作为文化研究的性属研究教学

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 9, Number 3, 2008 ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/08/030469–09 © 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14649370802184791 Teaching gender studies as cultural studies Tejaswini NIRANJANA Taylor and Francis ABSTRACT This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contribu- tions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be rethought. This conjuncture arose from thinking about culture in the framework of nationalism and the anti-colonial struggle, and the alignment of women with national culture. I discuss briefly the trajectory of how we have gone about investigating the culture-gender conjuncture, present a reformulation of what I think we’re up against, and introduce some new research projects which are trying to take this on board. The focus in these projects is on the question of translation, and how the issue of ‘regional’ languages poses a chal- lenge to prevalent ideas in the women’s movement and in feminist teaching. The larger proposition is that we need to formulate curricula based on new kinds of research if we are to take feminism into the cultural studies classroom of the future. My generation of scholars has been practis- ing cultural studies, sometimes by other names, but now we inhabit the moment of institutionalization, and have to teach cultural studies in formal settings that will ensure the official certification of students and researchers. If pedagogy is a significant new site for the articulation of the praxis of this interdisciplinary domain, we have to work out the modalities by which we can ‘curricularize’ what we have been working on. In my case, the task is of teaching gender studies as cultural studies, and I want to argue here that this is a newly complicated business, one that throws up a host of challenges for the teacher as well as the researcher. My paper revisits a conceptual conjunc- ture – that of culture and gender – that has been central to feminist theorizing in India. The women’s movement has engaged in various ways with the questions arising out of this conjuncture, whether it was in dealing with issues such as the Miss World Beauty Contest 1994 or the legal debate around the Uniform Civil Code in the mid-1990s or the 1998 controversy around the film Fire . An earlier instance of such engagement was the sati debate in the 1980s. Feminist scholar- ship, especially in literary studies and history, has discussed the formation of the female subject in India over the last century and a half, and elaborated how notions of normative femininity and masculinity were set in place. I would like to suggest that our present moment poses a series of new questions to the articulation of gender-culture issues that has now entered into feminist commonsense. The challenge is most sharply visible in the space of pedagogy, where newer generations of women and men who do not necessarily acknowledge inheriting the struggles of the past are encountering the politics and the concepts generated by feminism. I will touch briefly on the trajectory of how we have gone about investigating the culture-gender conjuncture, present a reformulation of what I think we’re up against, and discuss some new research projects that are trying to take this on board. The larger proposi- tion is that we need to formulate curricula based on new kinds of research if we are to 470 Tejaswini Niranjana take feminism into the cultural studies class- room of the future. Investigating the culture-gender conjuncture It may not be inaccurate to say that the thematization of culture in gender theory in India draws on a critique of the nationalist project both pre- and post-Independence. In a range of writings spanning a variety of disciplinary locations (history, sociology, literary studies, art history, film studies) feminist scholars have engaged with and analysed the formation of normative feminin- ity as it takes shape in the context of discus- sions about Indianness. Approaching the problem from a different direction, some scholars have investigated the formation of the normative citizen-subject in India, arguing that it is informed by debates on the woman question as well as by new embodiments of masculinity and femininity. Feminist historical scholarship in partic- ular (e.g. Recasting Women , Sangari and Vaid 1989) was able to show that the formulation of notions of culture in India were premised on woman, thus drawing renewed attention to the significance of the culture question under colonial rule. With culture under- stood here as a mark of distinctiveness and distinction in relation to the colonizing West, we also gained insights into how a historically specific way of thinking about Indian women came to be naturalised. Feminist writing on more contemporary issues may not have directly addressed the culture question as such, but it is possible to look at some of the 1990s discussions, say about the religious community, or about caste, as referring implicitly to the culture question. An essay I wrote with Susie Tharu several years ago – ‘Problems for a contem- porary theory of gender’ – tried to analyse the 1990s’ impasses of Indian feminism; the essay had argued that we needed to work through the challenges posed by issues of caste and religious identity, and that this could be done by investigating the composition of the femi- nist subject and her hidden hegemonic mark- ings (Tharu and Niranjana 1996). If liberal nationalism sought to relegate religious identity and caste to the domain of culture (however ambivalent the relationship of nationalism/developmentalism was to ‘culture’), our essay argued that it was impor- tant for feminists to think otherwise. We suggested that acknowledging what had been called ‘cultural’ could complicate the liberal humanist notion of the rights-bearing individual, pointing to collective identities rather than singular ones. Thus, we see yet another sort of analysis of the culture–gender conjuncture, one suggesting that in confront- ing some of the questions related to what had come to be seen as ‘cultural’ we would even- tually be able to interrogate the subject of feminism itself. A related issue, not so much in feminist research but in the women’s movement, is the general ambiguity about the claim to the term feminism in India, and the tendency to use ‘women’ instead of ‘feminist’ whether strategically or otherwise. The