Mamata with Monalisa

In February 2002, I had the opportunity, along with a couple of friends from human rights groups in Kerala, to investigate into a very tragic incident. Two girls aged 18 and 15 from a village near Kottayam in Idukki district in Kerala committed suicide due to societal resistance to their living together. The incident had been reported in the local newspapers. This was the first such suicide reported among the adivasi community in Kerala, and formed one among many such incidents of suicides by women occurring all over the country. During the course of the same year, there was another report of two women in Tamil Nadu who committed suicide in the Satyamangalam forest area in Erode district – they had written a note to their families that since they could not live apart from each other they had arrived at this decision to end their lives together. Farzana
In October 1998, Mamata and Monalisa from village Hulipur near Cuttack in Orissa attempted suicide once again for the same reason: they preferred death to separation. The attempt at suicide tragically led to one of them surviving the attempt and having to face charges of attempted murder by the other’s family. This is one among the list of suicides and attempted suicides by lesbian couples, prepared by Stree Sangam (now known as LABIA) in Mumbai, based on newspaper reports covering a period of five years, mostly occurring in small towns and villages of India.
In all these instances, the girls/women concerned directed their helplessness and protest not just against society but also their immediate families. What hits one in the face is that the institutional structures and practices of the family plays a strong role in restricting democracy and curtailing spaces that promote a culture of equality and freedom of choice. The specific case of lesbian suicides illustrates the particular condition of women within patriarchal and heterosexual structures. All women have to endure the pressures of marriage, restricted spaces, curtailment of mobility, lack of economic and social freedom and choice of a future, which is even more graphically illustrated through the narratives of the women who attempted/committed suicide.
Numerous issues are inter-linked, but at the core is the argument that society and state institutions such as law, higher educational structures, and most particularly, the family reinforce heteronormativity as a normative paradigm for social existence.
Increasing control
At a time when there is overall insecurity in social and economic existence, co-existing with pressures to conform to certain identities, the authoritarianism of institutions tends to tip over the edge. Within social institutions there is less space for democracy. All over the world, we notice today the resurgence of conservative social and political forces. States are increasingly asserting their authoritarian urges. Movements of religious fundamentalism in reinventing traditions situate women back in the family in newer negative forms and also are able to influence state legislation and policy. It is also of import to note that when fundamentalist forces resurge they have always acted in tandem with neo-liberal socio-economic forces resulting in the negative valuation of women. Within families too, especially middle-class families, parental authority continues to assert in a substantial manner. Despite numerous changes that society is undergoing, there is the persistence of the cultural norm where parents continue to have lasting roles and responsibility in children’s lives.
The critique of the family is not a new or original matter to either the women’s movements or women’s studies. Right from linking the origins of the family with the rise of private property to reactions to the current conservative appropriations of the monolithic family ideology by all societal institutions, there have been continuous critiques of the family vis-à-vis women’s autonomy, assertiveness and emancipation. The women’s movements in India, when it addressed violence in the private sphere brought the family into sharp focus. The family by being a site for a range of domestic violence from rape to sex-selective abortion to the burning of women to death, had confirmed itself as one of the critical spaces for patriarchy’s assertion. Nevertheless, the discourse of the critique of the family remains to be pursued.
Thrust of research and academics
The pertinence of raising this issue of the critique of the family at this juncture is important from another point of view for researchers and people in the academia. The University Grants Commission’s (UGC) Tenth Plan Profile of Higher Education in India, while at first situating higher education within a global project of continuing education for all, stresses the need to prepare youth for this new global and national economic revolution in generating wealth. Education will be seen increasingly as preparation of trained persons in all fields. There will be an increase of jobs in the service sector and brain drain will now be perceived as value added trained human power export promising a return flow to India of investment, jobs, and a better economy. While this forms the vision thrust, in the detailing of schemes, under the General Development Schemes are the schemes for women. In this, clubbed along with schemes for women’s hostels, day-care centres, part-time fellowships, and infrastructure for women students and teachers, are Women’s Studies Centres. Historically, the Women’s Studies Centres grew out of the women’s movements with the political agenda of social change. Even though it tries to do this by reflecting the lived experiences of women, making women’s voices heard, by academic research and documentation of women’s lives and removing their invisibility, the apex body of higher education in India, the UGC, has relegated it to that of a non-formal scheme. Significantly, Family Studies is also added within this category of schemes in the Tenth Plan. Its objective is to promote integrated families, targeting eligible universities and colleges, while the justification and anticipated impact is the proposal to introduce family study centres along the lines of women’s studies, which will then further the concept of integrated families. It is assumed that ‘this may reduce the instances of broken families and will help in inculcating good values in the members of the families’.
