rough history women have experienced their bodies in different ways.

Some have lived with their

bodies in subservient ways, while others have challenged social norms in subversive ways.
Sometimes both these aspects of docility and resistance have interplayed giving one a clearer vision
of the body.

This paper has been inspired by more than three decades of ones discovery of the body and its
relationship to the self while also being the centre of our work in the womens health movement. We
begin by understanding what the body means to womens lives in their struggles for survival, and
today, while we feel enriched by the lessons learnt from the womens movement, we are also
grappling with newer issues that confront us with changing meanings of the body.

This essay draws on our work, specically the lives of marginalised peoples. These may be
individual voices but are largely experiences of movements of dalit women, disabled people, queer
and transgender people and sex workers. The contributions of these voices from the margins of
society have challenged and enriched the debates within the womens movement. This speaks of the
tremendous openness and willingness to be inclusive and dialogue with divergent views on part of
the womens movement.

The evidence for the capacity to engage and debate is seen in the shift and changes that take place
in the theorising within the movement. These shifts and changes are not to be seen as an inability to
have one position, but a reection of the strength of the movement to engage with diversity and
multiplicity.

Section 1 looks at the diverse constructions of womens bodies across castes, classes, regions,
religions and other categories. Running through this is the role of the womens movement in
dismantling these notions of the body. Section 2 deals with the struggles and shifts in the
understandings of the body over three decades. This is reected in the campaigns undertaken by
feminists along with voices from other movements. Integrated in these debates are ones own voices
and the distinct voices of individual women. Section 3 places the complex unresolved concerns
raised by the interface of feminists with movements of each of the marginalised peoples.
1 Dismantling Notions of the Body

In order to understand and realise what our bodies mean to us as women, feminists have tried to
dismantle the constructions that have surrounded the body as experienced by women (and men).
The body gets constructed differently right through a womans life by patriarchy and capitalism. It is
also experienced differently by various categories of women. From childhood womens bodies
experience gender construction, where girls are taught to acquire gender roles and qualities that are
feminine which are supposed to compliment mens superior masculine traits. Women from middle
and upper castes and classes remain captive in these feminine bodies.

Women have always received contradictory messages about their bodies. When expedient, it is
gloried by ideal images of goddesses; honour of the nation/family/community and sometimes the
same body is projected as shameful, embarrassing, vexatious, fearful and disgusting. Women have
constantly struggled to maintain this ideal body and project themselves as good women or have
been afraid to confront the negative aspects of being portrayed as bad women. Through this
comes the distorted picture of how we view our bodies. It can be extremely disempowering for a
woman to be confronted daily with notions of other womens bodies as well as her own and feel as
though she does not measure up.

On the other hand, the gendered bodies of lower castes and classes get constructed by poverty,
malnutrition, heavy burden of work, gender discrimination, and so on. Their bodies are projected as
shameful, polluting, dirty and impure. They become survivors with nothing much to lose.
Nonetheless both kinds of bodies are used and abused. This condition is further cemented by
ideologies of motherhood, son preference, notions of purity and pollution that keep women captive.

It needs reiteration that it was feminism that was responsible for putting the body on the intellectual
and theoretical map of society and history. In the era of sexual liberation, feminists brought the body
to the forefront in their analyses of power relations under patriarchy. The body became a political
issue as feminists struggled to gain control over their fertility and sexuality. As feminists, we began
our challenge of the notion of biology as destiny, where the natural material body was being viewed
as a biological entity thereby justifying inequality or differences between men and women. In India
too, the feminists of the autonomous womens movement identied the centrality of womens bodies
and recognised patriarchy and capitalism and the institutions like State, family and marriage as the
prime sites of control.
1.1 Role of Patriarchy and Capitalism

Patriarchy constructs bodies along gender lines. The social theory of the body takes gender and
power into account. Gender identity is assumed by many to be natural, but in actual fact, it is a
process of socialisation where since birth every individual is made to t into male or female
categories adopting masculine or feminine roles, qualities and behaviour at any cost. From a
feminist perspective, human bodies are shaped and controlled by the norms and expectations of the
gendered social order in which gendered bodies are produced for a social world creating identities
and self-denitions.

Womens bodies are primarily social constructs that dene their experiences of femininity in inter-
subjective relationships with others, along with class, caste, ethnicity and regional dimensions.
However, transgender experience has complicated this understanding further, by highlighting the
lived experience of gender transition in deep connection with sexual desires, identities and

44 practices, thereby questioning the binary of the male and female gender and sexuality (Hines
2007: 103-04).

Marxists located production only in the public sphere, whereas it is feminists who have highlighted
the vital, yet, invisible role of womens bodies in production. The labouring female body has never
gained importance because womens labour has been persistently devalued, be it within the home or
outside, as domestic/ sexual labour, as productive labour within the household or agricultural and
other formal and informal labour. In India, caste has played an important role in determining ones
occupational status. The lowliest of occupations on the caste scale are those who do menial jobs or
work as agricultural labour on the soil. These women have no assets apart from their bodies despite
which their back-breaking, and blood and sweat-dripping labour has no value. Their bodies perform
the most required tasks in society such as scavenging, cleaning, sweeping, sowing, transplanting,
reaping and other soil and land-related activities. Thus society has put on womens shoulders tasks
that are necessary, and yet, valueless.