implicit reason for this move seems to be the associa- tion of feminism with the West and the need to maintain a distance from what we have named as that cultural formation, some- times for reasons of caste-class solidarities across the category ‘women’, the members of which have differential access to Western cultural and intellectual resources. If we can now turn our attention from the making of gendered identities to the emergence of the culture question, we should take note of how this question is posed in the third world or more broadly non-Western societies as part of a colonial contestation; in India, for example, the term sanskriti translated as ‘culture’, is emblem- atic of a system of representation that calls ‘Indian culture’ into being. Here, the culture question is an intimate part of the formation of a national(ist) modernity, but culture in modernity tends to be represented as some- thing that remains outside of modernity. This curious relationship between culture and modernity in the colonial context may give us some indication as to why women occupy the place they do in discussions about culture, when in normative Western feminist discourse the opposition is between Teaching gender studies as cultural studies 471 women and culture, with women being placed on the side of nature (John 1998). The stakes are high, whether we are taking the historical perspective or looking at contemporary events or at the status of the feminist as critical thinker. Feminism in Asia Although my main references are to the Indian situation, I should reiterate that there are obvious similarities with other Asian settings when we think of the feminist stakes in the culture question. These stakes clearly involve issues both of political as well as symbolic representation. Kumari Jayawar- dena’s classic work Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986) had argued that in the non-West these two movements share an intimate relationship. In parallel, the ‘culture question’ also becomes a ‘national culture question’, with significant implications for women. Although nationalist movements enable women’s political participation, they also create for them a fixed position in the symbolism of national(ized) culture. We can see examples of this in the production of the New Woman in Japan or Korea or India. A criticism routinely faced by feminists across Asia is that they are deracinated or alienated from ‘our culture’. Interestingly, this is not a charge levelled against any of our other political frameworks, which may also be far from having a clearly identifiable indig- enous source. Feminist demands are alleg- edly demands arising from ‘modernization’, which is seen to erase ‘our’ culture and replace it with western values and ways of life. To begin to unravel the complex weave of this seemingly easy criticism, cultural stud- ies has to have a theory of how notions of culture have been put together in our context. One of our starting points would be to analyse how the creation of the national was based on the assertion of cultural difference from the West, and how women were frequently represented as the embodiment of that difference. The antithetical relationship between modernity and culture produced by nationalist discourse in the non-Western world implies also the alignment of women with the cultural and the authentic . Although in the Indian context this process has been investigated in detail in feminist scholarship, in the activist initiatives of the women’s movement the notion of culture often remains unexamined. My contention will be that it is the issue of translation – understood here in dimensions beyond the linguistic – that we need to address for a critical perspec- tive on our feminist commonsense. The translation problem In this section I move between the inter- linguistic idea of translation and one that signals both derivation and an exceeding of the original context. Feminism as well as other political movements in India often depend on a conceptualization and initiation of political processes drawing on a vocabu- lary that is perpetually in translation. I am not suggesting that we are translating Enlighten- ment rationality, symbolized by a formerly colonial language, into a completely othered space. This formulation, familiar to us from a variety of disciplines, cannot account for the already-translated nature of our condition. I argue instead that the space of translation is one in which there is a simultaneous negoti- ation of different sorts of languages, concep- tual as well as linguistic. If we can agree on this, it would mean that these languages configure the questions asked and the reso- lutions sought in our context. It would also mean that the languages converge and diverge at different times in different regis- ters. While this is one level of the problem to be investigated, another level has to do with the unavailability of linguistic resources to understand this complex situation. The language question in its many rami- fications is something Indian intellectuals tend to deal with through endless deferral. For decades we have been admitting to the need to close the gap between social science vocabulary (which is largely in English) and the languages of cultural forms, practices, institutions. While small initiatives have been attempted, there has as yet been no large-scale multi-pronged conceptually- informed effort to tackle this problem. The 472 Tejaswini Niranjana language issue has surfaced frequently in the women’s movement of the last three decades. Urban activist groups of the 1970s and 1980s, for example, grappled with the task of thinking about the focus of their activism as well as their constituencies, since the latter often included less-privileged women from non-English-speaking back- grounds. Like several other issues which seemed divisive, the language question too remained unaddressed in the heady days of feminist activism. In the last decade or more, however, minority women and dalit women in partic- ular have been articulating their dissatisfac- tion with the subject-positions offered by Indian feminism. Interestingly, linguistic differences, often standing in for differences of other kinds, are also being foregrounded. There are increasingly larger and larger numbers of non-English-speaking women who see themselves as feminists and access feminist modes of analysis in the regional languages , having come to the women’s