/or urge to, it may see another paper being written.

2 Now, this is one among many instances that reflect the fallacy, I suppose, of language itself. The moment we prefix any word/term with ‘over’, it gets already attached with a bit negative sense – oversimplification, overstress, and such. Yet, I felt almost compelled to use this term – over-glorification – in this connection.

3 I deliberately use this term - common sense - in this connection and I would like this term to be accepted not in the familiar manner but, as Antonio Gramsci, had long ago pointed out in his seminal Prison Notebooks, in an interrogative manner. What, after all, does constitute our common sense? What is so common about this common sense? Also, where from does that sense in common sense come?

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as the haze gets more apparent, i tend to
demarcate the evil from the evil