Womens bodies get constructed both physically and mentally for procreation or as is widely known,
reproduction, and for male pleasure. Time and again the family, community and State have
experimented methods of controlling and assisting womens reproduction by manipulating their
bodies. Women have been brainwashed by the glorication of motherhood and the importance of
having a biological child. Women are blamed for having too many children or stigmatised for not
having one, or even worse, if she chooses not to exercise her reproductive option.

The consumption of the body for male pleasure forms the basis of the market manipulation of
womens bodies. Whether it is the wife at home or the sex worker, women dancing in bars or women
depicted in serials and lms, the objectication of womens bodies for male gaze has been a part of
the body agenda. In an era of globalisation, the images around us of ideal feminine beauty and the
pressure to emulate these ideals operate as reections of patriarchy and capitalism, largely through
the use of diets and consumer products designed to enhance our faces, hair and bodies. If today
social disciplining cannot produce gendered bodies, the knife can cosmetic surgery is now a big
business bodies are literally carved to the shape prescribed by gender symbolism.

A changing and globalising economy has pushed women to opt for certain types of labour within a
shrinking livelihood spectrum. Within this scenario, the lives of both bar dancers and sex workers
have shown how deeply caste and livelihood are integrated.1 Their work demands that they make
their bodies alluring in order to attract customers, but many times they feel awful when men ogle and
attempt to touch them. This stigmatised work demands that women sell or barter their bodies and try
to negotiate for safety and security in the given spaces. Studies provide important insights into the
manner, wherein a society that views women as objects of desire, some of the women who nd
themselves in difcult circumstances turn it into an earning ability.2

In the case of women in prostitution or sex work, there is a strong voice from the dalit movement that
traditional forms of prostitution like the devadasi system have its origin in the

april 24, 2010 vol xlv no 17

patriarchal framework where high caste men were allowed free and religiously sanctioned sexual
access to dalit women. The movement recognises that not only are the majority of women in
prostitution located in the lower caste material life and in poverty, but that it meant the sexual
exploitation of lower caste women for sexual gratication of upper caste men. The State, on the
other hand, has tried to homogenise all categories of prostitution as immoral that needs to be
curbed. There is, yet, another side to it where the sex workers themselves question the moral and
cultural motives of the State and its efforts to sanitise their occupation (Tambe 2008: 73-97).

1.2 Control over Womens Bodies

Women are always under pressure to conform to family, society and community expectations. In
India, the family moulds women into their ideal roles of wife, mother, daughter, and so on. The family
becomes the site where the material body is disciplined and socialised. Cultural assumptions of
womanhood are reproduced through stipulations and the female body becomes a site of social
control.

The female body has also been targeted as a metaphor for nation and community. Womens bodies
not only represent honour, but it is the symbolic marker of the boundary between us and them.
Caste and religious differences are drawn into produce dichotomies of otherness and power
hierarchies among women. Women become carriers of essential traditional culture and are
compared to Bharat Mata, symbolising both the Hindu nation and the mother. A womans honour
then represents the nations honour (stree ka samman, rashtra ka samman) and it has to be
safeguarded at any cost.

Religious imprinting of the female body, the nations denition as female/mother, the gendered
production of the relationship between land and womens bodies, are all used as controlling regimes.
The glorication of motherhood is repeatedly used by the right wing, stressing womens roles as
ideal mothers who bear sons for the nation. The ideal family obviously considered Hindu, is
projected as that which the State wants, while the Muslim family is castigated as mindlessly
reproducing offspring. It would be apt here to quote the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,
where he exhorts the Hindu women to bear more sons in order to outdo the population of the other.
Another oftrepeated quote that exhorts womens bodies into nationalist duty and pride, which
basically means Hindu pride, is that of hum do hamare do, lekin woh panch unke pacchis (we two
our two, but they ve their 25) which castigates the over-fertile Muslim womans body, but extols the
Hindu womans controlled fertility for the cause of the nation.

Motherhood is exalted and eulogised in Indian/Hindu texts and rituals. But it is only the right kind of
mother who is socially validated: the mother who can bear sons within marriage. Within the
framework of reproductive hetero-normativity, marriage and childbearing become central to womens
sense of well-being and personhood and is looked at as womens destiny. Womens reproductive
capacity helps the family to maintain caste purity, preserve the family and community name and
property, and produce sons as protectors of the nation. If a woman fails to bear

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a child she becomes a source of shame, and leads to a loss of face, family dishonour and mental
agony.
This well-groomed role and identity for women is complemented by the State which uses it to full its
eugenic agenda of population control. This agenda decides what kind of population is needed for our
society and which people do not have the right to be born. A large number of women from
marginalised communities such as adivasis, dalits and Muslims continue to be targets of the
coercive and dangerous population control policies of the state. The bodies of adivasi, dalit and
Muslim women are subject to compulsory sterilisation, uninformed invasive contraceptive measures
and even clinical trials. While the State dictates a denite age at which women have to be married
they deny an agency for their reproductive decisions. Additionally, religious fundamentalism and
masculinist nationalism have been threats to womens sexual and reproductive health and rights and
bodily autonomy. Amidst the rhetoric of the State and religious leaders, all women are faced with the
challenge of asserting control over their bodies.