move- ment through their involvement in other political and social movements or through literary debates in the different languages. It is largely from here that the demand for translation is being raised, but one cannot accede to the demand simply by providing literal translations of material already available in English. Instead, the challenge would be to create a conceptual context in which the translation would have to take shape. Trying to meet such a chal- lenge would force the feminist to reconcep- tualize her subjectivity as one formed in- translation, and to realize how her questions and agendas are shaped and re-shaped continually in the space between languages. To return to our discussion of the culture–gender conjuncture, it is evident that feminist criticism of ‘our’ culture often amounted to a denunciation of it in the name of modernity; to retain its critical edge, feminist politics had to sidestep the culture question (which also meant framing it only in the nationalist discourse). The leverage for this critique was provided by a universalist liberal humanism, which took shape through the apparatus of ‘English’. The contemporary challenge to ‘English’ in the women’s movement, therefore, could be read as a challenge to that framework within which the culture–gender problem continues to be addressed. The irony here is that urban women’s groups have seen ‘culture’ as a non-urban non-English prob- lem, whereas I’m trying to argue that it is from that latter constituency that the real questioning of the culture–gender fit arises. The question arises not necessarily through direct problematization of the production of (Indian) culture as women’s domain, but through the critique of English dominance and the demand for translation. I want to argue for the recognition of translation as one of the most significant areas for intervention today, across all the disciplines. And since by definition cultural studies proceeds from a re-theorising of what culture has meant in the past (and therefore also from a re-theorising of the culture-gender conjuncture), cultural stud- ies should be at the forefront of the develop- ment of a new theory of translation. It goes without saying that I don’t refer to transla- tion simply as an activity of putting what is expressed in one language into another language, but an activity that has to perform self-consciously several levels of mediation. In our context, a good deal of conceptual work has been happening over the last century in the Indian languages even if not in a systematic fashion, and the creation of a shared critical vocabulary should now be at the forefront of our agendas for this century. No doubt there is much to learn from the history of North East Asian contexts in terms of how such vocabularies can be developed. The importance of the develop- ment and consolidation of critical vocabu- laries for the pedagogy of cultural studies can hardly be over-emphasized, especially since interdisciplinarity does not provide ready-made analytical protocols. Introduction to new projects Coming now to the question of pedagogy in relation to culture and gender, we should glance at the legacy of how we have been Teaching gender studies as cultural studies 473 asking the questions. Here I draw on my experience of teaching women’s studies/ gender studies as well as cultural studies in largely urban settings, where the language issue or the critique of English was not a central part of the context. Feminism as an intellectual-political project and women’s studies as a discipline have been central to the formation of cultural studies, as I have argued elsewhere (Niranjana 2007). While the question of culture has always occupied a significant place in the framing of the problems women’s studies set out to address, the ques- tion of gender or even women is not always salient in the cultural studies classroom. In the early 1990s, I was teaching women’s studies as an optional course for humanities and social science students. The teaching was done in a stimulating atmo- sphere at a politically volatile time. We were carrying forward the legacy of the 1980s women’s movement and participating in the ongoing political debates of the 1990s. Raising culture questions in the women’s studies classroom was an exhilarating activity, and – as in many Asian contexts – formulating critiques of ‘our culture’ from a feminist perspective was a compelling task. But although women’s studies attempted a cultural critique in the interests of women, there was an implicit universalism prodding us to an impatience or irritability with our specific contexts and their constraints. With hindsight we can see that a tension remained: women’s studies raised the question of culture, but tended also to see it as antithetical to modernity of which feminism was a part. When, therefore, the culture question begins to be asked in all its complexity – so that it becomes part of the investigation of our modernity rather than lying outside of it – there has to be a re- complication of the ways in which gender perspectives deal with culture. To do this we would first have to unravel some of the seeming successes of gender sensitization initiatives. Both in the undergraduate and post- graduate humanities–social science class- room in India, we can witness the effects of the mainstreaming of gender questions made possible by (a) the activism of the women’s movement; (b) the success of women’s studies in the academy, and (c) the universalizing of rights issues post Second World War both by international agencies and by newly independent nation-states. The success of gender mainstreaming, however, can appear somewhat paradoxi- cal. Students have begun to treat the analy- sis of certain crucial aspects of women’s subordination as self-evident and common- sensical, if not superficial. Familiarity with the issues raised by the women’s movement breeds boredom if not discontent. For a generation of women who have benefited from the struggles of the women’s move- ment, the social and political concerns of an earlier generation are being seen as outdated. The curricula that deal with femi- nist theory and the women’s movement acquire a jaded look for young people in colleges and universities disconnected from the history upon which the curricula draw. We need to ask then what purchase the existing critiques of culture–gender forma- tions have in the present. Is normative femi- ninity a