Blissful Life

Category: feminism

  • The Logic of Social Justice

    Today in a discussion at IPH, Meena said “we should all fight against discrimination”. And Prashanth asked “Isn’t that your personal politics? What if people don’t agree with it?” What Prashanth was really asking was “Is there any logic to the demand for social justice?” “Isn’t it just politics?”

    This is the same discussion I had over lunch with Viswanathan (CVN) at MFC’s mid-annual meet in Kozhikode. CVN is widely known for saying “Science is the only way of knowing” which I have wrote about in the past. In the meet also CVN made the same point (I have posted a transcript of the comment here). CVN told about the enlightenment project

    […]By the term “modern society”, I mean a society that upholds the values of “liberty, equality, fraternity and justice”. These values, which we call constitutional values, are really values of ‘Enlightenment’ – or ‘European Enlightenment’ if you insist.

    Enlightenment project is a sociopolitical project that nobody likes in today’s India. The right wing hates it, the left wing has only contempt for it. Of course, this was always a minority’s concern in our country, historically speaking. Unlike the ‘National movement’, this ‘movement’ – if you can call it that name – came up from the ‘depressed castes’. If I am to name a few ‘big names’ that would represent this camp, almost everyone comes from the Dalit-Bahujan background. Mahatma Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Thanthai Periyar, Mahatma Ayyankali, Sahodaran Ayyappan – all from the depressed castes. This is a movement that developed as a response to the day-to-day existential insults heaped upon the depressed caste people over millenia.[…]

    So while eating chicken and ghee rice, I asked CVN, “if you say science is the only way of knowing, how do you know that the values of enlightenment is what we need to work towards?” I was asking what’s the “logic” of working for social justice. 

    CVN initially said “This is outside the realm of science. It is a question for morality.”

    But I wouldn’t relent. I was like “We KNOW that social justice is the right thing. And ‘science’ is the only way of knowing. Then what’s the logic with which we say social justice is the right thing?” I said it was important for us to articulate that logic or if not we wouldn’t have any way to convince others that it was important to fight for social justice.*

    *I actually said that we do have a few other ways. One is to use guns. Another is to use love. And that I am exploring the latter. But the quest for a logic was so important.

    CVN sought more time to think about it.

    And that brings me to an important fight with the postmodernists. In mfc group, I’ve had several sleepless days debating with a bunch of people who think that we have no way of knowing whether homeopathy, ayurveda, etc could be bullshit. That there’s a “possibility” that these are true. That our ability to know the “truth” will always be influenced by where we’re coming from. They think we’re living in some crazy world where we can never know anything, and just everything could be true.

    In that fight, it became clear to me that there is some sort of “logic” which I was looking for in everything. That it is this “logic” or rationality that I was calling science. In another discussion with Prashanth we decided to not call it ‘science’ because it was confused by several people to mean the establishment, but to call it ‘jnana’ or so.

    So, science (broadly construed), or rationality, or ‘jnana’ whatever you call it, is how we tend to get answers to everything.

    Then what’s the science of social justice? What’s the logic of social justice? 

    How do we ‘know’ that social justice is necessary?

    That’s the crux of the challenge.

    One way to answer this would be that this is beyond the realm of science. That it is politics. Or morality.

    If you’ve gone through Michael Sandel’s famous course or book on “Justice”, you’ll notice that MS gives many different “logics” – utilitarianism, libertarianism, Kant, Aristotle, etc. But again, the choice is left to us. So we’re again left with the question of “what’s the logic of our choice to work for social justice and how do we objectively describe it to a skeptic?”

    Let’s do the 2024 thing, and ask Claude.ai what it thinks.

    You’ve raised a profound and challenging question that gets to the heart of moral philosophy. You’re correct that there’s no universally agreed-upon, objective foundation for pursuing justice or any other moral goal. This leads us to the realm of metaethics – the study of the nature of ethical statements and judgments.
    There are several perspectives on this:

    • Moral Realism: Some philosophers argue that objective moral truths exist independently of what any individual or culture believes. Under this view, pursuing justice could be objectively right, even if we can’t always discern what justice entails.
    • Moral Relativism: This view holds that moral truths are relative to cultures or individuals. From this perspective, justice is indeed optional, as it’s just one of many possible value systems.
    • Moral Non-Cognitivism: This approach suggests that moral statements aren’t truth-apt (capable of being true or false) but are expressions of emotion or prescriptions for action.
    • Evolutionary Ethics: Some argue that our sense of justice and morality evolved because it was beneficial for group survival, but this doesn’t necessarily make it objectively “true.”
    • Pragmatism: This view suggests we should pursue justice because it leads to better outcomes for societies, even if we can’t prove it’s objectively correct.

