/ WOMEN AND MEDIA
Behind the lessening of true potential
The idea of women as autonomous and equal citizens is sanctioned in our
public sphere through the media, even as the media also endorses the idea
that women are around to be gazed at through advertisements, films,
contests, and the like.
Shoma Chatterjee
says that our women are paying a price for this contradiction.
05 May 2006 -
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.
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.
