UNIT – I: UNDERSTANDING GENDER

UNIT – I: UNDERSTANDING GENDER

CHAPTER 1:   Gender: Why Should We Study It?

INTRODUCTION:  The study of Gender aims at preparing the students to face new realities and set new terms for interaction among young men and women. Often the young boys and girls are plagued by anxieties and confusions about being male, about feminity, relationships, responsibilities, gender identities etc. but there are hardly any places where these thoughts, fears, experiences or emotions are recognized and openly or rationally discussed. An understanding of the gender issues will enable the students to develop good inter-personal skills in the society as well as at the work places.

• Gender is the physical and / or social condition of being male or female.

•   Different societies, different cultures, different generations have different ideas of gender.

• The study of gender is essential for the following reasons:

-         The experience of gender is emotionally charged for everyone especially young adults.

-         Being a man or a woman is a source of different kinds of pleasure and many positive emotions

-         But growing up into a man or a woman can also be painful, confusing and a source of many anxieties

-         The experiences and emotions about the relationship between men and women are rarely talked about.

-         Girls and boys are segregated in the society while growing up. This makes gender a key axis of inequality

-         To obtain equal rights along with men, women had to fight against bias, discrimination and violence in many spheres of life.

• Indian women were fortunate enough to get the right to vote in 1935 along with men. Women in several other countries got it much later.

• The post independence “Status of Women Report” of 1975 showed shocking revelations:

-        The condition of vast majority of women had deteriorated since independence

-         There was a decline in sex ratio

-         Women were excluded from newly created jobs

-         The number of women in elected bodies was declining

-         Rural girls dropped out from schools rapidly

-         There was an increase in violence in families such as dowry deaths etc

-         Women were subjected to sexual violence and custodial rape by the police and in hostels.

-         Women could rarely get justice because of the patriarchal attitudes present in law and in the functioning of the courts

• This led to the formation of various women’s groups all over the country; some of the first ones being Progressive Organization of Women formed by Osmania University Women students in 1973 followed by another organization in Hyderabad called the Stree Shakti Sanghatan in 1978.

•     As a result, special laws were introduced to support the women fighting against violence. The 73^rd amendment to the Indian Constitution in 2009, provides for the reservation of 1/3 rd of the seats in village panchayats for women.

              Some accounts mentioned in the chapters and links:

1.   "Why this Kolaveri Di" 

"Why This Kolaveri Di" (English: Why This Killing rage, Girl?) is a song from the soundtrack of the 2012 Tamil psychological thriller film. 

The words of the song are in a simple form of a mixture of Tamil and English. The song creates an imagery of an Indian boy who has gone through love failure. While singing, Dhanush creates a tone of being drunk, when he repeatedly asks why she hurt him.

The song expresses the boy’s anguish as to why men and women can’t just be friends even in this modern age. He also touches on the question of class-caste relations.

         2.   Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein. "Sultana's Dream."

 Sultana's Dream is a 1905 feminist utopian story written by Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain. The female narrator of Sultana’s Dream wanders into a dream city that shuns war and violence. In this utopian world, women rule and men are content with their places in the kitchen. The queen of this kingdom explains how women won and kept their peace against men and their war-like ways.

          3.  G. Sampath's article throws light on how the participation of fathers in care-giving can lead to social, cultural and economic benefits at the family as well as the national level.

CHAPTER 2:  Socialization: Making Women, Making Men

Socialization: The process through which society shapes and trains people to be social individuals is referred to as socialization

•  This training begins in the family for both boys and girls right from their childhood

•  The training continues in schools through teachers, textbooks, games and other activities.

•  Both girls and boys are given training in correct forms of behavior, dressing etc.

•  Girls are trained to be shy, soft and afraid and to remain silent even when attacked. This is often regarded as preparation for marriage.

•  Boys are trained to be rough, strong, dominating, fearless and emotionless. They are taught to give preference to career success, sexual prowess and to exert control over others.

•  While girls receive most of their training from their mothers, boys learn about being a man from friends and films.

• According to the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, Gender is not natural – it is socially shaped.

Some accounts mentioned in the chapters and links:

• Mohana Krishna Indraganti's short film Ammayi, is based on Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl".

•  Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl":

            'Girl' is a prose poem written by Jamaica Kincaid that was published in The New Yorker in 1978.

The only characters in 'Girl' are a mother and a daughter. 'Girl' is a somewhat of a stream-of-consciousness narrative of a mother giving her young daughter advice on important life issues and concerns. The poem is one long sentence of various commands separated by semi-colons.

The advice consists of how to do certain domestic behaviors, including making Antiguan dishes, as well as the more assertive points of being a respectable woman and upholding sexual purity. There is a lot of discussion from the mother about how the daughter must interact with people as well as how to behave in a romantic relationship with a man.

    The daughter only speaks twice in the story. First she stands up for herself against one of her mother's questions that turned into an accusation, and again at the end where she asks her mother a clarifying question. It concludes abruptly with a rhetorical question from the mother wondering if her daughter didn't understand how to behave based on everything she was told.

