Caste-ing Desire & Caste Bodies — Pt. 2: Sexual Pedagogies and the Brahmin Erotic Gaze
I was not planning a second post on the Brahmin Erotic Gaze, but a recent article in LiveMint caught me up with a torrential stream of thoughts, and I simply couldn’t leave it unaddressed.
The story in question above interviews “rural women” about their sexual desires and continually suggests that “rural women” act on their desires more openly and with less shame than “urban women.” Masoodi chooses to foreground the article with the interview of a woman, S, who reveals she had a dissatisfying sex life with her husband and eventually had an affair with his relative. Using her description of sex as a bodily hunger, Masoodi’s story goes on to reveal anecdotes by “rural women” on the ways in which they seek sexual pleasure also when unable to seek out partners for pleasure.
For instance, a section titled “Brinjals and belans” describes in some detail how women improvise phallic objects in their household for sexual pleasure.
In the village of Charan, a few miles from S’s home, a group of women sit together, laughing about a recent incident. An unmarried woman, in her late 20s, was sexually aroused, but didn’t want to “commit a sin” by sleeping with a man. She tried to pleasure herself by inserting a stone pestle used to ground spices into her vagina. She confided in a neighbour, who immediately told others. “Usay araam mila, magar gaon hansta raha (She felt better, but the village ridiculed her),” says P, a 32-year-old farmer. The ladies have a host of ribald anecdotes. Another woman inserted a long green brinjal in her vagina, the stem broke off with the vegetable still inside her. She had to be taken to hospital. The whole village came to know of it.
I reproduce these sections here with some discomfort. We do not know anything about this group of marginalized women (in that we work through the common assumption that “rural” = marginalized) beyond their habits of self-pleasure. But who are these revelations about self-pleasure meant to enlighten? Who is this news to? Why are “rural women’s” self-pleasure of any interest to Livemint’s English-language audiences?
Well, the above article also cites a National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) that finds that
Compared to urban women, rural women have sex earlier in life (urban women begin having sex almost two years later than rural women); the frequency of sex is higher; and they have more sexual partners in their lifetime.
So if it is “urban women” who are the frame of comparison, it must mean that “urban men” and “urban women” are also likely the audience that this English-language piece is targeting — informing “urban India” of how “progressive” “rural India” is.
The reason I put all of these in quotes should be obvious; these are assumptions that the article makes without much clarification. That “urban” and “rural” are clear-cut categories of distinction that are self-evident, that the pursuit of sexual pleasure is a mark of some kind of progressiveness, and that the “rural” is far ahead of the “urban” in this marker of progress…
As a narrative, this becomes an incredibly simplistic set of observations. Who is the “rural”? What markers of identity do they carry in terms of caste, class, religion, language and sexuality — all of through which sexual behaviour is mediated? Why are “rural” women treated as a monolithic entity?
For instance, the NFHS-4 survey quoted above (which can be found in full here) provides clear explanations of their sample of “rural women,” what their age, caste, class, religious and educational markers are, in addition to a host of other indicators such as health and socioeconomic conditions (pp. 1–2).
Sexual behaviour in the governmental survey is thus quantified alongside a number of markers about their socioeconomic life. This breadth of the sample is simply not clarified in the above LiveMint article, which provides no anchors to help us understand who “rural women” are. Perhaps people familiar with the regions of Sangli or Bundelkhand may have some familiarity with the composition of these villages, but I would bet not much more.
However, some really interesting additional information lies in the data source that the article provides midway through.
“It is very deeply understood in rural areas that sex is a basic need,” says Archana Dwivedi, director of Delhi-based non-profit Nirantar: A Centre for Gender and Education. “From wherever they are getting or providing it, no one makes a big deal about it. Tell me one village where extramarital relations, or relationship with the jeeja (sister’s husband), devar (brother-in-law), sasur (father-in-law), aren’t rampant? Of course these relations could be both forced and consensual.”
Nirantar conducted a workshop for three years, beginning 2005–06, where they brought together four organizations and tried to explore how rural women in north India perceive sexuality. One of their findings was that rural women are much more open about sexuality than urban women, despite differences across caste, class and religion. In one workshop, a group of rural women were asked to list sexual acts. Some 64 acts were listed, including fisting, inserting the penis in the armpit, or even something as simple as playing with the hair.
I will come back to the LiveMint article in due course, but Nirantar, as their very useful blog tells me,
… works towards enabling empowering education, especially for girls and women from marginalised communities. We seek to promote transformatory formal and non-formal learning processes which enable the marginalised to better understand and address their realities. Our focus on gender interlinks strongly with other social dimensions, in particular those of caste, sexuality and religion. Nirantar promotes access to information, literacy, and perspective and skill building through interactive trainings and educational resources that are simple but not simplistic. Nirantar also works at the community level and undertakes research and advocacy, particularly on critical issues which need greater attention from the State as well as civil society (emphasis mine).
