It is difficult not to look at the ground when you are in a room full of women who have been subjected to unspeakable sexual abuse. It is awkward when you meet those who up until that moment have been faceless, lost somewhere between FIRs and newspaper reports, just “a 24-year-old who was dragged away at night…” Reduced to a statistic: “This was the fourth such case here in just the past one month…”
Femen, a Ukrainian group famous for its topless protests, is in news again after a Tunisia court ordered the release of activist Amina Sboui. The Tunisian activist was arrested in mid May after she wrote the word Femen on a cemetery wall in Kairouan, central of Tunisia. She was put on trial for carrying an ‘incendiary object’ (a pepper spray). Conservative groups had accused her of insulting the city of Kairouan, a religious centre.
A mention on the external forces that influence the increasing take-up of English is pertinent here. Globalisation of English, characterised by, inter alia, the dominance of English in global media networks and international communities, entails challenges and opportunities for contemporary Malaysia. But far from ideologically neutral, globalised English comes pre-packaged with forms of political and cultural baggage. Moreover, the globalisation of the English language is more a reflection of hegemonising economic drives than the geographic spread of speakers across the globe.Since the 1990s, there has been a gradual ‘intellectualisation’ of women’s movements in Malaysia, particularly in Muslim women’s groups. Female academics, lawyers, writers, artists, and journalists became members of feminist NGOs during this period, particularly in Muslim feminist groups. However, the over-representation of urban middle-class women and men in feminist activism in Malaysia marginalises the concerns and voices of working class women whose issues are seldom expressed in fluent English.
AIRASIA Group chief executive officer Tony Fernandes has responded to criticism that the uniform of its female cabin crew is too revealing. “If you really want us to go global, and every politician says so, then support us and look beyond our shores and our cultural sensitivities,” he said on Tuesday.
Mr Fernandes said that crew members themselves designed the outfit, and that it was chosen because of its “universal features”, reported liberal news portal Malaysiakini.
“Being a big brand attracts detractors, not everyone will love us,” he said during the Global Malaysia Series forum in Kuala Lumpur. Critics of the uniform come from both sides of the political divide.
One of them is Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, who, in a written parliamentary reply, said that airlines can choose their own designs, but that the government would ask AirAsia to reassess its uniform.
Sell?
Meanwhile, during the same forum, the former boss of Malaysian Airlines (MAS) Idris Jala said the government should consider selling the national carrier, but not at a loss.
The minister in the Prime Minister’s Department said MAS was trading at RM6 (S$2.30) when he was in charge, but the share price of the company has dropped to 30 sen now, Malaysian Insider reported.
The government’s state asset manager Khazanah Nasional is the majority owner of the airline, which has posted losses for its last six quarters, the report added.
Recently, French President Francois Hollande had unveiled a new stamp emblazoned with the face of Marianne, France’s revolutionary symbol which is inspired by these feminists known for topless protests. My conversation with Alexandra ‘Sasha’ Shevchenko, co-founder of Femen, and Inna Shevchenko, leader of Femen France, about the group’s ideology.
t was an AC 2-tier compartment of a Delhi-bound Rajdhani from Assam. The passengers were just getting ready for lunch and some had even armed themselves with a fork and spoon. Fork on the left, spoon on the right. Just as it should be, the way it is taught at convents and boarding schools perched on mountain tops.
As the train’s attendants came with a fresh supply of bottled mineral water, the conversation turned to the Guwahati molestation case of July 9 this year when 15 men were caught on TV pouncing on a teenaged girl outside a bar as one of the goons whipped out his camera to record it for titillation and posterity.
Feminism and the women’s movement in Malaysia are products of specific historical and political contexts. Following this logic, the language used in feminist activism can also be seen as a product of similar contexts. The focus of this article is the current state of the feminist movement in Malaysia and its linguistic framework as the effects of changes in language policy. This article argues that the predominance of English poses challenges to the inclusion of working-class class feminist agendas but offers opportunities in strengthening transnational feminist linkages. Language thus becomes an underlying issue which may explain the successful inroads and setbacks faced by feminist organisations in Malaysia.
The language of feminism is relatively alien to the public discourse in Malaysia where terms such as ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, and even ‘feminism’ exist as loanwords. When ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ and their different linguistic incarnations reflective of the country’s multilingual fabric appear at all, they are sporadic and usually enmeshed in the discourse of academia, activism, and human rights in the English language. Although there is a recognition of feminist activism in Malaysia, it is subsumed under the banner of women’s struggles against discrimination and injustice. In other words, women’s struggles are not always recognised as being feminist ones.
There is considerable literature on the development of the women’s and feminist movement in Malaysia. However, language use in Malaysian feminist discourse has been given little attention by scholars. This lacunae requires attention due to the highly political nature of language policy in Malaysia where language use is linked with ethnicity, class, and at times religion.
English was hardly the language used in the organised calls for feminist emancipation which emerged during the turn of the twentieth century. Inspired by Muslim reformers during their studies in Cairo, Syed Syeikh Al-Hadi and Zainal Abidin Ahmad, better known as Za’ba, were Malay male intellectuals whose writings on women’s liberation began the stirrings of emancipation of Malay people not only on gendered terms, but against colonialism. Their writings appeared in Malay journals such as al-Ikhwan (1926-1931) and Saudara (1928-1941), publications that were heavily influenced by Egyptian modernist magazines.