    You’re right that, in a sense, all moral frameworks are “optional.” There’s no physical law of the universe that compels us to be just or moral. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that morality is arbitrary or unimportant.
    Many philosophers argue that even without an objective foundation, we can still have robust, rational discussions about ethics and justice. They suggest that we can use reason, empathy, and shared human experiences to build ethical frameworks that, while not objectively provable, are defensible and beneficial.
    Moreover, from a practical standpoint, societies need some shared ethical framework to function. While the specifics of what constitutes justice may vary, the concept of justice itself seems to be a near-universal feature of human societies.
    In the end, whether to pursue justice (or any moral goal) is a choice we make as individuals and societies. But it’s a choice with profound implications for how we live and interact with others. The lack of an objective foundation doesn’t negate the importance of these choices; if anything, it makes our moral deliberations even more crucial.

    That should settle it. If generations of philosophers haven’t found an answer, can we really find a logic to social justice?

    But there’s an alluring charm to the search for a logic. If only we had an objective way to say justice is right, we could go about our lives much more easily. We just have to tell everyone the logic and abracadabra they are now working for social justice too. The whole world could just be transformed.

    Yet there’s no logic. And therefore the fight for social justice is hard. It is an illogical choice. It is something we enter into through our own free will. And so all the methods of how we transfer “knowledge” comes of no use for us. Because it is not “knowledge”. Social justice is a choice. How do we convey our choice to someone else? That’s the question we actually need to answer. 

    As I’ve written before, after exploring power and realizing it doesn’t work I’ve been exploring love as a framework for this. I’ll write soon about how this has been working out for me in the last two years.

  • Intersectionality, Queering Science, Lived Experience, and Rationality

    Plenty gets written about intersectionality. I have a feeling that my repeated use of the word might be giving some of my readers nausea by now. Yet I feel like there’s plenty that’s not written about intersectionality. Questions like the following: What’s the relationship between intersectionality and science? How does intersectionality validate lived experience? And what’s the role of rationality in an intersectional world?

    Queering science

    Firstly, if you have not heard Sayantan Datta speak about this topic, you should first do so. YouTube search for “queering science sayantan“. Watch 4-5 topics Sayantan has already delivered on this topic.

    There’s an (unsettled?) debate in cognitive science about whether human beings can think without language. Can we think about things if we don’t have words for it? If I didn’t know the word “chair” in any language, would I be able to think about chair?

    There probably are several instances in our lives where we had a concept that we had in our mind and on a random day we find a term for what it is called. The name for that concept. Let’s take the word “intersectionality” itself. One can see the concept addressed in Ambedkar’s pre-dated work on caste. But perhaps Ambedkar would have felt like “ah, that’s what I am talking about” when/if Ambedkar came across the word intersectionality. One might argue that these are instances of us thinking without words.

    Yet, we can also probably argue that words help us think clearer. Having a word for a concept makes it possible to refer to that concept more frequently. It allows us to give that concept its own dedicated space and examine its *cough* intersection with other concepts. When we have a word for something, we are able to think about that concept more concretely than when it was an amorphous, ambiguous, vague undertone to our thoughts. Perhaps if Ambedkar had a word like “intersectionality”, Ambedkar could have written a couple of volumes about it.

    A closely related concept is “reification“. I don’t fully understand it. So I’ll rely on others’ definition of it. “Reification is when you think of or treat something abstract as a physical thing.” Now in Marxist terms there is probably a different meaning also for reification. But in the book “The Social Science Jargon-Buster” Zina O’Leary gives this example: 

    Consider the following statement: ‘Mother Nature cares about all her creatures.’ Here we’re reifying Mother Nature by treating an idea as a real
    thing… with a name (note the capitalization), a gender (her), a relationship
    (mother) and a human characteristic (caring). The same is true when we say
    something like, ‘Religion tries to repress sexuality’.