1.3 The Role of the Modern Medical System

The modern medical system, which is also a part of the patriarchal/capitalist state, views womens
bodies as vulnerable and prone to illnesses, which has its origin all in their heads. Womens bodies
are viewed as sources of danger frail bodies and ckle minds. The medical community exercises
tremendous control over womens bodies and makes huge overall gains manipulating their
reproductive health. Today it has overmedicalised the reproductive processes with ideas of scientic
motherhood seen in irrational caesarian births, articial reproduction, and so on.

Increasingly, technology and the medical community have cashed in on the vulnerability of childless
couples with promises of providing a biological child through assisted reproductive technologies
which are harmful to women, be it the infertile woman, the donor or the surrogate. The power of
science and technology has made womens bodies sites for experimentation and business. These
technologies are harmful and invasive where the womans body is prepared to receive the embryo,
nurtured with chemical controls, hormonal interventions and manipulation.

Medical profession also plays a major role in assisting women through scientic knowledge and
invasive technology to attain this ideal body boosting its coherence and manageability. The practice
provides you with medical solutions for all problems, be it silicon implants for enhanced breasts,
diets and hunger suppressing drugs to make you slim, reconstructing your virginity by hymenoplasty,
or anti-ageing creams and hormone replacement for ageing women. Time and again the attempt at
realisation of the ideal body is frustrated by the resurgence of the real.

Instead of presenting the human body as a meaningful unity, medicine tries to regard it as a complex
collection of interacting parts and systems. There is a duality created between the medical body and
the body familiar in daily experiences. The body as it is experienced in everyday life disappears from
view and nds itself reduced to a machine like entity performing mechanical functions.

1.4 Gendered Logic of Mind-Body Dualism

In western thought there has been this mind-body dualism in which the female body is considered to
represent nature, emotions, the mysterious other, unpredictable and dangerous, threatening to erupt
and challenge the patriarchal order. Simultaneously, it is also seen as incomplete and inadequate.
The male body represents culture, rationality, the perfect creation, always in charge and ahead. In
other words, female body represents all that needs to be tamed and controlled by the male agent
who in society could be represented by the father, husband, doctor, priest, scientist, and so on.
Women had to be kept bound indoors, and in thought and deed, through control of their sexuality
that is deemed dangerous in most cultures. Other forms of control are of their reproductive
capacities by controlling their fertility or infertility, their labour by dictating what tasks are t for
women to do, and by controlling their mobility and freedom by restraining safe access to spaces that
men are free to move in.

The embodied nature of all manual labour, be it for men and women, is denied any expression, more
for women which ends up concealing the value of all the work that women do within the household
as unpaid labour. The embodiment of reproductive and sexual labour is also belittled by portraying
women as childbearing machines or mindless bimbos.

Women have also used their bodies as resources to survive a harsh everyday life in a world that is
ordered by relations of gender inequality and economic necessity. Even as the body has been
symbolised as giving identity, a sense of personhood and recognition, women have used it as an
instrument for subversive expression and transgression.

1.5 Bodies as Sexualised While Being Gendered

Regulatory norms are set in play to conne womens sexuality within the framework of hetero-
normativity that is relationships that are monogamous, within marriage and only with the opposite
sex.

Sexuality is often experienced through the physicality of our bodies. Patriarchy and capitalism are
two of the socio-economic structures that play a large part in the conception of female sexuality.
Carol Vance states sex is a social construction, articulated at many points through the economic,
social and political structures of the material world. For instance, a womans body is viewed as being
sensuous, mysterious and exotic always the desirable other represented in advertisements,
womens magazines, on the catwalk, in popular cinema, and so on. Often these conceptions are
restrictive and oppressive which limit female sexuality to seek safety within heterosexual marriage
rather than sexual pleasure. Any sexual variance is considered to be deviant, dangerous and
violation of social rules.

The dialectic approach which views the body as a material object located in nature but subject to
social forces is also useful in examining theories of female sexuality. Although sexuality is grounded
in the body, the bodys structure, physiology, and functioning do not directly or simply determine the
conguration or meaning of sexuality (Vance 1999: 39-54).

46
Many progressive movements have considered sexuality as secondary, even a luxury for the self-
indulgent. Many feminists have questioned both the womens movements and the Marxists
relegation of sexuality as a private matter that does not count as an axis of oppression. Nivedita
Menon has queried that if heteronormativity is seen as natural, then why are there imposing and
violent structures such as marriage and family trying to keep it in place? Indeed, part of the
discourse of womens liberation that emerged in the late 1960s and epitomised by the slogan the
personal is political was that something once thought completely private and personal is actually a
major site of both oppression and liberation (Menon 2006).

The silence surrounding womens bodies and sexualities began to be broken through other voices in
the 1960s and 1970s who took it upon themselves to increase self-awareness related to the body.
One such group was the Boston Womens Health Collective, which eventually published the book,
Our Bodies, Ourselves which states:

Body education is core education. Our bodies are the physical bases from which we move into the
world. Ignorance, uncertainty and shame about our physical selves creates in us an alienation from
ourselves that keeps us from being the whole people we could be.

In the self-help health training too we have challenged the myths used to construct our bodies and
attempted to remove the sting of negativity and alienation. The body once considered a seat of
helplessness and shame has been highlighted as a source of pride and pleasure that we need to
control and have a right over.

