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Gender Trouble in South Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2020

Geeta Patel Open the ORCID record for Geeta Patel [Opens in a new window]
Geeta Patel*
Affiliation:
Geeta Patel ([email protected]) is a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia.
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Extract

It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher of gender, sexuality, and governmentality, Judith Butler. When Gender Trouble came out in the United States, it hit the stands like a hit; it transformed and unraveled the modalities through which ontologies and epistemologies of gender came to be. This was especially the case with the trouble, the disturbances, the turbulence that Gender Trouble carried along with it. Gender Trouble's thematics sometimes syncopated against familiar habits of belief that were and are carefully nursed and held to one's heart, upending them in sometimes unexpected ways. The concept of “performativity,” for instance, generated a buzz, partly because it unhinged and reoriented several fail-safe, deeply felt materialized beliefs, such as the ontological immutability of gender cohering resolutely and unremittingly in and through an inveterate notion of the biological (belief certainty in the sense that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might intend as the unnoticed grounding of one's sense of and use of language itself laid in so deeply that it disappeared from immediate purchase). Gender Trouble also asked us to address the seemingly intransigent separations between interiority and exteriority and the obdurate artifice of an “interior core” (psyche, soul, etc.), which, because it was constituted as a priori, meant that people believed it lay beyond being touched or constituted by any social, economic, or political exigencies, “regulations,” or “disciplinary practices” and thus “preclude[d] an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject.”

Keywords

colonialismgenderMirajiphotographysexualitySheba ChhachhiSri LankaSouth Asia
Type
Forum—Revisiting Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Reflections and Critiques from Asian Studies
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 79 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 947 - 967
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Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2020

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References

1 This is the manuscript version in my possession: “Wandering from town to house, a wayfarer / misplaces the road that gathers him home / That which was once mine/and your belongings, / both foresworn from memory / Mine and yours no longer known.”

2 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 136Google Scholar.

3 Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004)Google Scholar; Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009)Google Scholar.

4 Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. Patton, Paul (New York: Columbia University Press 1994)Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Bass, Alan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Though I cannot cover this in the brief space of an essay, area studies was so committed to new criticism (in a post-McCarthyish fashion) that it could not and would not look at the political economies under which particular renditions of gender/sexuality assumed their fixed shapes.

6 Dating is a complex issue with South Asian materials, augmented by many composers singing in the voice of and signing as those who had gone before. See Hawley, John Stratton, “Author and Authority in the Bhakti Poetry of North India,” Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (1988): 269–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mukta, Parita, Upholding the Common Life: The Community of Mirabai (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Sangari, Kumkum, “Mirabai and the Spiritual Economy of Bhakti,” Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 27 (July 7, 1990): 1464–75Google Scholar.

7 Patel, Geeta, “Vernacular Missing: Miraji on Sappho, Gender and Governance,” Comparative Literature 70, no. 2 (2018): 132–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Correspondence, February 4, 2020. Given the current situation in South Asia, I have chosen not to use any names and to leave out department and university designations, unless I have been given explicit permission in cases in which the material is not likely to invite unwarranted attention. Giving the name of a department can quite easily lead one to a fairly accurate surmise of who the faculty were, and the results are likely to be dire.

9 Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Geeta Patel, Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy: Reflections on Sexuality, Media, Science, Finance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017); Sharmila Rege, “Caste and Gender: The Violence against Women in India” (Working Paper RSC 19/17, European University Institute, Florence, 1996), http://hdl.handle.net/1814/1432 (accessed October 14, 2020).

11 Butler, Gender Trouble, vii.

12 Communication with students, February 1, 2020.

13 Sharmila Rege, Writing Caste, Writing Gender (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2006); “My Birth Is My Fatal Accident: Rohith Vemula's Searing Letter Is an Indictment of Social Prejudices,” The Wire, January 19, 2019, https://thewire.in/caste/rohith-vemula-letter-a-powerful-indictment-of-social-prejudices (accessed October 22, 2020).

14 Correspondence, February 15, 2020; email correspondence, February 18 and 21, 2020. I have changed some of the language here.

15 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).

16 Indrani Chatterjee, Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Neloufer de Mel, Women and the Nation's Narrative: Gender and Nationalism in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Mani, Contentious Traditions; Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989); Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books; New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986).

17 Greta Olson, Mirjam Horn-Schott, Daniel Hartley, and Regina Leonie Schmidt, eds., Beyond Gender: An Advanced Introduction to Futures of Feminist and Sexuality Studies (New York: Routledge, 2018); Geeta Patel, “Gender and Sexuality,” in The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, eds. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell), 642–47.

18 Rege, “Caste and Gender”; Rege, Writing Caste, Writing Gender.

19 Veena Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of Cultural Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

20 Patel, “Gender and Sexuality”; Seema Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company: Tradition and Transition in Northern India: 1770–1830 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Rege, Writing Caste, Writing Gender; Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World.

21 Geeta Patel, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji's Urdu Poetry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002); Frances Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

22 Butler, Gender Trouble, 2–5.

23 Butler, Gender Trouble, 136.

24 Butler, Gender Trouble, 136.

25 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2.

26 Of course, all of this begs the following questions: If performativity was so familiar, why did Butler's work find such avid purchase? When many South Asian feminists also sought refuge, or perhaps politically edgy solace in strategic essentialisms (pace Gayatri Spivak), where did they displace performativity?

27 All the photographs in the essay are courtesy of Sheba Chhachhi and copyrighted to her. The series here sequence the process of the transformations of the women.

28 Butler, Gender Trouble, 2–5.

29 Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, eds., “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (2006).

30 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

31 Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, “Area Impossible: Notes towards and Introduction” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (2016): 151–71.

32 Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 180.

33 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 183.

34 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans and eds. Hoare, Quentin and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971)Google Scholar; Viswanathan, Gauri, Masks of Conquest: British Rule and Literary Study in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

35 Butler, Gender Trouble, 2–5.