    In some sense, coining a word for a concept similarly reifies it, gives it a certain concreteness. And that concreteness which words provide is the way in which human beings communicate with each other things that are far more complex than what other animals can communicate.

    Footnote/aside: This also makes words very powerful. Words, especially the ones we coin from existing words, can have strong associations. Which is why many opposing movements coin different terms for the “same” concept. Aside on aside: If you haven’t read this elaborate, gripping article called “Hiding Behind Language” by Vijeta Kumar, you should.

    Words also categorize things. By giving something a label, you’re creating a box. There are some things which will fit inside that box and some which are not allowed inside. These categories are often very helpful for human beings because it allows them to think through things. Is this “kind”, “cruel”, or “neutral”? Is this “lavish”, “minimal”, or “thrifty”? Is this “love”, “hate”, or “indifference”?

    And such categories form the basis of most of science too. The whole of biology is one big categorization exercise. Kingdom, phylum, genus, species, blah blah blah blah. Chemistry has the periodic table and element groups. Even sociology divides people into cultures and groups and classes and so on. Categories make it easier to observe things and make useful predictions about the world. Categories are abstractions that allow humanity to function.

    But categories (and classification of entities into categories) have as much limitations as powers. Categories tend to be binary. Rigid and “all or none”. And categories tend to create a pressure of conformity. To see everything through the lens of those categories. To label things that don’t fit as “exceptions”.

    Binary is not intersectional. Binary is reductionist. Binary tends to erase differences and falsify conclusions. Binary forces us to see a lesser truth where reality could be far more grander and complicated.

    That’s why science needs to be queered. To queer is to question categories. To queer is to mix and match. To queer is to think intersectional. To queer is to see truth as it is without being colored by labels and labelled expectations.

    Science is indeed picking up intersectionality here and there. Not necessarily expensive stuff like individualized medicine or precision medicine. It is also simple things like viewing sex as a spectrum.

    The book x + y by Eugenia Cheng is a brilliant exposition of the role of mathematics (category theory specifically) in all of this. That book connects society, science, and intersectionality all together in a way that truly forms a manifesto of our work forwards.

    Intersectionality and the lived experience

    If intersectionality doesn’t do so well with categories, what does intersectionality rely on to draw inferences and make decisions about human life and society? When you apply an intersectional lens, what do you look at?

    Lived experience is one of the main things that you look at. Lived experience is the sum of all realities that pertain to one individual or entity. With an intersectional lens, one doesn’t try to categorize and draw causal inferences. One doesn’t jump to reductionist conclusions like, “Ha, this person is so because of their childhood trauma”, “Ha, this person is poor and that’s why they’re unable to attain healthiness”.

    Instead an intersectional approach forces one to think about how different life experiences have contributed to a particular situation in a particular individual (or anything) in that particular point in time with respect to their surroundings. It is a complicated causal web that intersectionality is interested in.

    Footnote/Aside: Realist evaluation is one of the few “scientific” methods that I see closely related to all of this. (Coincidentally, there’s a realist evaluation workshop being hosted by IPH, Bengaluru this month).

    Rationality

    How does rationality fit into all of these? Does rationality become unnecessary when intersectionality enters the scene? Does it become obsolete? Is rationality a thing of the “categorical” sciences? Is there any utility for rationality in the intersectional scene?

    Before we answer any of this, there’s one important article about reasoning that I would like my readers to read, if they haven’t. It is called the “Unraveling the Enigma of Reason“, written by Scott Young. It tells us – similar to Thinking, Fast and Slow – how our brain makes decisions and then justifies them with a reason rather than the other way round. It is something that truly underlies all of what I’m saying.

    The brain is the ultimate intersectional equipment. It computes millions of lived experiences and inferences (which get encoded as biases) every moment when we’re interacting with the world – to come up with decisions. On what to wear, what to eat, how to respond to traffic, and what to do in the presence of someone who looks a bit different from the people who the brain is used to seeing.

    A lot of that power is unused in routine situations though. We tend to drift to extremes. Binary thinking is easier for us. All or nothing. And we slip into such patterns. 

