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The law in India never uses the word ‘desire’. There is no law of desire or vocabulary present in the State that talks about desire. However, this “term can refer to a gamut of things including gender, politics, culture, history, sociology and all the subjects that go into making law what it is.” Desire acts as the bridge between the mind and the body.
The idea of desire builds a bridge between, what we like to distinguish as, the mind on one hand and the body on the other. Desire is a term that allows us to expand a conversation that might otherwise be more restricted if we were to only use the terms ‘gender’ or ‘sexuality’.
An important issue to discuss would be whether the questions of desire are private or public. To throw light upon the intersection of law with gender and sexuality, IMPRI (Impact and Policy Research Institute) organized a special lecture on "Law in my Kitchen: Questions about Gender, Agency, and the State" by Dr Madhavi Menon, a professor of English and Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at Ashoka University who works in the domains of queer theory, sexuality, desire, gender politics and identity.
Introducing the theme Dr Rukmini Nair, chair of the session pointed to the intersectionality built in the theme of how the link between state and law was bridged towards gender and the kitchen via an agency. This points to the need for interdisciplinary conversation around gender and patriarchy in the Modern State. It becomes the goal of the academician to empirically locate concepts and links for a greater audience. Descartian vocabulary has given the academicians today to make the claim the porosity of body and mind, best represented as “the mind has no sex”.
Desire: from the private to public
Privacy has captured the popular imagination. From WhatsApp’s privacy settings to the privacy judgement in the Retired Justice Puttaswamy case in the Supreme Court, there has been a lot of discussion around privacy. The critical question that we need to grapple with is, is desire private?We are encouraged to believe that gender, sexuality, and desire is all private matters. They personal issues because they belong to us individually and because they define us fundamentally. Dr Madhavi Menon said, “What’s interesting to me is that when we bring in law to adjudicate a matter that is allegedly so private, what happens then to that notion of privacy? What happens then to that notion of something being so personal and individualistic and so fundamentally belonging to the domain of self? What happens to that domain once it is publicly pronounced upon?”
This contrast of private and public is spurious because we are constantly told what our gender and sexuality are or what they must be. Even if we think we choose our sexual orientation, that choice has to fit specific parameters that are publicly decided before we are allowed to be of a particular sexual orientation.
Thus, this idea of gender, sexuality, or desire being private is untrue. It is an idea that has been impressed upon us to induce shame and not talk about these things publicly. It hinders us from talking about these ideas of sexuality or gender to take up public space and own the public sphere. When surfaced in the public sphere, these conversations would lend recognition to sexual identities that would be empowering and liberating at the same time.
The very notion of privacy is something to be skeptical about and most so about gender, body, desire, and sexuality because not only have these realms never been private, but they have always been publicly sanctioned and dictated. Asking us to keep them confidential is also asking us to keep them apolitical when they are arguably the most politicized versions of ourselves.
The law seems absolute, while gender and sexuality seem to be much more fluid. However, Dr Menon believes that law is more porous than complete and gender is more absolute than porous. Her explanation for the same is that the most common word associated with the law is ‘interpretation.’ The same absolute law can be interpreted in different ways by different benches of judges, which isn’t always a positive thing. Unlike in the USA where the Supreme Court sits as an entire bench for all cases that come to it, the Indian Judiciary assigns different benches to each case. The assignment of judges can be backed by political activity. This proves the porousness of the law.
The relationship between law and desire is another question that demands discourse. If they have been relegated to different spheres of life i.e, the public for the law and private for desire, then it’s important to look at the interaction between the two. Dr Menon poses the question, “Is the relationship between the two only and always antagonistic, which is to say is law always trying to control desire? Or is the law also enabling when it comes to questions of gender, sexuality and desire?”
The Great Indian Kitchen
The movie “The Great Indian Kitchen”, portrays mundane characters, every day and present. Their portrayal is kind, polite and wholehearted. It attempts to portray a universal story of a heterosexual couple, by not attaching any name to the characters.
The movie makes the audience uncomfortable because it drives home the embeddedness of patriarchy through seemingly nice and polite characters. The movie was rejected by major streaming websites like Netflix and Amazon. Produced in Malayalam, the movie is available to be seen on Neestream. The movie portrays two kinds of laws and their intersection law, that is the social law and Law which is the embodiment of the judicial power of the state.
Family is considered to be a fundamental unit of society and it is anchored by a certain idea of marriage. This idea of marriage is heterosexual and tends to have its roots in a patriarchal structure. Though it is governed through laws constructed by the state, it is also given in the social that marriage is a necessary ritual.
Misogyny and patriarchy have been internalized so much that women, in a way, forget their self-respect
This patriarchy is noticed not just in rituals around marriage or traditions like a woman taking her husband’s name, but, also in the roles that a husband and a wife are expected to play after marriage. Marriage is a deeply patriarchal institution and it is essential that we, as a society, rethink the law of marriage.
The institution of marriage stands at the intersection of the public and the private which is portrayed by the movie successfully. It is meant to be a private affair between two people, at most between two families, but it is the most highly adjudicated institution in the country, which can be proved by the number of laws devoted to marriage.