2 Struggles and Shifts

Beginning in the 1980s the focus of the campaigns of the contemporary Indian womens movement
has been on the violated body. The movement campaigned around rape, domestic violence, dowry-
related murders, sati, culminating in current concerns around campaigns highlighting sexual
harassment since the Visakha judgment of 1997. All kinds of violence against women, be it
molestation, mutilation, rape, or murders, womens bodies have been central to violence. Sexualised
violence has been acted out on womens bodies to maintain the honour of the community, young
girls are killed for having transgressed the boundaries set by the community, women are made to
parade naked and publicly humiliated to keep them in fear and terror. Violence has been directed to
disgure girls bodies through acid attacks on those who have dared to say no to unreasonable
demands. Even assertions and legitimate claims of rights invite severe punishment, as in the
extreme case of the dalit woman from Khairlanji, who claimed her right to land and in retaliation, she
and her children were brutally sexually assaulted, bodies heinously mutilated and done to death by
the villagers belonging to the dominant caste. The most gruesome of all: the use of sexual violence
as genocide or crimes against humanity as witnessed in the Gujarat carnage of 2002.

Running parallel to the national campaigns have been the United Nations-sponsored United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) campaigns on violence against women, which happens
through a series of events, mobilisations, conferences and projects (including for instance, Eve
Enslers famed show The Vagina Monologues). The focus is on resisting sexual violence and
reclaiming ones sexuality and the body. Also at this time, in

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the international legal domain, is the focus on rape as a crime against humanity, a form of genocide
seen in the womens movements efforts at the International Initiative for Justice on Gujarat (IIJ
2003). Along with the womens movement has been the different struggles for land rights like the
Telangana and the Tehbhaga movements, the Bodh Gaya struggle where women participated
shoulder to shoulder with men. Women did not differentiate their roles in the struggles, but there
were also occasions where they challenged the traditional notions of the body imposed on them. But
once the struggles achieved their goals, the women were asked to go back into their kitchens, their
motherhood roles, and were banished from the public domain of struggle.

The self-help health movement has time and again critiqued medicine as having needlessly
mystied the body through excluding knowledge from lay people with power over the body coming
to rest in the hands of experts. It questioned the model and reawakened the hidden possibilities and
unities in the body. The self-help efforts both internationally and in India have contributed to create
safe spaces for women to explore, appreciate and take care of their bodies. Respect for difference
and seeing beauty in diversity has made them reject the dominant ideology regarding female
standards of beauty.

Running parallel to the reclaiming of the body by the womens movement has been the womens
health movements role in critiquing the role of the state in enforcing population control policies. The
womens health movement in its critique of the states targeted population control has campaigned
against reduction of womens roles to being just mothers, while also reducing womens bodies as
sites of decreasing the nations numbers! In particular, later campaigns have addressed the anti-
women bias in society arising out of son-preference in families, with the movement focusing their
efforts against sex-selective abortion and diagnostic technologies such as amniocentesis. The
campaign efforts focused on the need to educate and legislate not just for people but the medical
establishment making them accountable to the use of these technologies. The campaign (1989-94)
put on agenda womens control over their bodies as well as the coercion they are constantly subject
to in a patriarchal situation of son-preference.

Womens movement recognises and believes that women have an agency vis--vis their bodies,
reecting their conscious thinking and relationship with their bodies. This has been seen in the shifts
we have made when discussing the issue of sex workers or bar dancers. Feminist approaches to the
body take into account the subordination and subversion aspects implicated in experiences and
embodying practices. While it recognises that when women interact with their bodies there are
possibilities for resistance, there are also limitations to notions of freedom, choice or agency. It
senses the dangers of liberatory practices within a discourse of liberal individualism (Davis 1997: 1-
21).
2.1 Differential Control over and Violence against Different Women
In India, land is central to all relations of power. Land relations of both ownership and labour meant
control over those who will work on it. This has led to control over women and womens bodies.

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Thus both landlords and men who head households have control over the women under them.
Women are denied property rights as all ownership is in mens names.

In a feudal society upper caste womens bodies were marked with messages of purity preserved for
the husband alone and controlled in order to prove the legitimacy of heirs to the land and other
property, while the bodies and sexuality of the women of the lower castes/classes was available to
all. They could be used and abused by all men in power. In our engagement with community level
work on addressing health rights through selfhelp processes, we have had many experiences, which
have enlarged our understanding of womens lives.

I recall the fortress like houses of the upper castes where women were cooped inside the four walls,
whose destiny was to reproduce children preferably male offspring to carry forward the name of the
family/ community. They surely did not lack for food and water but their bodily integrity and sexual
autonomy was denied to them.3

Thus not only the roles expected of women of different classes were diverse, but the violence meted
out on their persons and bodies varied. Even on the death of the husband, the women were
subjected to all kinds of cultural controls so that they would keep their bodies disciplined and not get
distracted. The experience of Lakshmi who was widowed at a very early age still rings in our ears.
She said:

I lost my husband at a very early age of 14. Today I am just 36 but I look and feel like an old woman
of 60. My mind has been so disciplined that I dare not raise my eyes to look at another man and my
body has been so disgured that there is nothing that one can look at and desire. The only reason I
was tolerated by my husbands family was that I had given birth to two sons. They used all kinds of
ways to keep me in control. My father-in-law insisted that I have bath only with cold water. I was
given only watery curds and rice to eat no pickles, no chutney. I was made to sleep on cold oor, I
have kept my head shaven and I have always worn a white sari with no blouse. All this was done to
my body so that my sexuality would be in control and that my husbands share of the property would
be intact within the family.4

Women from the lower castes, on the other hand, were expected to be sexually available while their
bodies were simultaneously treated as polluting. It was a cultural norm that the rst night of the
marriage of the lower caste bride would be spent with the landlord of the village.5 In fact, there was
a constant demand for their sexual services against their will. In order to domesticate both these
groups of women, subservient norms of sexuality and gender were used.