It should be emphasised that, women’s studies, or rather feminist scholarship, whatever their limitations, have sought to push forward the critical analysis of gender hierarchy within societal structures, bringing to light the oppressive dynamics within even structures such as marriage and family. On the other hand family and kinship studies have not critically addressed issues of power and hierarchy operating within these patriarchal structures. The issue to now contend with is the proposed sidelining of such critical analytical efforts emerging from Women’s Studies Centres and the promotion of family studies in an altogether reactionary policy and research milieu, which also do not take into account lived experiences of women in marginalised instances as seen in the case of the suicides mentioned above. The task before us is to expand the understanding of women’s vulnerable and marginalised existence within structures such as the family rather than focus on harmonising and integration, which are only euphemisms for ignoring the powerless.
No discussion of the family can take place without addressing and questioning marriage. Monogamous marriage with patrilocal residence and patrilinear inheritance is the foundational structure of the family. Reproduction of heirs is almost always the only function of the family embedded in normative heterosexuality in the majority of communities where social, caste and gender discrimination and hierarchical status within families exists. Along with this is the cultural transmission of norms and values through generations. The State refuses to define what constitutes the family but directs its legislation, policies, and programmes at the household, thus rendering invisible the biases against women that are perpetuated within the family. Violence against the powerless within the family is a socially sanctioned and accepted practice in order to retain the sanctity of the family, and this is done at any cost – brutal or subtle violence. Despite existence of other forms of groupings and living arrangements, the institutions of marriage and family go unchallenged.
Debates abound on the issue of legal recognition of several such forms of mutual contracts and partnerships engaged in by consenting adults of any sex, and the entitlements in the form of rights and social security that are given to individuals in a marriage that should be extended to these partnerships also. The concept of marriage is sought to be redefined by stating that procreation and transfer of property through familial lines is not the only reason for marriage and so the basic nature of these structures change. While debates around State recognition of different types of unions have taken place as a means of expanding the concept of living arrangements, there have been voices that have differed. These voices have questioned the legitimacy of bringing into the purview of structures such as marriage, which are anyway oppressive and conservative, those relationships that lie outside them. Further they question the State’s right to legitimise voluntary intimate unions.
Vehicle for heterosexuality
Theoretically opposing marriage alone is not enough. We have still not been able to question heteronormativity. The term ‘heteronormativity’ is used instead of heterosexuality, as it takes the conceptualisation beyond sexual definitions to signify its pervasiveness over all normative, ideological, and structural arrangements in society. The system of compulsory heterosexuality while allowing for varied structures within itself does not allow the questioning of the larger system of heteronormativity itself. Heteronormativity views the world and all its phenomena within the framework of binaries that are complementary and hierarchical (e.g. male and female). These binaries are considered as natural and normal, and even reflects onto Nature the complementarity of these binaries. Nature is socially constructed as constituting these complementary binaries, when in reality Nature presents immense diversity and variation, with the potential of infinite possibilities. Composing a worldview within a binary framework, heteronormativity encourages silences and enforces denials of multiple sexualities and practices, thus privileging the monogamous heterosexual family based on procreation/reproduction. Heterosexual individuals find the questioning of compulsory heterosexuality threatening, because in their analysis they do not proceed beyond the argument of sexual choice when in effect it is a belief system, a whole worldview. Heterosexual marriage is the ultimate goal of the family for all its members. The guilt faced by most women as daughters vis-à-vis parents, especially mothers, makes it often impossible to pursue a choice of their own. The larger institution of family comes into the picture and puts its own burden of duty on women and demonstrates their ‘failure’.
In conclusion
In trying to bring back the focus of our discussion, while there are numerous instances where women choose to live together despite all odds, the condition of those driven to suicide should set us thinking not just of proximate living arrangements such as the family and the acceptance they accord to individual choice, but societal paradigms that overarch social practices. While the need is to campaign and advocate for rights for social inclusion, there should also be attempts to buttress existing theoretical and research efforts and foreground these in discussions of family and gender/feminist studies in India.