Gender and Spaces- Current Challenges

[This Blog is part of A Conversation on Inclusivity Series]

Gender is more than an identity for women. It is a lived experience, and this experience navigates them through all milestones, informs most of the decisions that they make and forms their immediate realities. The fight is to create a world where it is practical and fair to let the navigation, decision making and lived realities be imagined from a non-gendered place. As I continue to navigate my own realities as a woman in a post-colonial country, I am struck by two major interventions offered by our former coloniser to the world of discourses.

First, the much talked about British Netflix series Adolescence and second, the highest court in the United Kingdom’s ruling that defines ‘woman’ in strict terms of “biological sex”. Adolescence has been generating various conversations in India, especially in university spaces, social media discussions, study circles, etc. Its hard-hitting indication of growing misogyny and anti-gender justice sentiments among young boys and men is something one cannot turn a blind eye to. 

In contrast, the UK Supreme Court’s judgment, while assessing the Equality Act of 2010, tends to close all plausible dialogues on the contested social and cultural identity of womanhood, which certainly goes beyond the biologically determined one. This appears particularly striking with the awareness that most administrations across the world are increasingly meddling with a progressive understanding of identity, autonomy and freedom. The challenge to navigate in such a world has become even more difficult now. 

I have spent over half my life on university campuses, as a student, residential scholar, and now a professor. I observed how gender and the politics of gender come, both as a negotiation and as a safeguard. Negotiation- because as a woman, you are never really done fighting for the right to a safe and gender- friendly space; safeguard, because the space also is a normative promise to all its members that a minimum standard of dignity, safety and respect will always be there, uncompromised. There is also a promise of ensuring that the space is inclusive and accommodating of women’s voices and other gendered minorities. But does this not apply to other spaces? Certainly, it does- public as well as private. 

Both the British Netflix show and the Supreme Court’s judgment serve as warnings, showing us what to avoid and what not to become. Both should also be understood in the context of the growing polarisation in the gender justice discourse, increasing intolerance towards gendered vulnerabilities and an uncritical/unscientific demand for dismantling the legal and other social safeguards that provide constitutional protection to women and other identities. On the very rudimentary and deterministic understanding of gender- “whom does it benefit?” and “at whose cost”- are some questions which we must ask. Right to abortion, right to equal pay and recognition of various liberties are a still an on-going quest in gender justice, while issues like unpaid care labour, marital rape and menstrual justice are those still awaiting to be recognised as mainstream agendas before policy makers and legislators.

In the meantime, the challenge is to not let the spaces become victims of regressive or archaic mindsets; the challenge is to not let identities be reduced down to their biologically determined notions- as we know how it’s a cultural hazard to do so- biologically determined gendered roles have facilitated and normalised the moral policing of women, others deciding their bodily autonomous fates and the imposition of societal norms of “accepted gendered behaviour”; the challenge is to not let spaces become a growing ground for sexism and intolerance emerging out of bigoted understanding of gender and gender dynamics. The challenge is also to normalise all aspects of womanhood to a point that the experience is not excluded or stigmatised- be it menstruation, mental health or a survivor’s experience- irrespective of their “social conformism”. And to all these, may we say CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!?!

Dr. Radhika Jagtap is an Assistant Professor at the School of Law, UPES

{The opinions expressed herein are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University.}