“But what was the girl doing so late in the night?” asked the Air Force officer in the traveling group. From Ghaziabad but working in Guwahati, he went on, “Apparently she was drunk and was flirting with some men in the pub. Shouldn’t she be probed for loose character?” Some heads had already begun to nod in agreement when another passenger, by now red with rage, said, “Next time someone grabs your sister’s bottom, the police should first investigate whether she’s morally sound.” No one spoke to each other the rest of the journey as the sullen group waited impatiently to disembark at New Delhi.
And we’re talking here of men who head large teams at fancy offices in Gurgaon and Nariman Point – people who wear suits to office and always stir their coffee clockwise. Now imagine the conversation in the general compartment of a local train filled with those too poor for a good education or exposure, those who have grown up thinking a woman should be behind the veil, in the kitchen and forever pregnant.
Strange theories are floated to explain the depravity of Indian men – from greater access to pornography (that would have made Holland very unsafe for women) to a growing inclination towards noodles (think Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) – but the truth is that at the root of it all lies a culture built around hierarchies, of gender, faith, colour, caste, region.
We are, quite simply, not used to people being equal – dark versus fair, Mongoloid versus Aryan, ‘chinky’ versus large-eyed are demarcations and rankings that have almost been internalized; in many cases institutionalized. Of course, female versus male continues to be the greatest division of all – and one that cuts across all other borders of the mind.
We at The Times of India in our edition today laid out a 6-point action plan to make India safer for women – harsher punishment, sensitization of the police force, setting up of fast-track courts, better patrolling, cleverer use of technology like GPS and CCTVs and a data base of public transport personnel – but what all these measures will not address is the mindset. A mindset that since the time of that deviant philosopher called Manu has refused to see “the weaker sex” as anything but property and the receptacle of male sperms.
Though many of my north Indian friends react in agonized protest when I say this, but in the end it is also a cultural and civilisational thing. In those societies that do — or have learnt to — respect women, and consider them as equal, incidence of rape, sexual harassment, molestation is very low, if not absent altogether. In Darjeeling, for instance, police stations across the district will tell you that in the last decade they have come across only a couple of cases. That, too, in one an outsider was involved. A cop I spoke to for this article remembered just a single case of “eve teasing” – in 1981.
The Khasis of Meghalaya also score very high on gender parity. So do the Nagas, Mizos, Sikkimese and generally the people of the North-East. Another indication of this equality is the absence of dowry in these communities. And this is because there really is no price on the head – or body – of a woman. This translates itself in many heartwarming ways (though it doesn’t mean much, Aamir Khan mentioned these facts about the North-East in one of his Satyameva Jayate episodes). You will, for instance, never see a woman in any of the Darjeeling buses standing for want of space while men are sitting down. It is quite remarkable actually, now that I have lived, worked and traveled outside the North-East for over a decade. The word, I guess, is ‘un-relatable’.
If what happens to women on the roads of Delhi and Mumbai – other cities, too – is to stop, the change will have to come first at home, from the family. Boys, as they grow up, will have to be taught that their sisters are not there to get the leftovers – the one piece of chocolate that couldn’t be eaten, the tricycle with a broken wheel that couldn’t be driven, the school with expensive fees that couldn’t be afforded. I met a bright 12-year-old girl recently – she sometimes tags along with the woman in my colony who presses clothes – who told me she had to discontinue her education because he father could only afford to send two children to class. So her bhaiyyas got a chance to go ahead in life while she was left to accompany her mother on small errands that usually get rewarded with a 10-rupee note.
A lot of how India will be in the future, how one half of the population will treat the other half, will depend on the lessons from parents and teachers. GPS and CCTVs, after all, cannot track what goes inside homes and the minds of men; they can only make our streets a bit safer. The violence to women within families is many times deadlier. And often it is this violence, the mentality and justification of it, that spirals away and gets carried out in cinema halls, moving auto-rickshaws and crowded malls. It is this that makes well-dressed men in sharp suits and shiny shoes traveling in planes and expensive trains say a woman is responsible for everything bad that happens to her.
Why do you use the bared breast as a symbol of protest?
Inna: We started in 2008 as a union of young women who were discussing the problems faced by our sisters and mothers in Ukraine. Back then we followed the classical modes of protests to catch the attention of the government. But nobody was interested in what we had to say. Through our observation and dialogues we realized that the only function which the world assigns to women is sex. You can see it in advertisements which sexualize the female body and the booming sex-trade. This is when we decided that we must subvert the sexual use of the female body and transform our bodies to launch a campaign against patriarchy — we began to bare our breasts and then people noticed us.
Femen has coined a word – sextremism. What does it mean?
Inna: This is a tactic that we use in our fight against male domination. Sextremism means the transformation of the woman’s body into a canvas for protests. We see ourselves as a new brand of feminists. Feminists before us have protested against the domination of men in the society but, at the same time, they stuck to the values of patriarchy which sees a woman’s body as a source of some false sense of honour. They covered themselves up. We have ripped away our clothes and thrown in it the face of patriarchy and given our own meaning to the female body.
