by Saraswati Raju
The recent rape and the circumstances under which it has occurred has brought forth the issues regarding missing sensitivities towards gender issues anew; not that they were totally absent at any point and yet the explicit invocations were more of academic interests than of general concern. That we need to wake up and become gender sensitized and the process should start at an early stage of socialization is a welcome sign and yet most of the discussions around the proposition end up revolving around girls and women although the vocabulary uses the ‘now in fashion’ term gender. Somehow, we say Gender, but end up talking about girls and women. Much of the misconceptions and twisted notions about what gender constitutes has led to inadequate policy prescriptions and societal handling of problems at hand.
Let us decode the term. The term ‘gender’ has a long history and a range of meanings. The root of the word can be traced to Latin, ‘la: genus’ meaning ‘type’, ‘kind’ or ‘sort’. It is also connected to the Greek root ‘gen’, meaning ‘to produce’. Although biology or sex might form the basis of gendered identities, gender is quite different from sex. Simply put, the term ‘sex’ denotes biological differences between boys and men and girls and women and ‘gender’ conveys what individuals would conceive of their roles as boys and men and girls and women, largely sanctioned and ascribed by societal strictures. In other words, gender refers to how societies set the behavioural, social and cultural rules for being a boy/man or a girl/woman. The French philosopher and writer, Simone de Beauvoir, in her classic text The Second Sex argued: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’.
However, it is also to be noted that ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are no longer seen as mutually independent of each other. It has been argued that boys and men, girls and women socialize into gendered roles through their sexed bodies, whereby sex as biological identity of individual’s plays out how they internalize certain values and behavioural codes as social beings - asking a girls to cover up their bodies appropriately and behave in a certain ways, or admonishing boys for not being strong for example. The crucial point to remember is that biological sex and gendered constructs are interlinked; they are not the same.
Since gender is a social construct, gendered encodings—behavioural norms for women and men have to change not only with time, but also with locations. Recent development reports in India have brought out how spatial location in which women live makes a difference to even as basic well-being indicator as ‘longevity’, that is, women in Kerala can expect to live longer by a margin of 18 years as compared to women in Madhya Pradesh despite little difference in per capita incomes between the two states.
The socially architected gendered constructs thrive on misconstrued notions of power and role ascriptions. The macho images of men and the bread-earners’ tag gives a (false) notion of power and familial control to them which is increasingly been threatened and challenged now as girls and women are coming out of age-old framing of their being confined to home spaces or dependency upon the male protectors. The power equations are thus changing and this change has to be accepted by the significant other half – in this case boys and men. For process-induced transformation in male attitudes towards girls and women, boys and men need to change; they need to see and treat girls and women as persons/human beings in their own right, freedom as rightfully theirs as that for boys and men.
Ingraining of the values that does not treat boys/men and girls/women differentially have to start at home – there are conscious and subconscious behaviour that is meted out to girls as compared to boys – they can be as innocuous as asking the sister to fetch water for her brother even as they both may have returned from school at the same time or prioritizing the feeding of a son over a daughter. Children emulate what they see around them –the norms start forming. I am reminded of my niece, watching me standing on a stool and nailing on a wall, her comment was: ‘buaji aap papa ban gaye’!
Given the recent upsurge and the role played by the youth across caste, class and regions, the younger generation offers potentials and hope for constructive social changes. Ironically, however, this particular constituency has been rather neglected with the result that while discursive spaces for women and girls have increased, there are very few if no spaces available for young men and boys to deal with emerging gender dynamics what to say of physiological and psychological changes that the growing boys undergo.
However difficult or contested the proposition that we need to work with boys and men may appear, they are the constituency which requires urgent attention if we were to address the root cause of recent events. The preoccupation with women’s question that has began somewhere in the 19th century in post-colonial India has continued to emphasize on women’s issues rather than on gendered relations, rarely if ever challenging the areas of male control and oppression. In the absence of gender-sensitized boys and men, women’s liberation/empowerment has little realizing dream.
Author's Bio- Note:
She is one of the founding members for the International Geographic Union (IGU) Commission on Gender and Geography, member of editorial boards of Annals of Association of American Geographers, Antipode and Progress in Human Geography. She has been at the forefront in introducing gender studies in Indian geography—her co-edited publication of the Atlas on Women and Men in India has been praised as a landmark in this direction. Her recent co-edited books include Colonial and Post-colonial Geographies of India (2006, Sage Publications), Doing Gender, Doing Geography: Emerging Research in India (2011, Routledge), Gendered Geographies: Space and Place in South Asia (2011, Oxford University Press) and her co-authored book titled NGOs and the State in 21st Century: India and Ghana (2006, INTRAC, UK).
She is a recipient of Janet Monk Service Award (2010) for exemplary contribution to the study of gender/feminist concerns in geography. She has also been awarded the 2012's Distinguished Service Award for Asian Geography. The award honours 'outstanding scholars in the field of Asian geography who have demonstrated exceptional scholarship as well as service to the specialty group'.
No comments:
Post a Comment