Anjali Yadav

Prof. Vebhuti Duggal

CCT-III Mid-Sem Assignment

18/09/2018

How do Hooks, Stoler, and Mohanty complicate the narrative of race, class, and feminism

in their writings?

This one time, I was travelling in metro and overheard a man teasing his partner, “oho, seeing

like a feminist.” This sentence seemed to have blurred the conversation thereafter but instantly

reminded me of Nivedita Menon’s book, Seeing Like a Feminist – who in her Introduction to the

book invokes both Bell Books and Simone de Beauvoir. Menon traces the inspiration of the title

of her book to James Scott’s Seeing Like a State and presents readers with two types of ‘seeing’.

James Scott uses the metaphor of seeing to indicate how the modern state makes heterogeneous

practices legible to itself in order to control them. Menon goes on to say, “Thus, the State’s

‘seeing’ is invested with enormous power, because when it ‘sees’ an identity, it is making that

identity ‘real’, its ‘seeing’ is simultaneously ordering society. On the contrary, when a feminist

‘sees’ from the position of marginality he or she has deliberately chosen to occupy, it is a gesture

of subversion towards power; it disorganizes and disorders the settled field, resists

homogenization, and opens up multiple possibilities rather than close them off.”1

1
Menon, Nivedita. 2012. Seeing Like a Feminist. Zubaan Books. Penguin Books. Pg viii.
To take one contemporary popular culture example of Mira Rajput—wife to Bollywood actor

Shahid Kapoor during a gathering celebrating Women’s Day, called her ‘stay-at-home-mother’

status a conscious ‘choice’. She said, “It is my choice to be at home. I don't want to spend an

hour with her and then rush to work. Why did I have her? She's not a puppy.”2 For this morally-

loaded statement she faced a lot of backlash, and rightly so, from working women who bashed

her for belittling the efforts of working women who are trying to make their ends meet. Kapoor

does not stop here but goes on to comment about the ‘new wave’ of feminism. She says, “There

is a term called FemeNazi, which is now becoming the female equivalent of male chauvinist.”

This shows Kapoor’s “shortsightedness”3 to acknowledge the privileges she enjoy being an

upper class, upper caste, urban woman. Born into privilege and then married into privilege

makes her blind about caste, class, and race while preaching about ‘her’ comfortable idea of

feminism. Chandra Talpade Mohanty right at the start of her essay asks its readers “Why

feminism?” and explains the responsibility of being a feminist. According to her we cannot

invisibalizes the “sociocultural and historical locations”4 of the women.

Another such example is the #WhyLoiter movement5 which later turned into a book with the

same title by Shilpa Phadke. The purpose behind these mid-night walks in Mumbai is simple yet

complex. Gender inequality, which makes the streets unwelcoming to women at night, urging

them to stay in their homes at late hours prompted this mini-movement. A group of women,

including Shilpa Phadke came together and conducted mid-night walks in particularly

‘conservative’ areas of Mumbai. But the group comprising of women from fairly upper middle

2
https://www.mid-day.com/articles/shahid-kapoor-wife-mira-rajput-homemaker-bollywood-news/18062184
3
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and Politics of Feminism. Indiana
University Press.
4
Mohanty. Pg 198.
5
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/why-loiter-indian-women-public-space-pri_us_560b0568e4b0af3706de6c50
class background, having access to a certain level of privileges negates the daily struggle of a

women from a basti near-by, who experiences the same street, daily at night while returning

home during late hours after work. But this is not incorporated. Feminism and class are

interrelated, and so is race. Even Mohanty says later in the same essay that gender and race are

“relational terms”. Feminism is not entirely a gendered term. It has smoked with flavors of class,

caste, nation, and race. According to Mohanty, “… no one “becomes a woman” (in Simon de

Beauvoir’s sense) purely because she is female.”6

Hence, from the discussion above it is clear that feminism cannot be understood in isolation. bell

hooks, a twentieth century feminist focusing on the intersectionality of gender, class, and race; in

her essay, ‘Issue of Accountability’7 talks about a “myth”. A myth that the social status of all

women in America, irrespective of their race, is same. hooks complains about the lack of

accountability for the black women lives. And this interfered with the discourse of the Women’s

movement in America and still continues to do in several other contexts. She says, “They (White

feminists) had not changed, had not undone the sexist and racist brainwashing that had taught

them to regard women unlike themselves as Others.”

Racism is a feminist issue too, like caste is in India. Adrienne Rich, a radical feminist in her

essay ‘Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, and Gynephobia’ says, “If Black and White

feminists are going to speak of female accountability, I believe the word racism must be seized,

grasped in our bare hands...” Similarly, in Indian context, there has to be an intersectionality

between gender and caste.