    We can avoid such binary stereotypes and biases by being actively aware of our biases and stereotypes. When we’re constantly reflecting on our actions and evaluating the reasons for our behaviour, we tend to see the patterns that we’re used to. And once we see the patterns, our brain autocorrects some of those. And then we see some new patterns. And then we autocorrect some more (sometimes in the opposite direction). And so on.

    When we start thinking at extreme levels of intersectionality, life becomes unlivable too. If we need decisions, choices to be made; we will need a way to discard irrelevant lines of thought, prioritize one thing over the other based on arbitrary and normative moral principles, and arrive at some actionable path forward.

    And that’s where rationality comes in. Rationality is what demystifies things and allows us to focus on what’s important. Rationality is a tool to connect the infinite possibilities of intersectionality with the pragmatic needs of the real world.

    Rationality is what allows you to call a spade, a spade. To call out bullshit. To cut the crap. And to focus on praxis. On stuff that matters.

  • The First Feminist in My Life

    As usual on mothers’ day, my WhatsApp is filled with images that romanticize the systemic oppression of people who become mothers. Photos of mothers who are at work with children, of “caring”, “loving”, and “sacrificing” mothers, of mothers carrying children on their back (including photos from animal kingdom), and so on.

    While I find it fair to thank those people for such forced “selfless service”, I find it arrogant and violent to continue stereotyping and socially enforcing such gendered and oppressive practices.

    I often think of the privileges I must have had to enable me to see systemic oppression as it is. And one of the greatest privileges I’ve had is to have a feminist mother.

    I’ve never heard the word “feminism” from my mother. And that’s probably why it took me forever to realize she is a feminist. Fortunately for me though, the lessons of feminism did come through all my childhood albeit without the label.

    To begin with, my mother is a teacher. And she puts work at par with, if not higher than, family. She has a very clear idea of her role as a teacher and very meticulously carries it out. She has withstood social pressure to ignore her profession or to ignore becoming better at it.

    The way she deals with my father is more illustrative of her feminism. She never backs down in an argument. And there are plenty of arguments that she has with dad. When I was younger, I didn’t really understand who was right in those arguments. And because I was closer to dad, he would often convince me that he was right. But today I realize that my mom was right and continues to be so in many of the arguments that she has with the dad and with society. She still speaks up, unweathered.

    She has always demanded better and just treatment from others. Because she sees the injustices that are being meted out to her. But more importantly, she never waits for anyone to treat her better. She is independent and continues her own life with not much regard to all that. She does not let people develop a savior complex.

    There are far too many details in my childhood. But to summarize, there are many privileges of being male in a patriarchal society and my mother “exposed” many of them to me all throughout my childhood. 

    That’s why I call my mother the first feminist in my life. And I’ve got to thank her for that every day.

  • Anger is a Valid Emotion; Conflicts Bring Real Peace

    I have seen “triggered” being used as an insult at social justice activists when they become angry. People hold anger itself as an invalid or incorrect emotional state to be in. That is not very smart.

    Anger is a perfectly valid emotion. Anger is a reaction to a provocation, hurt, or threat. Anger is a form of expression. It means that one has been triggered. 

    The problem is not anger. The problem is the original violence.

    The violence that triggers someone is the one that needs to be corrected. Not the anger that follows.

    This is where conflict becomes important. Conflict is a situation where two parties who have two versions of “truth” negotiate and try to arrive at a common version of “truth”.

    Whether a conflict gets resolved quickly or not depends on both sides wanting to and being able to find a common ground.

    Emotions like anger are commonplace in conflicts. And that makes people averse to conflicts. More than the outcome, they are scared of the emotions.

    It might be evolutionary. Anger could have been a sign of imminent danger in the past.

    But, we are not monkeys anymore. We are humans.

    Being scared of anger is not necessary anymore. On the other hand, expressing it and getting into conflicts are very much necessary.

    Because only through conflict can there be a negotiation. Only conflict can change someone’s “truth”. And only when that happens will there be real peace.

  • How Can I Be Useful For You?

    I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I haven’t still figured out how to execute this. But here’s the idea. I’m very privileged, purely by the accident of birth. There are millions of people less privileged than me in many ways. I think the right use of my privileges would be to help bridge the inequities in our society. And for that, I have to start somewhere. I’m doing various things, but I think I’m not doing all I can.