•   Mohammed Khadeer Babu’s “Bajji Bajji” is about a boy who wangles a smart deal for the second hand notebooks that he will recycle and use. The reader chuckles at his exploits, yet the story is also a testament to the large numbers of children who must routinely pull together every resource to manage the demands of life and school. When in another story he describes his family cooking and sharing a mouth-watering Sunday lunch of meat, it dawns on us that the pleasure of eating meat is a well kept secret in the world of Indian stories.

•        Gogu Shyamala’s "Radam." Telugu original. "Raw Wound." English translation.

 ‘Raw Wound’ is a story about the oppressed condition of women who are forced to become jogini by villagers. The tag of jogini may sound respectable, but these women are considered the village’s common, sexual property. The protagonist’s parents ensure their daughter does not have to suffer such the fate of becoming a jogini by smuggling her away to school.

•          Krishna Kumar, "Growing Up Male"

  In the essay Growing up Male, Kumar suggests such a role for schools, "we need to perceive the school in conflict with the community's code of socialization .…while the larger social ethos offers stereotyped models of men's and women's roles, the school must insist that adults working in it will not act in stereotyped or stereotyping ways".

The way out:

           The author says that, while the world outside the school offers stereotyped models of men’s and women’s roles in the society, the school should act as a counter-socializer. The school’s media such as text books and other materials should teach its students the true essence of sex roles in the society even if the school has to go against the society’s code of socialization.

•                    First lessons in caste: BR Ambedkar from "A childhood journey to Koregoan becomes a nightmare." 

        The present extract describes a journey undertaken in 1901 by the ten-year-old Ambedkar and his siblings, from their residence in Satara to Koregaon, to meet their father, and the discriminatory behaviour they experience (for being untouchables of Mahar caste)  en route at Masur which makes their very journey appear impossible and dangerous.

•       “How I Upstaged the Clevers of My Class” by Md. Khadeer Babu is a more light hearted, yet thought provoking account of prejudices that a young boy faces in his village school.

 

CHAPTER 3: Just Relationships: Being Together As Equals

            Truly Just Relationships are those relationships which are just i.e. they have justice and equality in them.

• True friendship or love allows each other to feel comfortable, to be themselves and to pursue their goals, dreams and passions
• True friends stand by us through the darkest moments of our life
• True love or friendship has no place for jealousy, domination, violence, cruelty, vulgarity or misbehavior.
• The behavior of the present day heroes, in our Indian films, on the name of love and heroism, is unfortunately sending wrong signals to the youth in the society.

Some accounts of truly just relationships:

• Mary Kom and Onler:

Mary Kom is a woman of substance, self made, dedicated to her chosen field, and a winner of glory for her country. Daughter, wife, mother of three, Mary Kom has always yet been her own person, with a dream that grows bigger with every success.

Her relation with Onler was a relationship that developed slowly. At first Onler was only concerned about helping her. He saw her problems, and how she was struggling single handedly. Her parents lived in the village, they were no support at all, either financially or otherwise. And as a woman boxer, Mary had many hurdles to cross.

Onler gave her support and was her true friend.

       

• Love and acid just do not mix

Laxmi Agarwal is an acid attack survivor and works for the rights of acid attack victims. She was attacked in 2005 at age 15, by a 32-year-old man whose advances she had rejected. The attack left her face disfigured. She underwent several painful surgeries that left her weak and her family penniless.

Lakshmi fell in love with social activist Alok Dixit. Both decided not to get married and instead be in a live-in relationship, challenging the society by not getting married. Lakshmi is now a mother. Her daughter today accompanies her mother where ever she goes, and probably knows it in her heart that her parents are the most beautiful human beings she’ll come across.

• Emma Watson’s speech

In September 2014 British actor and Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women, Emma Watson, gave a smart, important, and moving speech about gender inequality and how to fight it. In doing so, she launched the He For She initiative, which aims to get men and boys to join the feminist fight for gender equality. In the speech, Ms. Watson made the important point that in order for gender equality to be achieved, harmful and destructive stereotypes of masculinity and behavioral expectations for boys and men have got to change.

• Love letters

Letters to Jyotiba, from his wife Savitribai Phule: These aren't love letters, but tell you what love is all about. The letter show how the relationship between the pioneering couple of women's education in India was marked by deep and shared concerns as they provided strength to each other.

• “Braveheart Badeyya”, by Gogu Shyamala is a story in which a son is saddened that his mother cannot wear slippers in the presence of the upper caste landlord even when walking on thorn-infested land. Outraged by this unjust custom, he stays awake the whole night and makes a pair of slippers for his mother using his father’s leather-making tools.

Further reading: Rosa Parks-The Braveheart

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger, spurring the Montgomery boycott and other efforts to end segregation.

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks refusal to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus spurred a city-wide boycott. It galvanized the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. For 382 days, almost the entire African-American population of Montgomery, Alabama, including leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, refused to ride on segregated buses, a turning point in the American civil rights movement.

The city of Montgomery had no choice but to lift the law requiring segregation on public buses. 

Rosa Parks's childhood brought her early experiences with racial discrimination and activism for racial equality. At an early age, Rosa Parks faced injustice wherever she went and decided that by taking action she could change the world around her. Rosa Parks received many accolades during her lifetime, including the NAACP's highest award.