Adding to the feudal customs and practices that impact womens bodies, are caste and religious
diktats pushing women into more conservative roles making them carriers of culture and religion.
Dress codes, adherence to religious symbols, etc, may seem external, but they play a role in
strengthening the making of our bodies. Construction of the body in the above manner is in itself an
act of violence.

2.2 Body in the Beauty Business: Morality and Censorship

Apart from the nation and religion, society is constantly concerned with the representation of women.
The public gaze whether male or female is always speculating on womens bodies, how next she will
clothe her body or adorn it or maintain it or manipulate it or shape it to perfection. Society has
created a certain image of what is considered as socially approved good looks, and there is a blatant
marketing of good looks with everyone following it blindly. We earlier noted how contradictory
messages about the body are constantly beamed at women. Hence, there are multiple ways in
which women experience body image and negotiate cultural messages about their appearance.

The media is the biggest site of representation of the female body. Womens bodies are sexualised
and objectied for the male gaze and market. Feminists in the 1970s and 1980s were concerned
with the way womans bodies were objectied, represented, marketed and consumed. Some of the
earliest campaigns have been to protest against the degrading depiction of women, with activists
taking to the streets to blacken posters. This, later culminated in the representatives of the womens
movement protesting the beauty pageant for Miss World/Universe. Beauty pageants across the
globe were looked at as social globalisation aided by international capital so that yesterdays
western products nd a ready market elsewhere. It was termed as the business of beauty.6

Womens groups were also doing media-monitoring, analysis of imagery of women bodies in
television, cinema, photography and other visual arts. The breaking point in a way was the Indecent
Representation of Women Act of 1987, which had feminists in debate as to what was indecent
representation of female bodies, or representation of degrading behaviour as in the case of the
humiliating depiction of a wife in the lm Mera Pati, Mera Parmeshwar.

But as it happened, the activists of the womens movement found themselves on the same side as
the right wing who were morally castigating such representation of women as shameful to Indian
culture, which imposition feminists had always resisted and fought against all along. It was an
instance of the right wing taking over our agendas and language, thereby making us rethink our
positions. Hot on the heels of the M F Husain controversy where the images of Saraswati which had
been on display in galleries since the time it was painted in 1970 was vandalised, the right wing was
busy discovering nudity and sexual degradation. They were producing pornographic vision where it
did not exist before. Feminists realised the need to see through this moral castigation and the right
wing agenda of clamping down on freedom of expression.
In recent times such moral policing and physical violence have been directed at women who were
present in pubs of their own free will. This assault on womens freedom and choice gave rise to a
campaign which tried to ridicule this absurdity of moral policing in a country where diversity of
multiple kinds have always coexisted. Calling itself the Pink Chaddi campaign it used the electronic
media to enthuse people to send pink coloured underwear to the attackers who called themselves
the Ram Sene. In this manner they exposed these men who were obviously threatened by the
growing assertion and agency of women.

Calls for bans by right wing forces, in the name of Indian culture, made feminists question
censorship. Feminists believed that censorship should not be the answer for degrading
representation, but a more informed debate that makes people aware and critical.

At the same time, we clearly and urgently need to have a better appreciation of how women are
addressed by the beauty business, in what ways they consent to the new impossible standards of
sexual attractiveness beamed at them and what aspirations lead so many to have their skills and
their bodies honed in the hope of a modelling career.

When the state, market and science and technology come together, several questions need to be
posed and answered as well. Technological intervention is not an answer to social problems. It could
be the technology machine, the doctors knife or pharmaceutical concoctions that have pushed
women to take the bait with accompanying institutions like the media and market providing images of
ideal bodies.

In this competitive era, beauty has become priceless. Our concepts of beauty keep changing. The
best body, the most beautiful woman, is not necessarily the most desired one. What is it that a
makes a person desirable? Is it her hair, eyes, complexion or body perfection? It could be an
endless list! The obsession to look good, and the craving to look better has never been so obvious.
Some of the professions that women are involved in today like modelling, dancing, or sex work
demand that you look more presentable and younger than your age. Women have been queuing up
at cosmetic clinics for expensive facelifts, quick-x Botox makeovers and commonplace chemical
peels. Enhancing genitals is the latest cosmetic surgery trend. Cosmetic surgery to alter the labia is
the third most sought after operation after facial and breast augmentation surgeries.7 The
emergence of quick treatments has contributed to the beauty rush. Women look for glamorous and
attractive looks within the shortest possible time. The citys cosmetic surgeons, in fact, are reporting
up to 30% increase in the number of people seeking beauty treatments.

Shifts in thinking have urged feminists to also look at the reclaiming of the body as resource, where
a pragmatic approach by women often transgressive is sought to be suppressed.