    Here’s the deal. I’ll list down a list of things that I think I can effectively help others in. I’ll also list down many of my privileges here. If you aren’t as privileged as I am in any one of these, you can feel free to reach out to me on any topic on the first list, and we can work out a way for you to take my time for your own benefit/growth/advantage.

    List of things I can work with you on

    1. Learning medicine, learning basic sciences.
    2. Learning programming, learning GNU/Linux system administration.
    3. Learning to use the internet.
    4. Contributing to free software projects.
    5. Writing essays/articles in English, learning English
    6. Conceptualizing research studies in health, academic writing, and publication.
    7. Public speech.

    I’m going to be a bit selfish and not list down everything that I can actually do for others. I’m sorry for that. But if you think there’s something related to the above but not exactly in the list, we can talk about it.

    List of my privileges you can use to compare

    By listing something down here, I don’t mean to imply that one is better than the other in any way. I just feel certain things have made things easier for me in my life, and I’ve listed those as privileges.

    1. Being male
    2. Being cisgender
    3. Being heterosexual
    4. Being born in a privileged caste
    5. Being born in an economically stable family
    6. Having my parents alive well into my adulthood
    7. Having young parents
    8. Being born to a doctor
    9. Being born to a teacher
    10. Being born to parents who are in government service
    11. Not having to support family
    12. Being the grandchild of three teachers
    13. Being born in a majority religion
    14. Having access to books from early childhood
    15. Having access to internet by 8th standard
    16. Having been to an English medium school
    17. Not having suffered psychological or physical trauma in childhood
    18. Not having physical disabilities
    19. Being tall
    20. Being fair skinned
    21. Having a lean body-nature
    22. Not having congenital or acquired illnesses that require medical care

    This is by no means a complete list. I haven’t added all the privileges that I accrued thanks to the above privileges. So have I not added the privileges that I am not aware of. Anyhow, if you think I am more privileged than you in any way, you should not hesitate to take this deal.

    You can find my contact details here.

     

     Post script: I have thought about how this can be considered virtue signalling. I am open to discuss ways of making this less about me and more about others. I’ve considered the idea of volunteering at NGOs. But I haven’t found a right fit at the moment. Neither is it feasible at the moment due to COVID. Also, I want to somehow be able to scale this idea and figuring out first hand what works and what doesn’t might be useful in that.

  • Liberty vs Morality

    Liberty and morality can be seen as counter-balancing forces.
    Liberty applies to individuals.
    Morality is a social construct.
    Liberty is about what one can do.
    Morality is about what one cannot do.
    Liberty assumes each human is a rational being and respects them for that.
    Morality is enforced on humans by authority based on arbitrary consensus.
    Liberty allows a human being to achieve their maximum human potential.
    Morality can potentially prevent individuals from harming other individuals.
    Liberty and morality are not equally acting on everyone, though.
    Morality often sides with the more privileged. Because the authority to enforce morality rests with them too. In turn, liberty also accumulates with the privileged.
    Privilege may never get equally distributed. We must therefore constantly renegotiate the arbitrary rules of morality for the benefit of the less privileged.

  • Is Feminism Brahmanism?

    This post is an analysis on the points made in the transcript of a talk titled “Feminism is Brahmanism” (FiB) and the counter-points raised to it. I know that it is difficult to separate points made by a person from that person themselves. It is difficult to separate generalizations and personal attacks from solid arguments. But nevertheless, I will make an attempt, for my own sake. Because I call myself a feminist and I want my flavour of feminism to be the best flavour of feminism possible.
    Firstly, I have to state my own biases here. I have been pondering over the question “Is Reverse Sexism Possible?” for about an year now. I’ve not had a conclusive answer yet. The first time I read the FiB article I thought I had an answer. Maybe the answer will take another year to be clear. Anyhow, I believe in intersectional feminism as of now. The kind that is being talked about in Data Feminism. And I believe that gender equality is not the only thing that feminism is about or should be about.
    Let’s now move to the original: “Feminism is Brahmanism“
    We have to realize that this is the transcript of a talk and therefore a lot of meaning may have been lost in the transcription process. Also I have no idea on the context in which this talk was given, nor have I been following the speaker to know their background.
    In the beginning of the talk Anu Ramdas makes this point:

    That all these women produced this vast amount of knowledge and some of
    it has been responsible to make my rights possible. They have all
    worked for it. And I should just find it and I am going to find it. But
    in real life that was not the story. The person who worked to make
    education possible for my family was my paternal grandaunt. It was my
    paternal grandaunt who took decisions about her children having to go to
    college and through her effort and clarity of thought the family begins
    to have education as a benchmark we need to get. She is the person that
    I associate, in my life, with education. But feminism is telling me it
    is not her, it’s all these other women. So, either my grandmother (aunt)
    is a feminist and her role is documented in that feminist literature or
    they are disconnected. This reality and the materialized feminist
    knowledge and my real life have no connection. That is the first part of
    the journey.