And who is Nirantar? According to this article, a Delhi-based collective founded by five people — Renuka Mishra, Jaya Sharma, Farah Naqvi, Malini Ghose and Dipta Bhog — working on issues of gender and education, says this Outlook article.
So a Delhi-based organization founded and run by Brahmin-savarnas runs sexuality workshops with “rural women” to discover their liberated practices of sex. A little bit of digging generated a full report on what occurs in these sexuality workshops, as well as who these eponymous “rural women” are (link to full paper on Scribd here):
Authored by co-founder Jaya Sharma for IDS, the paper provides a detailed breakdown of what these sexuality workshops are composed of, who facilitate, who attend and who participate.
The women from the community with whom workshops were conducted were all rural. A majority were Dalit reflecting the priority placed by most of the organisations to work with women from poorer and more socially marginalised sections of the rural communities. The vast majority had low levels or no formal education. The participants were active members or leaders of village level women’s collectives supported by the partner organisations. A majority had therefore been involved in collective actions related to violence against women or demanding entitlements related to livelihoods, health, etc. A majority had received some capacity-building inputs from the organisations, such as those related to gender issues or livelihoods. The vast majority of rural women were Hindu, with few Muslims and no Christians (emphasis mine).
The report does a thorough job of explaining how sessions are conducted, the conscious choice of facilitators to use the analogy of food and hunger to sex, of deconstructing “good-woman, bad-woman” tropes, etc as workshop exercises.
What I am most interested in here is why the sex lives of Dalit women — and if not, then predominantly Bahujan women — become the focus of an NGO about female empowerment. The above report authored by Jaya Sharma states outright:
The paper also seeks to foreground the importance of a political approach to sexuality — an approach that recognises the linkages between sexuality and power in its various and interconnected dimensions — be it in terms of gender, caste, religion or class related ideologies, material realities and structures. (p. 8)
It would seem obvious then, that as an analogy, the workshops would also work with “urban women,” who presumably in the restrictive conceptualization of this report are Brahmin or upper-caste women. But there seem to be no such sexuality workshops for “urban women.”
Instead, the only comparative group Sharma identifies is the staff organizing the workshop who are“educated middle-class urban women working in NGOs.” Here is that classic castelessness that NGO-workers are afforded — that they can be “middle class” and “urban” while engaging with Dalit women about sexuality with no reference to their own caste location. The “political approach to sexuality” then that Sharma refers to can only be understood as Brahminical, because it shields the caste locations of Brahmin-savarna men and women conducting sexuality workshops for Bahujan women. This is an outcome of the Brahmin Erotic Gaze at work, if not through directing desire and lust on the bodies of vulnerable Bahujan women, then by creating projects of pedagogy engaging with the desires and lusts of only Bahujan women. As a parallel, it continually downplays how sex-positive feminism in urban India operates through caste and class antagonisms. After all, if Nirantar enables the marginalized to better understand their own realities, in this context, it is a sex-positive urban feminist organization with Brahmin-savarna capital enabling Dalit women with little to no capital to better understand their own sexualities.
There is a real unresolved contradiction here — if rural Dalit women are more open and active in their sex lives than “urban women,” why are the self-proclaimed “urban women” creating and facilitating workshops about expression and consent for them, and not for other “urban women”? Why this easy accommodation of Brahmin-savarna repression, sexual morality, and respect for their private lives and private spaces in the city? Furthermore, could it not be Dalit urban women “educating” Brahmin-savarna urban women about sexual needs and pleasures? Presumably there are Dalit women in cities too? Why make this a rural intervention when it seems clear that the urban Brahmin-savarnas need the intervention themselves?
Even more mysteriously, are there no Brahmin-savarna rural women? If anything, Brahmin-savarna urban women can better engage conservative Brahmin-savarna rural women in sexuality workshops?
A lot of these questions can be answered, I suspect, through the political agendas of NGOs in development, and the NGO-ization of development itself, which remains a handmaiden to neoliberal caste-capitalism. Rather than approaching sexuality through its relationship with capital, labour and gender — all mandated through the caste economy — NGO-ized sex-positive feminism isolates the “rural” as the site where sexual pleasure most needs to be rescued.
Also implicit in the report is the idea that sexual pleasure in urban India is not in need of urgent rescuing (a claim that the Indian chapter of #MeToo explicitly defies). Indeed, in the above report, Dalit participants themselves linked articulations about sexual pleasure to more general articulations about health, education, employment, and socioeconomic power, but the sexuality workshop’s hyper-focus on bodily desires, sexual activity, sexual songs, and sexual cultural histories raises some very disturbing questions about sexual epistemologies and pedagogic power.