3 Being Challenged by the Margins

When it comes to the body and its various facets, womens movement has been constantly
challenged by voices of people with stigmatised bodies. They have forced us to look at the politics
of privilege and redened their marginalisation as a form of oppression that is social in nature. There
have been similarities that

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have brought our struggles on to a common platform. But there have also been differences and
denials that the womens movement has turned a blind eye to.

The sex workers movement and the bar dancers struggles have made feminists rethink the use of
the body as a resource for livelihood in a context of diminished options for survival.

Society refuses to tolerate womens exercise of their agency, their choices and preferences, be it bar
dancers, sex workers, or even models. Today, more and more young middle class women are using
their bodies for making careers and projecting it for earning an income: in effect, they are exerting an
agency vis--vis their bodies. However, it is not just them, the sex workers movement and the bar
dancers efforts have shown us that women across classes, especially the labouring classes, have
always relied on their bodies as a resource for livelihood, and have been relentlessly exercising
agency. The intricacy and complexity of womens relationship to their bodies in patriarchal society is
intensied for those who earn their living through exhibiting and using their bodies in a sexualised
and gendered context. Broad concepts such as gender inequalities, sexual autonomy and power are
magnied and condensed when a woman depends on her body for income. One needs to reconcile
our thoughts, feelings and beliefs about our bodies and sexualities within this dependence.

Some of the debates that arose out of the questions raised above focus on the body as a resource
specically with reference to sex work, dancing in bars, surrogacy, with right to bodily integrity,
agency, taking primacy in discussions on the body. Some of this has followed the work around
prevention of HIV-AIDS that sex workers groups have been involved in since the 1990s, which gave
rise to sex workers rights movements. These debates have further intensied following the feminists
positions that were reected after the bar dancers controversy in 2005. Additionally, increased
debates on the body as a resource have surfaced with the discussions among womens groups on
the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Bill, 2008 where commercial surrogacy as an option
was widely debated.8

Additionally, they have pushed aside the moral argument of increasing sexual promiscuity, being evil
and corrupt inuences on society and thrown aside the depiction of their lives as deviant and
degenerate, in their quest for recognition as workers contributing productively to society. They are
also consistent in their struggle for rights from state and society to decriminalise and provide a safer
environment to their work. Sex workers from Maesot, Thailand say,

we decide when, where, and with whom well do what we are more comfortable with our bodies
and sexualities than most people. We dont have private parts, dismembered from the rest: they are
part of a whole.9

Another extension of the use of body as a resource which can be considered as a subversive
activity, is that of women opting to be surrogate mothers. Some feminists abhor the idea of the
commercial use of the womb for surrogacy. They concur that motherhood is a role that cannot be
traded. Other feminists feel that if women opt for surrogacy, then they believe in their capacities to
treat their bodies distinct from their motherhood

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april 24, 2010 vol xlv no 17

roles and they have a right to decide what they want to do with their bodies.

Disability Rights Groups: These groups have time and again drawn our attention to the points of
contention such as eugenic abortions, wherein feminist campaigns against sex-selective abortions
questioned the aborting of female foetuses, but were not sensitive to the issue of the abortion of
deformed foetuses. They asked feminists if they thought it ethical to eliminate foetuses that had
genetic abnormalities thereby debating only about the rights of the perfect and able-bodied, but not
those who were born otherwise. They offered both a challenge and extension to feminist debates,
although they have not secured all the answers. Disability rights activists have placed the notion of
the temporarily abled body (TAB) as the primary focus for those who want to understand the body in
all its complexities. This indicates that the body is always in a state of movement between any point
on the continuum of ability to disability.10

In 2008, the instance where the pregnant woman and her husband, had led a case in the Bombay
High Court seeking to abort their 25 week old foetus, has been an issue that had feminists up in
debate and discussion. The couple was seeking permission to terminate the pregnancy with medical
guidance, since they had crossed the legal time limit of 20 weeks according to the Medical
Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, as the foetus had certain blockages in the heart. Their rationale
was that it would not just distress the child who would be born with the disability and suffer thereby,
but also burden the mother and her family nancially and otherwise. It brought back among feminists
the earlier dilemma when they opposed technology for sex-selection, but not for detecting genetic
abnormalities as a basis for termination of pregnancy.

As feminists, the dilemma that confronted us was that, at one level it was a womens rights issue as
the burden of taking care of children born with disabilities almost often fell on women in families,
while at another level, the rights of disabled people to be born or eliminated stared us in the face.
But signicantly, we questioned the eugenic agenda of possessing perfect bodies that is so deeply
ingrained in us. It is only now that we are becoming aware of the exclusion of the disabled in our
agendas and forums and questioning their inaccessibility to spaces as their right. Society is created
for the able-bodied in which women suffer most because of their gender and disability.

The Queer Movement: It has further questioned the concept of a normal/ideal body. Construction of
the gendered body and its tting into the binary of the male-female is done to perfection by the
institutions such as the family, religion, media, law, science, the state and police. Violence of various
sorts is meted out repeatedly, by these very institutions, to those who have transgressed the
boundaries of this binary. Female to male (FtMs), male to females (MtFs), kothi, hijra, aravanis, and
all such constituents under the queer umbrella are constantly challenging, resisting, transgressing
the normativity of the gendered body. And these acts earn them continuous violence from all the
abovementioned institutions. While they challenge the patriarchal construction of the gendered body,
they are also extending the challenge to feminists by questioning the notion of the category
woman. Some FtMs seek to alter their bodies through sex-reassignment surgery (SRS), while the
MtFs and hijras and aravanis mostly try to approximate the female body through similar processes,
thereby challenging the notion of the perfect, biological, female body of a woman.

