The Lok Sabha election results are around the corner. Surely everyone agrees that women and queer people who call themselves feminists or allies and yet vote for BJP, are glib. It was during this party’s tenure that the women who faced violence were also the most defenseless – be it Asifa, a child, or Bilkis Bano or the cases at Hathras. During BJP’s tenure, LGBTQ rights were also compromised upon.
Surely everyone agrees that women and queer people who call themselves feminists or allies and yet vote for BJP, are glib.
It is certainly not as if Congress or any other party is perfect. The sad truth is, we don’t have a party that is created by the marginalised for the marginalised. That leaves us to scrounge for the “best among the worst”.
The dichotomous politics of right-leaning women
When a human is conservative, you expect to see an orthodox pedant with regressive thoughts. However, today’s conservatives come in two shades. One of them are the traditionalist and socially conservative people as described in an article by the Guardian titled ‘Indian women are being told nationalism will empower them. It’s a trick’. This group of people is very much tied to the underlying patriarchy behind nationalism. They throw the hard earned bodily, domestic and sexual autonomy all oppressed genders fought for, under the bus.
Another group includes well educated, upward-mobilised, English educated graduates and post graduates with gym and pub memberships- the “urban elite” women and queers with emancipated lives. It is dichotomous when those born to extremely orthodox parents still exercise the agency to wear clothes of their volition, or engage in the use of substance, and yet hold bigoted patterns of thinking that accompany a right-wing ideology.
Majoritarian politics gives this group the undeniable advantage of political representation – the visibility that they would enjoy and reclaim under the garb of “being women or queer” while maintaining the status quo position of privilege for the cis het men in their ilk.
Besides, there could be a tendency for the well-educated to avoid voting for mainstream leaders in general, but in India, after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, a Lokniti survey gathered that 42% of graduate Indians supported and/or Modi and the BJP. A lot of centre right leaning people when questioned cited the strengthening GDP and the rise in Micro, Small and Medium Industries as the answer, which sounded innocuous, but is not at all true, in reality.
When agency doesn’t equal empathy
While the centre right seems benign, they have been the most insidious in eroding human rights, particularly towards the trans and non binary community. They’ve also espoused casteism, anti-minority sentiments, casual ableism and more. This “urban-elite-seeming” right wing group is harder but more important to watch out for. They follow a selective mix of right and left-wing qualities, a tailor-made ideology that suits their needs while throwing the rest under the bus. They often play the role of carrying the cis hetero patriarchy and caste endogamy forward. It’s amusing when some of them appropriate the feminist/ally tag despite having exclusionary views.
While the centre right seems benign, they have been the most insidious in eroding human rights, particularly towards the trans and non binary community.
A causative element could be that some people might have mobilised themselves enough to cut through some rudimentary form of patriarchy/queerphobia – to the extent they are employed or it helps them afford products regardless of the pricetag. This also helps them stand eye to eye with the cis het men in their family, only to continue oppression against other marginalised people. It has helped only the top 5-10% of people while leaving millions of others opressed within the larger subset of women and LGBTQ people.
In fact, Ms. Bhavani Kunjulakshmi – graduate teaching Assistant and Doctoral Fellow at Maynooth Univeristy Ireland and the host of the well acclaimed Feminichi Podcast shared a recent post where she remodelled the rape culture pyramid to trace the genocidal purpose of white and savarna feminism that is based on an insidious form of self victimisation and ends at facilitating assault and explicit violence on other marginalised groups of people.
The litmus test
Many of these right-wing women and queer people have been calculative in showing their true colours. Take Kangana Ranaut. In 2015-2016, Kangana Ranaut established herself as a feminist, where she destigmatised period blood, and spoke against the objectification of women in Indian Cinema. Sadly, everything went downhill from there. She has been flagged for her rabid islamophobia, Sikhphobia, casteism, homophobia and transphobia. She hasn’t even spared those with mental health struggles.
So, was feminism a convenient clickbait for Kangana et all to use then? Was it a half-baked understanding of women’s rights events in the world?
So, was feminism a convenient clickbait for Kangana et all to use then? Was it a half-baked understanding of women’s rights events in the world? Was it a means to just grab clout to settle scores against hapless people?
Similarly, within the LGBTQ community, section 377 was the moment when the bifurcation between the left and the right-wing section arose, making intersectional and capitalism demolishing queers go there way and assimilationist “anti woke” queers like Iyer Mitra go theirs, debunking the notion of a community.
