Behind the lessening of true potential

Since the 1960s, the women’s movement has been engaged in a systematic and constant critique of media institutions and their output. Women’s representation in the media helps to keep them in a position of relative powerlessness. The term ‘symbolic annihilation’, coined by George Gerbner in 1972, became a powerful and widely used metaphor to describe the ways in which media images render women invisible. This ‘mediated’ invisibility is achieved not simply through the non-representation of women’s points of view or perspectives on the world. When women are ‘visible’ in media content, the manner of their representation reflects the biases and assumptions of those who define the public - and therefore the media - agenda. Despite measures to redress gender imbalances, the power to define public and media agendas is still mainly a male privilege.

Gender must be brought within the scope of human rights. Every case of insensitive/invisible/partial writing/reporting is as much a violation of human rights as it is of gender rights. I will illustrate this with the help of one ancient text, the Mahabharat and reporting on one contemporary incident, the curfew during the Gujarat riots in the mid-Eighties. The context is the politics of knowledge in a patriarchal society, and I will briefly elaborate on this first.

Gender, politics, knowledge

Patriarchy established and perpetuated the myth that men make knowledge and women keep and maintain traditions.

It is widely held that politics and knowledge are separate, but this is artificial and false. Politics is supposedly kept distances from knowledge because the former is considered to be a source of contamination within the scheme of the structuring of knowledge. If one probes a bit deeper, knowledge is deeply gendered in a patriarchal society at various levels as follows:

(a) What constitutes knowledge is decided by men of dominant sections of society. An example is the division of knowledge between theory and experience which claims that men’s voice is theoretical and that women’s voice is experiential.

(b) Most knowledge produced by men of dominant sections of society is generalized and passed as human knowledge. Dominant anthropology and history claims that men built civilizations. This has been accepted and acknowledged by major theoretical frameworks about human evolution. Yet, feminists underscored the fact that women had discovered agriculture. Feminists and historians are divided on this.

(c) Women are excluded from the process of knowledge, as subjects of knowledge and within disciplinary knowledges. Any major text on Western political thought will throw up examples of how women are excluded while bestowing authorship. For instance, Plato and Aristotle excluded women from their treatise. Another example: John Stuart Mill has gotten a key place, while his associate Harriet Taylor Mill has not.

(d) Women are almost always excluded as subjects of knowledge. For example, in any stratification study, the status of the household is marked by the economic status of the man. This is despite a substantial number of families being headed by women (families that are economically supported by females). These include households run by widows, women deserted or abandoned by their husbands, and wives and daughters of men who have migrated. One study by the Women’s Studies Centre at the University of Pune* has put the number of Indian households headed by females at 60%.

(e) Knowledge produced by women is labelled ‘deviant’. For example, women who were burnt to death during the medieval ages after being declared to be ‘witches’ were actually healers and early health guides. Feminist historians raise questions about these killings being coincidental with medical profession emerging as a profitable male profession with the blessings of the Church.

Patriarchy therefore established and perpetuated the myth that men make knowledge and women keep and maintain traditions.

The tragedy of Draupadi

Rape is used with impunity in times of war as easily as it is used as a strategy of terror. Women in Vietnam, written by Arlene Eisen, points out that U.S. soldiers received instructions for their search-and-destroy missions, which included raping of Vietnamese women, phrased in political terms.

Rape is frequently a component of the torture inflicted on women political prisoners by fascist governments and counter-revolutionary forces. The Ku Klux Klan in the USA has used rape as a weapon of political terror.

• Eyes of women filmakers

• Media and gender vision

The game of dice is the central episode in The Mahabharat. The orchestration, choreography and script that builds up, sustains and establishes the game of dice is totally conceived, executed and dictated by patriarchy. When Vidura has a premonition that something terrible is going to happen even before the invitations are sent out, Dhritarashtra says: “Do not worry. Nothing untoward will happen in my presence and in the presence of Bhishma.” Thus, whatever happens is seen as part of ‘the divine plan.’ Duryodhana escapes the responsibility of his actions by saying: “One and only One governs all actions and the script of governance is in place even before the human being is born. It is He whose commands I am following.”

Draupadi’s vastra-haran in the court in full view of everyone present is the worst violation of human rights imaginable; the sole voice of doubt is that of Vikarna who asks: “Are we truly conducting ourselves in accordance with Dharma?” But Karna snubs him at once. “All these men, do you think they know nothing?” Draupadi stands for no more than a ‘symbol’ of honour of the Pandavas; her body is a blank page on which scripts of revenge and humiliation, the story of men fighting like a pack of dogs are written. When she raises the question of whether a lady of the royal family deserves this treatment, Duryodhana says that she deserves this treatment precisely because she is a lady from the royal family. She has to be humiliated because she is the ‘woman’ of the enemy. Thus, she is denied all agency and individuality.