Dr Menon believed, “I’m interested in the question that how can we ask law to take ideas of desire, gender and sexuality much more seriously than they currently do?”
Dr Menon throws an interesting question of what would happen if we were to get rid of marriage completely. She questioned if people would still be invested in the idea of marriage in a situation where the legal rights tied to it are done away with.
In 2018, with a 4:1 majority, the Supreme Court of India ruled in the Indian Young Lawyers’ Association v State of Kerela that women in the age group of 10 to 50 years will no longer be prohibited from entering Ayyappan Temple at Sabrimala. This is the law of the second nature that contains the power to discipline and demand obedience. This judgment is portrayed in the movie as a breadth of fresh air where women can break from cycles of violence and horror that accompanies her menstruating body.
Armed with her awareness of the Sabrimala judgment, the lead female protagonist turns to question the mundane and everydayness of patriarchy in her own life. The second bookend of the kind of law becomes a safety valve for the wife to make decisions that could be seen as rebellious to the milieu of familial patriarchy and marriage.
The Sabarimala verdict ruled that women of menstruating age can no longer be prohibited from entering Lord Ayyappan’s temple. However, the most baffling thing was that women worshippers of Lord Ayyappan sided with the argument that the Lord would not like it if menstruating women were given entry to the temple. Though the key intervention remains that women can no longer wait.
The coupling of one’s gender with one’s ability to do work and the fact that one must perform the kind of work ‘suitable’ to their gender are deeply problematic ideas. If a woman doesn’t know how to cook, she feels the need to justify the same. But if a doesn’t know how to cook, he wouldn’t be questioned even once.
The two laws can also be located in the conflict between the social laws and laws of the state. Dr Usha Mudiganti while recounting her work on Beerngana gives the example of Rani Lakshmibai. Herein lies a woman who performs the gendered male role to fight the Law of the State, the Law of accession to fight for the property rights for her adopted son. She is a woman who has failed in her social role of providing a male heir to the throne and she fights for the right to be the mother of the next king. The unique performance of this act remains that she fights in the battleground wearing feminine garb, which becomes the location of blurring gender boundaries.
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Acknowledgment: Chhavi Kapoor is a research intern at IMPRI and is pursuing bachelors in Political Science, Literature, and Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai
The institution of marriage stands at the intersection of the public and the private which is portrayed by the movie successfully. It is meant to be a private affair between two people, at most between two families, but it is the most highly adjudicated institution in the country, which can be proved by the number of laws devoted to marriage.
Dr Menon believed, “I’m interested in the question that how can we ask law to take ideas of desire, gender and sexuality much more seriously than they currently do?”
Dr Menon throws an interesting question of what would happen if we were to get rid of marriage completely. She questioned if people would still be invested in the idea of marriage in a situation where the legal rights tied to it are done away with.
In 2018, with a 4:1 majority, the Supreme Court of India ruled in the Indian Young Lawyers’ Association v State of Kerela that women in the age group of 10 to 50 years will no longer be prohibited from entering Ayyappan Temple at Sabrimala. This is the law of the second nature that contains the power to discipline and demand obedience. This judgment is portrayed in the movie as a breadth of fresh air where women can break from cycles of violence and horror that accompanies her menstruating body.
Armed with her awareness of the Sabrimala judgment, the lead female protagonist turns to question the mundane and everydayness of patriarchy in her own life. The second bookend of the kind of law becomes a safety valve for the wife to make decisions that could be seen as rebellious to the milieu of familial patriarchy and marriage.
The Sabarimala verdict ruled that women of menstruating age can no longer be prohibited from entering Lord Ayyappan’s temple. However, the most baffling thing was that women worshippers of Lord Ayyappan sided with the argument that the Lord would not like it if menstruating women were given entry to the temple. Though the key intervention remains that women can no longer wait.
Gender roles in households
This goes on to show that misogyny and patriarchy have been internalized so much that women, in a way, forget their self-respect. They are unable to think for themselves and cannot perceive their value outside of gender roles. Dr Usha Mudiganti, Assistant Professor, School of Letters, Ambedkar University points out that one automatically connects cookbooks to women. Society inevitably thinks that all women can and do cook. Women also tend to feel the need to prove that they can cook.The coupling of one’s gender with one’s ability to do work and the fact that one must perform the kind of work ‘suitable’ to their gender are deeply problematic ideas. If a woman doesn’t know how to cook, she feels the need to justify the same. But if a doesn’t know how to cook, he wouldn’t be questioned even once.
The two laws can also be located in the conflict between the social laws and laws of the state. Dr Usha Mudiganti while recounting her work on Beerngana gives the example of Rani Lakshmibai. Herein lies a woman who performs the gendered male role to fight the Law of the State, the Law of accession to fight for the property rights for her adopted son. She is a woman who has failed in her social role of providing a male heir to the throne and she fights for the right to be the mother of the next king. The unique performance of this act remains that she fights in the battleground wearing feminine garb, which becomes the location of blurring gender boundaries.
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Acknowledgment: Chhavi Kapoor is a research intern at IMPRI and is pursuing bachelors in Political Science, Literature, and Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai
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