6
Mohanty. Pg 201.
7
hooks, bell. 2000. Theories of Race and Racism, A Reader. The Issue of Accountability. Routledge Students
Readers.
To complicate the idea of feminism further, it can (should) be contrasted with Dalit feminism in

Indian context. Laura Brueck, who specialized in Hindi Dalit Literature, in her essay ‘Questions

of Representation in Dalit Critical Discourse: Premchand and Dalit Feminism’ talks about the

Dalit critique of a prominent Hindi-era writer, Munshi Premchand. Dalit writers and critics

dismissed the emotions evoked by Munshi Premchand. According to them, authentic Dalit

identity and experiences fail to incorporate Premchand in its realm. Then the question arises,

who has the claim to this Dalit authority and authenticity? According to Sunder Sarukkai , the

experiences of the Dalits are the only source of authenticity and the right to theorize should be

completely in the hands of Dalits. To parallel it to what Mohanty and Hooks together are saying

is –who has the right to ‘authentically’ write about the women, irrespective of their caste, class,

and race from all over the world. Their historical and social contexts are not taken into

consideration.

I agree with Brueck calling the elite Hindi literary discourse as a “north Indian public

imagination” , representing Dalit lives. If we unpack the term representation using Stuart Hall’s

argument; it becomes clear that using our imagination to represent anything is a conscious

political act which reflects our class, caste and gender. Hall describe representation as, “two

processes. First, there is the ‘system’ by which all sorts of objects, people and events are

correlated with the set of concepts or mental representations which we carry around in our heads.

Without them, we could not meaningfully interpret the world at all.” Therefore, whatever

images, objects or experiences Premchand used, was nothing but a collection of his elite Hindi

male writer identity. Similarly, the “lived experiences” of a White woman, even if they share a

geographical territory, will be different from that of a Black’s; and so will be of a Savarna

feminist to that of a Dalit’s.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay8 says, “Can the subaltern speak? What must the elite do

to watch out for the continuing construction of the subaltern? The question of ‘woman’ seems

most problematic in this context. Clearly, if you are poor, black and female you get it in three

ways.” In other words, the subaltern or the Dalit women are triple damned.

Anita Bharti, a feminist Dalit writer, uses Premchand as a tool to critique the gendered politics of

Dalit literary sphere. The Dalit feminist movement gained momentum after the release of a Dalit

writer, Dharamveer’s book called, Premchand: Samant ka Munshi (Premchand: Master of

Feudalism). During the launch, several women rose in protest—throwing their shoes at the

author. The agitation was in response to Dharamveer’s imaginative reinterpretation of the

Premchand’s ‘Shroud’. In the original story, Bhudiya (Madhav’s wife) is left to die during

childbirth by the duo. To which Dharamveer adds, “This is the reality of Dalit exploitation and

oppression—that so often their offspring are not actually their own.” Following this he “coolly”

asks, “What would be better—allowing Budhiya and her child to die, or raising another’s child

while calling it your own.” Dharamveer’s unabashed treatment of sexual violence of lower caste

women by the upper caste men outranged Dalit feminists widely.

Hooks, Stoler, Mohanty, and De Bouvier are not writing about say, America, France or Nigeria.

Rather, theorizing from their own contexts against patriarchy, which makes sense in larger

context. This larger context in case of Stoler is the colonized and colonizers themselves. Ann

Laura Stoler, in her book, ‘Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in the

Colonial Rule’ gives the imperial authority a gendered edge. She says, “… imperial authority and

racial distinctions were fundamentally structured in gendered terms… The very categories

8
Spivak, Gayatri. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? Columbia University Press.
“colonizer” and “colonized” were secured through forms of sexual control that defined the

domestic arrangements of Europeans and the cultural investments by which they identified

themselves.”9 But Mohanty further complicated the term ‘cultural imperialism’. In her essay,

she brings forth the third-world feminist movements, which have challenged the notion cultural

imperialism. This group of feminists hence complicates the idea of feminism and talk about the

what Mohanty calls, “shortsightedness” of the feminist movement to incorporate the experiences

of the ‘Other’ women around the world.

9
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in the Colonial Rule.
University of California Press. P 42.
Bibliography

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in the

Colonial Rule. University of California Press.

hooks, bell. 2000. Theories of Race and Racism, A Reader. The Issue of Accountability.

Routledge Students Readers.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and Politics of

Feminism. Indiana University Press.

Menon, Nivedita. 2012. Seeing Like a Feminist. Zubaan Books. Penguin Books. Pg viii.

Spivak, Gayatri. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? Columbia University Press

Hall, Stuart. 1997. The Work of Representation.

Sarukkai, Sunder. 2012. Experience And Theory: From Habermas to Gopal Guru. The Cracked

Mirror. Oxford University Press.

https://www.mid-day.com/articles/shahid-kapoor-wife-mira-rajput-homemaker-bollywood-

news/18062184

https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/opinion-entertainment/mira-rajput-your-

feminazi-and-puppy-remark-were-destructive-for-women-4564819/

https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/why-loiter-indian-women-public-space-

pri_us_560b0568e4b0af3706de6c50