Eclipsed Lives
By Prabhat Sharan
18 March, 2010
The Verdict
The realization that women have a right to their bodies and an equal share to living, which dawned in seventies and picked up momentum in eighties, petered out in the dawn of the new millennium.
The brouhaha over Women’s Reservation Bill has once again brought to fore not just the issue of women emancipation or liberation, but also that of the down-trodden, Dalits, Adivasis and oppressed working class. The post-1947 transfer of power and the hyped illusion of granting powers to the people by declaring the country a republic nation, till date has not brought any solace to the masses or freed them irrespective of gender, from the shackles of exploitation.
Reservations have not brought about any form of emancipation for the down-trodden simply because its sole aim has always been to deflect and channelize the simmering anger, bubbling to erupt into a white hot revolt against the exploitative system, into a mad scramble to climb the existing socio-economic ladder of the rapacious system.
Not that, reservations, did not bring about marginal changes in the lives of the oppressed but the approach and implementation of such policies was executed in a manner to help the existing polity as well as also create a myth for the supremacy of the corporatization where only “the crème de la crème of the efficient operate.”
That the oppressed people have always been at a disadvantage, because of various existing socio-economic factors, were glossed over, so as perpetuate status quo at the subterranean level of society. The psychological factors deeply embedded in the societal tropes were never tackled and instead the existing polity reinforced stereotypes.
The same is the case with the issue of women emancipation where an attempt has always been made to show that tinkering with the system and infusing ‘feel well and get high,’ hallucinogenic drugs into a tired and beaten body, is the ultimate panacea to the ills that plague the oppressed gender.
Thus, in one swift swathe, by creating a din over the reservation polity, the existing system has managed to shunt socio-economic class factors and jaundiced-psychological coloured filters, offstage from the societal proscenium. And of course in the process also reduce women to pantomime dames.
Destroying, defusing and dissolving the rebellions into the crucible of illusions generated by the society of spectacles, blots the pages of feminist movements.
In 1970s three books- The Female Eunuch, Our Bodies Ourselves and The Dialectic of Sex- had shaken shook the empire of men and self-image of women in the English speaking Western world.
It was the period of the second upsurge of women’s movements wherein the women realized that the Beatnik movement had done nothing for their liberation, and the dream of a liberation was still hidden behind the a far more dense cloud of sexist ideologies, institutions and technologies.
All the three books looked at the feminist movement and its limitations in face of emerging consumerist corporate cultural economy. If the book, Female Eunuch of Germaine Greer was polemic and rhetoric in nature, Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex fused Freudian and Marxian thoughts to tear apart the belief that women’s liberation can be achieved without the destruction of class differences and the psychological morbidity arising out of gender based biological differences.
Even as the Western women were still grappling with the depression of the failed Beat revolution- a movement, which was insulated in nature and incorporated by the corporatocrats for raking in profits and deflecting the minds to harmless and frivolous forms of escape by changing the plane of reality- the publication of Our Bodies Ourselves rattled their faith in medical technology.
Not that the women’s movement were not there in earlier epochs. Rebellions against the oppressive systems were frequent both in West as well as in East. But they were isolated, insulated and individual in nature. The analysis of the rebellion or of the exploitative system tended to look at the female exploitation grounded in cultural isolation. And the women’s movement essentially remained a bourgeoisie woman’s movement.
The seventies changed the outlook. If Our Bodies Ourselves became a battle cry for women then Greer’s polemics shook the male institutions and Firestone’s socialistic analysis pressed panic buttons for the capitalist system.
The realization that women have a right to their bodies and an equal share to living, which dawned in seventies and picked up momentum in eighties, petered out in the dawn of the new millennium.
Like an amoeba, the corporate economic structures managed to accommodate various strands of feminist movements and brainwash the exploitated protagonists into cheap labour whose body continues to be commodified in the market where it is always up for auction.
The isolation of the movement from the class struggle was one of the reasons. But more insidious was the increasing influence of the mass media on the society per se through reduction ad finem of the very concept of “freedom.”
One of the prime factors in the West in nineteenth century that sparked of the women’s movement pivoted around the issues of reproduction-a theme which found its echo not just in Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) but later in Firestone and Our Bodies Ourselves in a much nuanced form.
But even as the white women were talking about the controlling of their overall destinies, the capitalist corporate system reduced the concept of choice through reproductive technologies to consumption fostered by private enterprise. The experiments for the birth control ironically were and are carried out on the bodies of coloured women living in the two-thirds world.
Similarly, the myopic view presented in grandiose and eulogized manner of the myth of the increasing of space for women in the contemporary society, is a reality, as real as the myth of an illusory golden lamb being honoured.
The corporate media by relentlessly selling beauty concepts, have imprisoned women in a psychological morass where the prison bars are made out, from an expenditure totalling approximately $ 20 billion cosmetics and dieting industry.
The bombardment of such concepts corollary with internalization of myths and illusions, has turned most of the professions in the upper echelons, be it the teaching, media, journalism, banking et al—into Cinderella professions where women like men are reduced to act in rapacious manner and behave like a stenographer to the corpratocrats, promoting the exploitative system.
And now it is the world of an exploitative politics where politicians are just fronts for MNCs, TNCs and implementer of imperialist policies.
The spoke of the wheel of the feminist revolution has come back to the point where it had once started. And the result-an eclipse of an independent existence.
Prabhat Sharan is a Senior Journalist with interest in social, human interest, working class, wild-life conservation, philosophical and literary studies. He can be contacted at [email protected]