    And later this idea is revisited

    What have these feminists clarified for me to stop women from spending
    so much of their time searching, fetching, storing water [in most parts
    of the world]? Or about having safe childcare, when their occupations
    are not white-collared jobs. The majority of the women of the world are
    working in agriculture. So how does childcare look for agricultural
    workers and what has feminism articulated about it? In all these
    hundreds and hundreds of books […]
    […]
    So, my conclusion is that this is about ruling class women, 99% of which
    is white women’s struggle. Their struggle of becoming equal to who? Are
    they struggling to become equal to the black man or the Asian man? No!
    They are struggling to become equal to the white man. Their struggle, in
    one sentence, if I have to say: feminism is about the white women’s
    struggle to become equal to white men. While white men are the
    oppressors of the entire world, men and women together. Feminism demands
    all women to help white women win their battle to become equal to white
    men who oppress the rest of the world. And this is repeated in every
    society. Elites of that society adopt this ideology, saying we are
    fighting for all women but all they are doing is fighting to be equal to
    their class men. But all women are recruited to perform this duty. And
    hence I cannot see their achievements, their success as being warriors
    of rights for all women because the water problem has not changed. It is
    not even there in their orbit. Therefore, I have started to see
    feminism as being oppositional to all the historical struggles of
    marginalized people, where men and women, are engaged in. For example,
    anti-caste battles and struggles.

    I think these paragraphs summarize the premise on which the speaker is making the assertion. The premise is that lots of feminism is just about gender equality. If we assume that is true, then I can easily draw the line from there to how feminism suppresses conversation about caste and how it allows continuation of class structures like brahmanism. (Tangential question: Why should the B of brahmanism be capital? Isn’t brahmanism a concept like feminism? Won’t it be a common noun then?)
    Now let us take the response by Anannya G Madonna – “Ambedkarism is Feminism – A Response to ‘Feminism is Brahminism’“
    The author here looks at various waves of feminism. If I read it correctly, the first wave is equated to white feminism – of equal right to vote between genders.
    Then “womanists/black feminists” gets introduced and in the same vein “Dalit feminism”.
    They then go ahead and give various examples of Dalit feminists who have independent existence and aren’t just agents of white feminists. Later, also, they justify the point that being influenced by white feminism is not a bad thing per se. That the idea of human rights in Europe will apply to India as well, even if the context changes.
    Essentially, I think, the point they are making is that Indian feminism is/should be Dalit/intersectional feminism.
    Another point worth mentioning is that the fourth wave feminism is
    predominantly run by womxn of colour and various ethnicities and
    sexualities where they are taking the reins into their hands.
    Of course they also talk on a different point about Anu Ramdas’ agenda and question their integrity. But perhaps we don’t have to worry about that to answer the question whether feminism is brahmanism.
    We will come back to what Indian feminism is after looking at a few twitter threads.

    As a Dalit woman who has been critical of savarna feminism and savarna feminists, I just want to be absolutely clear that I do not agree with this BS. I’m Dalit, I’m feminist. I subscribe to the politics of Babasaheb Ambedkar, bell hooks, and my Dalit sisters/queer friends.

    — Malarăsculat 🌸 (@caselchris1) May 28, 2020

    NEW THREAD: The ‘Feminism is Brahmanism’ transcript published on Savari is a regressive, reductionist piece of garbage, the likes of which I haven’t come across in a long time. This post is not about refuting it. Dalit womxn and Dalit queer people have put forward their responses

    — Malarăsculat 🌸 (@caselchris1) June 19, 2020

    I just read Anu Ramdas article and I had a few thoughts:
    1. You can’t use google image search results as proof of any sort of point
    2. You just cannot say “feminism is brahminism” when so many bahujans identify as feminists.