Following this has been the challenges from the transgender rights groups, on SRS/cosmetic
surgery, which go beyond the submitting to patriarchal notions of beauty to transforming the body to
t transgender denitions of gender, taking the construction of gender totally into another domain.

We have yet another category of women and men who feel trapped in a wrong body for whom there
is no space in society to express themselves as they feel. Somehow, the feminist question of the
personal being political is now being posed in newer ways, in this case challenging gender. In all
this we are also asked the most pertinent question: are we challenging patriarchy or accommodating
it?

The Inter-Sex Movement: This movement has challenged our notion of there being only two natural
sexes the binary of the male and the female sex. Research has shown that almost 2% of the
children born do not fall neatly into male or female criteria (Fausto-Sterling 2000). This ambiguous
identity/diversity becomes threatening to the institution of compulsory heterosexuality by challenging
the existence of gender in a binary form. By the multiple and uid reality of genders, a heterosexual
norm becomes unstable. The medical community and the family take it on themselves to give a
surgically assigned gender, which becomes problematic to the individual who realises the extent of
tampering the body has undergone as life progresses.

Take the case of a talented Indian silver medal winning sprinter in the Asian games who was caught
in middle of a gender test controversy. The questions posed by feminists, following her failing the
gender test were: does having more Y chromosomes than you are allowed, make you less of a
woman? The athlete in question was born a woman, lived as a woman and had never undergone
any sex change surgery. Can a battery of gynaecologists, endocrinologists or haematologists decree
that one is not woman enough because of a uky chromosome? Does this not negate all the efforts
she put in to get where she was? At this point it would be useful to focus on the labouring body too,
as in a way a sporting, working body is an extension of a labouring body.

The earlier gender/sex analysis used in our trainings separated gender from the body. But later,
understanding of sex/gender distinction has helped to deconstruct the biological notion of natural
bodies and highlight the differences between sexes as social relations of domination and
subordination. The womens movement has moved away from the understanding of sex as natural
and gender as socially constructed. It has questioned the binary of sex and gender in a hetero-
normative society.

One in every 100 births is a non-standard body, and even these standards are imagined ones.
Corrective surgery is usually done between the ages of 3 to 5. Inter-sex movement speaks of
gender variance as a continuum, rather than of variations from the norm, critiques the
pathologisation of inter-sex by the medical establishment, and questions the privilege of the
normalcy of the so-called correctly sexed body. Inter-sex people have raised the issue of feminists
unwillingness to dialogue with them (ibid).

The edgling movement of the inter-sex people (still non-existent in India) has posed questions
along the above lines to feminists to rethink the notions of sex as biological and gender as socially
constructed. A question to reect is, how much are we as feminists, contributing to the making of
binary?
3.1 Foregrounding a Subversive Agenda

When women start perceiving the body as a resource, recognise their personhood and identity, then
agency and empowerment come into play and women take possession of their body. Bodies also
share social agency in generating and shaping courses of social conduct. Not only is it empowering
that there are other bodies like our own, but we also discover how difference amidst one another and
deviations from standard conceptions of beauty is invaluable. Women can openly compliment one
anothers bodies in a non-competitive environment. This can be a new afrming experience for
many.

As domination becomes unbearable, women have raised their voices and transgressed the
boundaries set for them. We have to only read the poems, songs and stories written by various
women, such as Akkamahadevi, Avvaiyar, Mirabai who challenged norms set for them as women, by
taking charge of their bodies and transgressing the limits set for them.
Sometimes transgression has been expressed through mundane acts like challenging dress codes,
veiling, cross-dressing, acts that give shape to their lives. When women get messages that their
bodies are inferior a gap is created between the body as decient and the body as an object to be
modied. Dissatisfaction becomes an active process whereby women engage with their bodies
altering the discourses of feminine beauty and addressing the ambivalence directed towards their
bodies, creating symbolic spaces for alternative identities.

3.2 Our Efforts through Trainings

The self-help health efforts both internationally and in India have been built on more than a decade
of campaigns by the womens health movement. Besides focusing on womens specic health
concerns, the training has been an assertion and quest to reclaim and have control over ones body.
It has contributed to creating safe spaces for women to explore, appreciate and take care of their
bodies. Respect for difference and seeing beauty in diversity has made them reject the dominant
ideology regarding female standards of beauty. The body once considered a seat of helplessness
has become a source of pride and pleasure.

