Different Voices, Different Messages

http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2011/Sep/26/different-voices-different-messages-14.asp

“If men can strip off their clothes”, tells a University professor to a group of research scholars, “why cannot women?” And then he closes his academic lecture with a proclamation with which the audience is satisfied, “This is what Western Feminism strives for. They want women to be naked.” And no doubt this view is popular among most of our scholars. Whenever one discusses Western Feminism with them, the answers range from claiming that it advocates nudity, glamour, fashion (Fashion Shows, where female body is exhibited), and even pornography. This is the popular image of Western Feminism in Kashmir, while a cursory look at the whole tradition of Western feminism proves that this is not the only way to view this endeavor as most of the times the pursuit of Western feminism has been the questioning of these very images and issues.
London Miss World Contest 1970 held at Royal Albert Hall saw various feminists, most notably Laura Mulvey, protesting against the concentration on physical attributes in these beauty contests as the only criterion that defines woman. One remembers the efforts of Andrea Dworkin, whose radical feminism and anti-pornography group fought against the pornography. For Dworkin, these pornographic images celebrate the violence against women and encourage men to eroticize the abuse of women. In her book, Beauty Myth: How Images of Women Are Used Against Women, Noami Wolf criticizes the fashion industries and consumerist mentalities which create the myth of ‘beauty’ to meet their market demands.
By these popular examples I just want to say that Western Feminism is not so monolithic and monotonous as only promoting nudity and porn. Rather it is multi-faceted and dynamic in its approaches. If Feminism is a movement to change the outside world as well as a theory/theories/philosophy trying to question why woman is a woman, if she is a woman, and how she has been constructed and made into an identity and cast into roles through a prioritization of male viewpoints, then there is no doubt that Western Feminism has been able to achieve most of these goals through various feminisms: Marxist and Social Feminism, Psychoanalytic Feminism, Liberal Feminism, radical Feminism, Postcolonial Feminism, postmodern and third Wave Feminism. Among the very influential 20th century feminist theorists include:
Simon de Beauvoir: argues how woman is created, and is created as an ‘other’ in patriarch society.
“One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.”
Luce Iriagaray: explores the construction of female body in phallogocentric systems like Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
“Female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters.”
Hélène Cixous: criticizes language as fraught with binary oppositions (where one term is privileged over the other) and stresses feminine writing - écriture féminine.
“Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours. . . . She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. . . . Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible”
Judith Butler: argues that gender as well as sex is constructed discursively.
“. . . gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is 
also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”
Western Feminism is not a woman rejecting to cook, rather a questioning of her role as a Cook. It is not a woman fighting men, rather a critical examination of why she has to raise her voice to make herself audible enough to exist.

26 SEPTEMBER 2011