    — (((Dominique Fisherwoman))) 💙 (@AbbakkaHypatia) May 29, 2020

    No. I don’t suggest that, i only said the Dalit Feminism is brainchild of Brahmanism. As The Dalit Feminist Standpoint is written by a Brahmin – and the Dalit feminism is a academic, NGO project of Brahmins Savarnas.

    — Dr.B.Karthik Navayan (@Navayan) May 24, 2020

    Every now and then, a significant number of Dalit womxn raise their voice against patriarchy and misogyny within their circles, and every now and then, they are shushed by ‘passionate’ savarna allies, Dalit-Bahujan men, and other Dalit-Bahujan women. https://t.co/u26QZ9GfTy

    — Malarăsculat 🌸 (@caselchris1) May 26, 2020

    @Navayan the whole feminism is against the Brahmanism. And people who are against feminism are themselves slaves of Brahmanism. or probably they have zero understanding of what Feminism is all about. Which eventually means they are oppressors of women.

    — Vaishali paliyal (@VaishaliPaliyal) May 25, 2020

    What we see in these is that there are two view points and one political issue.
    The political issue appears to be that there is an attempt to cover-up patriarchy inside Dalit communities. I don’t know much about the background of this.
    But the differing view point is easy to figure out.
    One side (mostly consisting of Dalit feminists) believe that their kind of feminism is what “feminism” is (or should be). And that is reasonable.
    The mistake made by Anu Ramdas’ side seems to be that they don’t acknowledge these Dalit feminists at all. They say that all of Dalit feminism is brahmanism NGOs telling Dalits what to do.
    If they had said “Dalit feminists exist, but so do Savarna feminists and the latter is same as brahmanism”, I think both sides would have agreed.
    The question remains though. What kinds of feminism do we see around us? Are all of these feminists subscribed to the fourth wave of feminism? How much of them don’t oppose brahmanism? Perhaps there’s no way to systematically measure this. But I have a sense that intersectional feminism is slowly catching up in India.

  • Do You Think All Human Beings Are Equal?

    At the end of Srimathi Gopalakrishnan’s post titled “Sexism in Medicine : The Eternal Confusion and The Innocent Mistake” there is a link that goes to areyouafeminist.com
    *SPOILER ALERT*: Take the test, if you want to.
    There are only two questions on that site which tests whether you are a feminist.
    1. Do you think all human beings are equal?
    2. Do you think women are human beings?
    When you answer yes to both these, you are confirmed to be a feminist.
    It seems like everyone would pass this test. Where are we deceiving ourselves though? Why isn’t the world full of feminists when it is so easy to be one?
    It is the first question. “Do you think all human beings are equal?” We tend to think that we think all human beings are equal. But are all human beings equal?
    What would explain a wage gap between two people doing the same job? What would explain a wage gap between two people who spend the same number of hours on their respective jobs?
    One could say that the wage differs because the output of two people doing work for the same hours is not equal. If a smart programmer codes for an hour she might produce better, readable, and maintainable code than a not-so-smart programmer does in 4 hours.
    In the free market, all that matters is the market value of what one produces. If what you supply is a rare resource, you are paid more, and vice versa.
    If it isn’t market price, what is it that we mean when we say all human beings are equal?
    Is there an “intrinsic worth” of human beings that we consider to be equal in all human beings? “When there is a pandemic, every life will count the same“? I say bull shit to that. There is a pandemic right now. The measures adopted to tackle it are grossly inconsiderate of the needs of a large number of people in our society. Even during life or death situations, “intrinsic worth” of humans is nowhere counted. What use is an equality which has no role in reality?
    This is where the question “Do you think all human beings are equal?” fails to be useful.
    The right question to ask is “Do you think all human beings should be equal?” That is a progressive and a transformative question. It accounts for the inequities in our society and asks us “Are you willing to make amends?”
    It also paves way for a deeper discussion on the reasons for inequities. It makes us introspect on what we are willing to give up in the effort to make all human beings equal. It forces us to acknowledge privilege and to be inclusive. It makes us rethink social and political order. It makes us question what rights are and what rights should be. It makes us wonder what it means to be a human.
    Do you think all human beings should be equal?