‘Honoring the Women Personnel Of the Pakistani Starfleet.’
In her cross-country travels Screen Sifar came across plethora of other space cadets, all stemming from the expert console of General Kenny Irwin.
These staunchly patriotic figures are as undaunted by the rigmarole of space travel as they are by the challenges of the mundane and fly by night world of technology.
Screen Sifar’s faithful Challenger Technobot was a little harried by the journey and of all the places one could hope for for spare parts , she would have thought Kandahar to be way in the lower rung, but oh how wrong she was!
We’re going to stop here for some much needed replenishment.
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The day is not over yet, and I have to give you something before I step out.So I give you Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s version of
f e m i n i s m.
“Here is a bare-bones description of my own feminist vision : this is a vision of the world that is pro-sex and pro- woman, a world where men and women are free to live freely and create lives, in security with bodily health and integrity, where they are free to choose whom they love and whom they set up house with, and whether they want or not to have children, a world where pleasure rather than just duty and drudgery determine our choices, where free and imaginative exploration of the mind is a fundamental right; a vision in which economic stability, ecological sustainability, racial equality, and the redistribution of wealth form the material basis of people’s well-being.Finally my vision is one in which democratic and socialist practices and institutions provide the conditions for public participation and decision making for people regardless of economic and social location.In strategic terms this vision entails putting in place anti racist feminist and democratic principles of participation and relationality, and it means working on many fronts, in many different kinds of collectives in order to organise against repressive systems of rule.It also means being attentive to small as well as large struggles and processes that lead to radical change-not just working (or waiting) for a revolution.Thus everyday feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist practices are as important as larger, organised political movements.
Finally the critique of essentialist identity politics and the hegemony of postmodernist skepticism about identity has led to a narrowing of feminist politics and theory whereby either exclusionary and self-serving understandings of identity rule the day or identity (racial , class, sexual, national etc) is seen as unstable and thus merely ‘strategic’. Thus identity is seen as either naive or irrelevant rather than as a source of knowledge and a basis for progressive mobilisation.”
The world over, contemporary discourses science, media, women and the arts have begun to think about the body. This development has been due to womens studies and the deconstruction of rationalist enlightenment discourses, leading thought and thinkers away from the tight dichotomies of mind and body, physicality and intellect, thought and action…towards a praxis oriented research and analysis of human affairs and enquiry. I think that the time has come for us to move away from a mode of thinking where we see women as disempowered and gear our expressions towards terser, tastier and less tired territories. We are at a point where we’re capable of talking about this.
In science fiction author Samit Basu’s book launch for ‘Unwaba Revelations’ at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival I asked if he would draw from an ‘Indian’ past for his science fiction, our ideas of anthropomorphic biologies, and our imagination of the space beyond. He said that he already does and that in the future there is going to be a lot of the very same thing happening. He seemed wary of taking that turn too zealously.
In the West, from reading Michael Chrichton, I’m aware that the future is being mined, and perhaps too heavily…
In Sharanya Manivannan’s work this is an extremely natural process, and is poignant to the point of becoming contemporary folklore…
So why am I bothered about this?
Over the past few days some very special women and I have been having a koofia discussion on Erotica and ‘Chick’ Literature.It came from a concern that there are not enough artists and writers of the ‘second sex’ speaking about sex.The sexual liberation project(ahem!) must go hand in hand with emancipatory awareness, although the road is complicated.
And in this discussion, we also spoke about dance, drawing from Chandraleka, the high priestess and fountainhead of dance in modern India.
Chandralekha felt that tradition was not, to use her words, “a superficial post colonial invention” of sorts.That we had to invent.
This is what she says.“If our so called “traditions” are largely superficial post colonial ‘inventions’, which subsume genuine experience and accumulation of the past, with its treasurehouse of complex and holistic concepts of body/energy/aesthetics, then our so called modernity has turned out to be a movement that privileged the bourgeois self, enabling an elite aesthetic to distort and de-eroticise the real and liberating energies of the body. Those of us engaged in a battle for recovery in several artistic and intellectual fields, therefore find ourselves simultaneously battling on two fronts often tending to get isolated and marginalised by national and international markets, by official state policy and dominant cultural constructs”.
In the process of de-colonising oneself in a globalising world one needs to stand corrected on illegitimate borrowing such as patriarchy , racial and ethnic prejudice while embracing it’s legitimate legacies.
Incidentally, Chandralekha also said that she didn’t consider it important to be a part of any ‘mainstream’.She was okay with being just a dot, but she knew just how important it was to be that dot.
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*my thanks are due to John Matthew for sharing this song on FaceBook.I have to mention Cherian Alexander, Arul Mani and Etienne Rassendran at the Joseph’s Arts and Science’s College Bangalore’s English Department.Their course called ‘The Popular Muse’ really did it for me.
All odes of course are for the bard.I pray for him to keep singing.
k a u n t e x t 