Contemporary poet Suman Kesahri imagines what the original author denied Draupadi by stating what Draupadi would have said had the author given her a ‘voice’. “Draupadi, Panchali, Krishna, Yajnaseni – all of these are adjectives, none of them is a noun. Did it ever strike you that I have no name? I had only raised some questions, I only had some queries. And you have taken away even my name!”

“Curfew is a kind of violence.” – Ela Bhatt

In the mid-Eighties, when Ahmedabad was caught in the trap of violent riots, the media completely missed out on the debilitating impact of the curfew on the lives of ordinary citizens, particularly the poor, who cannot afford to stock up on provisions. (Ammu Joseph, What is Gender-just Reporting?, January 2005.) During the riots and after, curfew was imposed round the clock, often for as long as seven to ten days at a stretch, at times even touching the maximum permissible limit of 500 hours. It forced large families to survive for days on the meager provisions they happened to have at home when curfew was announced – often at the dead of night. The entire onus of managing the difficult situation - feeding hungry families with nothing beyond onions, gram and wheat flour, and pacifying wailing children with black tea - fell on the women.

What’s more women’s loss of income during the five months of trouble proved disastrous for a large number of families. An estimated 29 to 33 per cent of the women organised by the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in the 1980s were sole supporters of their families; a substantial percentage of the rest earned more than the male members; it could be easily understoo d that a major slice of the women’s incomes went towards meeting the basic needs of their families whereas a substantial potion of the men’s earnings is often spent on drinking, smoking and gambling.

Talking to women actually suffering due to the curfew would perhaps have worked as persuasion to the authorities concerned to devise practical solutions to solve the problems of common people suffering for no fault of their own.

• Eyes of women filmakers

• Media and gender vision

The media missed out on all these stories because they had not talked to women, especially poor women in the affected areas. Their reports were based on information and analysis gleaned from “authorities”, “leaders” of various groups and sundry “experts”. The tendency was to dismiss the imposition and relaxation of curfew with a single, bland sentence or none at all. Talking to women actually suffering due to the curfew would perhaps have worked as persuasion to the authorities concerned to devise practical solutions to solve the problems of common people suffering for no fault of their own.

As a result of this media ‘invisibility’, the relief work of the government did not consider the loss of livelihood suffered by thousands of women working in the informal sector. Their families therefore, did not receive the kind of help they needed to survive in the short term, and to rebuild their lives in the long term.

Contradiction that lessened women’s potential then and now

Media representations in general and of women in particular are deeply embedded in political and economic contexts. Studies and commentary point to the often-contradictory ways in which the media and advertising are compromising women’s multiple identities in contemporary Indian society. Images of the ‘new woman’ as an independent consumer whose femininity remains intact, or as a hardheaded individualist whose feminine side must be sacrificed, illustrate new stereotypes of women whose ‘femaleness’ is always the core issue.

This illustrates that despite the small shifts noted in retrospective analyses, the media content, by and large, still reflects a masculine vision of the world. A wide-scale social and political transformation, in which women’s rights - and women’s right to communicate - are truly understood, respected and implemented both in society at large and by the media needs emphasis. The manipulation of gender images by male dominated media should make us critically examine what we see every day on TV, in magazines and newspapers. Global media-monitoring programmes undertaken by different groups in different countries show that nothing much has changed over the years. The same misrepresentations and stereotypes persist.

On the one hand, by endorsing a few liberal reforms like equal pay, the media reinforces the message that women have every right to expect to be treated as equal citizens, with the same rights, responsibilities, and opportunities as men. On the other hand, by mocking and dismissing the way feminist activists look, dress, behave and talk, the media also endorses the notion that in some cases, female subordination and sexual objectification were not only fine but desirable as well.

This contradiction, sanctioning the notion of women as autonomous and equal citizens while also endorsing the idea that women are around to be gazed at (advertisements, beauty contests, fashion parades, film), has lessened women’s potential then and has the same effect today. Although the media did foster the spread of the liberation movement through its vast coverage, the media also hampered the movement’s potential and women’s potential as individuals by placing female attractiveness at the forefront.

In conclusion, while gender is often seen as a narrow, special interest issue, gender awareness can lead to a better, more holistic understanding of any situation.