As Sabala says in Kranti and Sabala (1995):

I have been aware of my body at a very early age in life. That is because all signs of so-called
beauty was denied to me. I was able to take all this and ght out an inferior complex by being extra
intelligent, responsible, enterprising which compensated for the need to be accepted. But as I
entered puberty and started menstruating, I started

april 24, 2010 vol xlv no 17

hating my body. I looked at menstruation as dirty, inconvenient, em-Participants from middle classes
and upper castes looked at their barrassing which made it all the more painful. To add to this, I found
bodies as shameful and embarrassing. They were exposed to images that my mobility was restricted
to a great extent and restrictions of this uniform ideal body and anything different was not up to the
placed on me. I constantly compared the freedom given to my brother, mark, and hence, should be
concealed and silenced. In the training, just because he was a boy, and the norms placed on me.
The only way I we had to explode the myths that were used to construct our bodies could reason this
out at that time was I have been born as a woman in for the market, and value the diversity in the
body and look at it this body. Had I been born a boy I would not have to go through the as something
beautiful that needs to be respected and controlled pangs of menstruation, no restrictions and would
be free to do a lot of by us.11 things. These negative feelings towards my body kept increasing that I
It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my body and accept started getting suffocated. I
tried channelling my energies by being myself as a woman. But today when I hear the voices of
queer and adventurous, taking risks, defying practices and structures. disabled persons once again
questions come to my mind why is it so The turning point in my life where I came to accept myself
as a woman important to me to be categorised as a woman? Why do I want to be and gave
importance to my body was when I came into the womens tted into one of these gender/sex
binaries? Does it give me some privmovement. This got further strengthened when I got involved in
ileges to choose or make me feel safe? working more intensely on gender and womens health and
designed Here are persons who feel the need to own their bodies the way it is. the self-help training
in women centred health care. This provoked They are not ashamed but rather angry that their
bodies have been me to look at the body with a broader lens and understand the posi-mutilated and
distorted without their knowledge or permission. They tiveness of the body. I could not possibly talk
to women about their question the very notion of the norm and challenge my need to norbodies
without consciously changing my attitude towards my body. malise the body. They face me with the
fact that the category woman Besides, the women who came to the training also had experiences,
too is not stable or monolithic identity. which were, by and large, negative when seen in the context
of their All this has again thrown me into a state of confusion and I am again everyday life and
survival. faced with the dilemma of social construction of identity which can be Their perceptions of
the body were coloured by their social and eco-a question of power and privilege. nomic context of
class, caste, poverty and violence. The participants What I really want today is a society that is
inclusive of all people. who belonged to lower castes and labouring classes did not fear their I want
to be what I am and what I am needs no excuses. For me being bodies their drawings highlighted
the protruded chest with promi-is a continuum where I enjoy multiple identities or uidity of genders
nent ribs, spine a knotted rope, bones thinned out. Heart and brain and sexes and where there is
harmony and balance within. And was given an important place as they said they love with their
hearts belonging is a space created in society where variation is respected and brain is the
storehouse of memory. and valued.

Notes Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000): The Five Sexes Revisited, Menon, Nivedita (2006): Is Natural
Normal? Hetero-Essays and Comment, Academy of Science, New sexuality and Feminism in
Narrain A and Bhan G

1 Forum Against Oppression of Women (FAOW)

York, July-August. (ed.), Because I Have a Voice: Queer Politics in

and Research Centre for Womens Studies,

Hines, Sally (2007): Transforming Gender: Transgender India (New Delhi: Yoda Press). Working in
Dance Bars in Mumbai, RCWS, SNDT Practices of Identity, Intimacy and Care (Bristol: Tambe,
Anagha (2008): Different Issues/Different Womens University, Mumbai, 2005; Forum The Policy
Press), pp 103-04. Voices: Organisation of Women in Prostitution in Against Oppression of Women
and Research IIJ (2003): Threatened Existence: A Feminist Analysis India in Rohini Sahni, V Kalyan
Shankar and Centre for Womens Studies, After the Ban: of Genocide in Gujarat (Mumbai:
International Hemant Apte (ed.), Prostitution and Beyond: An Women Working in Dance Bars in
Mumbai, RCWS, Initiative for Justice in Gujarat, Forum Against Analysis of Sex Work in India (New
Delhi: Sage

SNDT Womens University, Mumbai, 2006; Report Oppression of Women). Publications), pp 73-97.
of the Sex Workers Session (conducted by FAOW) John, Mary and Janaki Nair, ed. (2000): A
Question of Vance, Carol (1999): Anthropology Rediscovers at the 7th National Conference of the
Autono-Silence: Political Economy of Sexualities in Sexuality: A Theoretical Comment in Richard
mous Womens Movement in India, Kolkata, India (New Delhi: Kali for Women). Parker and Peter
Aggleton (ed.), Culture, Society, September 2006.Kranti and Sabala (1995): Na Shariram Nadhi: My
and Sexuality: A Reader (London: UCL Press),

2 Ibid. Body Is Mine (Pune: Sapthahik Mudran). pp 39-54. 3 Sabala recalls from both her and
Krantis work with rural women on self-help. Also cited in

Sabala and Kranti (1995). 4 Ibid 5 Ibid 6 Janaki Nair quoted in the Introduction in John

and Nair (2000). 7 Mumbai Mirror, Mumbai edition, 9 March 2009, p 21. 8 Personal Communication,
discussions of the Indian Council of Medical Research with womens groups on the ART Bill, 19
October 2008. 9 Personal communication at a training workshop with sex workers in Thailand, 2005.
10 Anita Ghai, panel presentation on Contemporary Challenges and Perspectives at the Indian
Association of Womens Studies Conference, Lucknow, 7-10 February 2008. 11 Sabala recalls from
both her and Krantis work with rural women on self-help.

Background and Working Conditions of Women

References

Davis, Kathy (1997); Embodying Theory: Beyond Modernist and Postmodernist Readings of the
Body in Kathy Davis (ed.), Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body (London: Sage),
pp 1-21

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