Asha Singh has written eloquently about the fetishizing of Bahujan “rural women” through the example of the film Parched, where she notes:
The film is keen on the sex-life of ‘rural women’ because it is argued that they articulate sex forthrightly. I am not of the opinion that sex should not be discussed, however one cannot have an exclusive discussion on the ‘sexual’. In other words, one needs to ask what are the conditions of ‘rural womens’ sexual lives? What do they eat, where do they bathe, where do they relieve themselves? How can we discuss the ‘sexual’ without evaluating these conditions? We regularly get to hear and read about women who are out to urinate and are sexually assaulted. Who are these women who need to venture out to relieve them and are assaulted on their way? Very clearly these are ‘rural women’ and most of them are Dalit-Bahujan women who need to wait till dark to urinate or shit since they cannot do any of these during the day, nor do they have toilets in their household space.
… and,
In such a social-material context, Parched portrays the three main characters, naked at night taking a bath in a river/rivulet. I think this is a cruel joke on the lives of ‘rural women’. This is an impossible, non-serious portrayal. I do not see any liberation in such imaginations. They do not serve any real purpose for rural women where the question of toilets is closely linked to land-caste-gender relations. It only caters to an urban elite audience which is obsessively in need of feminist fairy tales. (Emphasis mine)
Sharma’s IDS report also notes her excitement about rural women’s songs about sex as a form of public discourse (p. 23), another point that Asha Singh cannily notes in her essay:
My doctoral thesis primarily focused on Bhojpuri folksongs. I realized that men and women in Bhojpuri agrarian society sing different songs during processes of labour or festivals. Women sing songs while grinding grains, transplanting or harvesting. On the other hand, men sing during harvest or seasonal festivals such as holi, chaita, baramasa etc. Women mostly articulate everyday lives in their songs, which include detailed descriptions of sexual relationships, child-bearing/rearing etc. Material realities in the song cannot be separated or dissected from the sexual details in women’s songs. On the other hand, men often image a ‘hyper-sexual’ woman in their songs. Issues of everyday gendered struggles of women are more or less absent or irrelevant to such men’s songs. Parched reminds me of such songs, which try to separate the ‘sexual’ from the ‘material’.(Emphasis mine)
Masoodi chooses to end her LiveMint article by stating that when her interviewee S has sex, “it’s not the man alone who calls the shots in the bedroom,” and that she is now in a position to demand an orgasm from any man. This laughable erasure of material disempowerment by substituting it with sexual empowerment through orgasms leaves me appalled. What assumptions are being made about sexuality and consent here on the behalf of Dalit women? Can one apply westernized sex-positive expressions of sexuality to Dalit women wholesale with no explored nuance? Most of all, why is recovering rural Dalit women’s sexualities of such urgency, so that all material realities about capital-labour relations and resulting inequalities faced by these women are ignored, while their sexual activities are made hyper-visible? Why are Brahmin-savarna women’s sexual practices given no mention? And why is this urban-rural binary of such importance when there are plenty more markers to fracture what sexual experience in India looks like?
The fact that the Brahmin Erotic Gaze in this case is amplified by Brahmin-savarna urban feminists must be emphasized. In the concluding pages of the report, Sharma explicitly connects sexuality to gender violence, saying “Sexual desire and violence against women are connected,” suggesting that Dalit women often return to abusive husbands for no identifiable reason other than to meet their sexual needs (pp. 27–29)… I cannot overstate how simplistic and damaging this line of thought is, and it leaves me deeply skeptical about the kind of analytic being used by these sexuality workshops to “train” Dalit women about their realities.
The subtly implied pedagogic project here is not just to “educate” women about consent and sexual assertion, but really the demonization of the Bahujan male who is consigned to little more than rape and sexual coercion, or complacent sexual object throughout this article. But if the rural woman is a Dalit/Bahujan woman, then the rural male is a Dalit/Bahujan male, his identity is also intersectional in the way the women’s identities are, as framed here, and the article and Sharma’s paper completely ignore the material realities of his existence that construct his sexuality and sexual practices. Any narrative centering “the sex lives of rural Indian women” is thus likely to contribute heavily at this point to the already existing narrative of “violent” Bahujan male, who has no voice or representation in a project about his own marginalized community, because as a male, he is automatically deemed dangerous to women’s sexual liberation.
This, I will argue, is an abiding concern of the Brahmin Erotic Gaze, along with perpetually valorizing the Brahmin-savarna male who continually benefits from cis-heteronormative sex-positive projects. Indeed, narratives emerging from the Brahmin-savarna English media about #MeToo suggests that these upper-caste men see themselves as beneficiaries of sex-positive feminism entitled to the sexual gratification that all feminists seek.
I come back to the idea of Brahminism as an erotic project constantly enabling the dominant classes to desire, consume, and circulate media about the bodies of the Other. To be sure, the work of sexual liberation is necessary and valuable work in a very Brahminical India, and many Dalit, OBC, and Adivasi women articulate these very concerns across media and platforms. However, a gaze that is top-down, controlled by Brahmin-savarnas, and with little analysis of how Brahminism structures the erotic does little to dismantle patriarchy, let alone dismantle capitalist exploitation of women or let alone annihilate caste.