The false binary of right wingers
Right wingers are often conditional, dividing all marginalised communities into “good ones” – homonationalised ones – and “bad ones” and consider unfamiliar territory as “westernised”, like the word “non-binary” – an English equivalent of Aravani or Kothi communities.
Similarly, within the realms of feminism, good feminism is where women work for anti minority institutions like the police and other toxic-masculine institutions. Bad feminism is if they tear through moral police lenses and reclaim jobs like “cocktail making” that may have had a lot of stigma around them. They don’t realise that this binary bifurcation massively undermines what feminism was started for.
From lack of nuance to bigotry: a slippery slope
One legitimate area of criticism in liberal and right aligned dominant cis het women is the lack of nuance in matters regarding hogging of spaces of a minority or marginalised group. Even liberal women are woefully guilty here. Their feminism is too choice driven – the choice to be conservative or liberated as per their convenience. This very choice to shapeshift isn’t provided to most women.
Another area which often irks, is when they engage in what we call “both-sidism”. Many NRI Savarna women and cis queer folks should realise that extending caste solidarity to Vivek Ramaswamy – a rabid queerphobe doesn’t segue well with queer allyship. You can’t have your feet on two divergent boats.
While some women have a paucity of nuance, some others are willfully malicious towards the marginalised.
It is irksome when trans exclusionary women assume a crude, biology-driven solidarity with all women, without even wanting to discuss dynamics of faith, caste, class, or ability like Vaishnavi S, who is the Indian country point of contact for the Women’s Declaration International (WDI) Indian chapter. WDI is a Britain-based organisation that pushes for single sex spaces. Firstly, it feels condescending to have a British-run white organisation to teach us trans exclusionary feminism, when trans people have forever been the most fundamental – yet marginalised – part of India’s queer fabric. Furthermore, a Brahmin woman – the country contact named above – whose whole ancestors most likely thrived on caste oppression, wants to educate all women on a lesson on trans exclusionary feminism by making a biased film on gender dysphoria. What is it if not ironic?
Speaking of bioessentialism, multiple gender diverse people who are assigned female, are also robbed of self-agency to identify as the people they affirm themselves to be. Besides, this shoddy clubbing of the sexes does not account for historical class solidarity between people that have led to organised proletarian working-class groups in the past. As Raewyn Connell, the author of Gender: In World Perspective says, ‘Is there a transgender Marxism? This pioneering collection shows that the answer is there are many – inspired by psychoanalysis, union organizing, queer communities, Black struggles and more…’
The history of the most powerful feminist movements
The most effective feminist movements are those that have been an umbrella for every recipient of patriarchal treatment. Eleanor Marx describes women as ‘creations of an organized tyranny of men, just as the workers are the creations of an organized tyranny of idlers…’. The most powerful feminist movements have been those by
● Angela Davis and Bell Hooks – intersectional pro-queer activists who revealed the interconnectedness in oppression and led black working-class women’s resistance.
● Savitri Bai Phule and Fatema Sheikh – anticaste activists who educated all women around them including widows. In fact, in the top ten universities of Pune, Savitri Bhai Phule University (SPPU) was the only university to enroll 41 trans* students across campuses.
● Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson – While Rivera was a gay, trans activist of Puerto Rican descent, Johnson was a black trans woman. Not only did they start the stonewall riots, they fought for the rights of queer women, black women and women of color against racial discrimination, police brutality ban on birth control laws, conversion therapy and more.
A wonderful reel by @Polithickaltheory (Vitoria Fernanda) comes to mind. It depicts how a student of Marxism is brainwashed from a radically proletarian communist engaging in Marxist feminism to becoming a liberal/right wing feminist. She attends a lecture on women in politics where women like Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice – known Islamophobic women – were celebrated. Both of these women have led untold violence in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Bell Hooks’ quotes on ‘Feminism is for Everyone’ comes to mind – about how the end aim of emancipation is one that favors everyone, which is pretty much the view of Marsha P Johnson as well – ‘No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us…’.
This makes her change her stances of women in liberation forces for all other women and settle down for lip service bourgeois feminism. It’s a parody on right/liberal feminists, who, hopefully one day realise that hard-won emancipation belongs to all and sundry. Bell Hooks’ quotes on ‘Feminism is for Everyone’ comes to mind – about how the end aim of emancipation is one that favors everyone, which is pretty much the view of Marsha P Johnson as well – ‘No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us…’.