Have any of your supporters been picked up by the government, police or special forces?
Inna: Almost every time we protest we are picked up by the authorities. The most harrowing detention took place in 2011 at Minsk, in Belarus, when we were picked up by the KGB. They took three of us deep into the forest and ordered us to strip completely; then they dragged us around by our hair and used various torture techniques upon us. They told us repeatedly that they would kill us. This went on for almost 24 hours, but in the end they left us in the forest. The authorities in France are much gentler and treat us like human beings.
Femen has announced that it is going to send its protest squad to the 2014 football world cup. What is the purpose?
Sasha: A football world cup means that many, many men will get together to watch a game and all they want to do is watch football, drink beer and have sex. I have seen it with my own eyes in Ukraine during the previous world cup. Many of my friends were forced to join the sex trade during the event. Trafficking of women in Eastern Europe is a huge problem. We want countries to criminalise prostitution or follow the Swedish model.
One of the arguments against Femen is that it is intruding into cultures, especially the Islamic one, and projecting its ideals onto a world where they have no place.
Sasha: We don’t discriminate on the basis of sex, colour, religion, race, or any other basis. Torture is not culture. If we go back 40 years into Iran’s history, women had more freedom and didn’t wear the hijab. Using various tropes of religion like hijab is a good way to propagate patriarchal values. Many women in Iran, and the Arab world, are beaten and abused if they don’t cover their faces. Femen is standing up for those countless women who don’t have a voice, and want to rid themselves of the clothes of patriarchy.The real stories of rape victims almost never come out, tightly sealed as they are in shame, taboo and a sense of futility. What is the point in talking about it, they will tell you, encouraged by their families not to heap further indignities upon themselves, having already “lost their honour” in the community. But when they do come out, the stories, they stagger you with the unbearable weight of each personal tragedy.
Do you support the ban on hijab in countries like France?
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The real stories of rape victims almost never come out, tightly sealed as they are in shame, taboo and a sense of futility. What is the point in talking about it, they will tell you, encouraged by their families not to heap further indignities upon themselves, having already “lost their honour” in the community. But when they do come out, the stories, they stagger you with the unbearable weight of each personal tragedy.
At Samadhan in Dehradun, a care intervention and rehabilitation centre for victims of sexual crimes, there is a young woman who the other inmates call ‘DGP’. Renu D Singh, 50, a rights activist who runs the 30-year-old privately-funded institution, said this is one of the “worst of the worst” cases that have come to her.
The girl is not in a position yet to talk about her history, but information pieced together by Samadhan activists hint at her surviving the violence of child marriage in rural Uttar Pradesh and running away from home. No one knows how she came to Haridwar three years ago where she had been raped so many times that she started smearing her body with her own excreta to ward off predators. She was being molested when some passersby heard her cries and alerted a local Samadhan representative. “She was on the brink of losing her sanity when we brought her here on September 13, 2011,” Singh said.
The victim’s case summary says that when she landed in Haridwar, hungry, unhinged and as vulnerable as a little baby, some “opportunistic criminals in the garb of sadhus” turned her into a sex slave for months. They let go of her when an untreated wound on her right leg developed a severe infection. “There were maggots crawling all over her and gangrene had also set in,” said Singh.
Then Singh says something that knocks the wind out of you. “Even in that condition, when we took her to a government hospital a doctor was caught trying to molest her. We created a hue and cry and went to the cops, but they asked us to first put in a complaint with the CMO and the DM. They later told us that they found the doctor innocent and that there was no basis for the FIR. The report about the doctor’s misdeeds was published in the local papers but nothing came of it. We were just glad we somehow managed to save her from yet another rape.”
When I met DGP sometime in June this year at Samadhan, she looked closer to 30 although she is barely 22, dragging her bad leg as she walked. “Do you know why she is called DGP?” Singh said, allowing herself a little smile. “It is because she occasionally pretends to be a cop. That gives her a sense of power. Once in a while she will carry a small stick, too, like officers do. The other girls humour her.”
On the top floor of Samadhan’s three-storied building in the heart of Dehradun, there is a small kitchen that the inmates run, making rice, dal and sabzi; occasionally they prepare dosa and noodles too. Standing behind the food counter is a frail girl. Let’s call her Amrita. “Namaskar,” she says, cheerily. “I am a victim-survivor, too, but am now studying law. I want to fight for women like me, help them in whatever way I can. The courts can be a jungle. It’s easy to get misguided and be exploited.”
Displaced by the Tehri dam and unable to cope up with delayed rehabilitation by the government, Amrita’s family had quickly disintegrated. Later, her father had only been too happy to give her off to someone who promised marriage. The man turned out to be a trafficker.
It was when she was fighting against her own trafficking and rape by some powerful men in her village that the brutal reprisal came in the form of her sister’s gang-rape. Amrita’s younger sibling was only 15 then. After a long battle an FIR was lodged in the Matli thana (Uttarkashi) in October 2010, but the police slapped a reverse case against the girl under section 182 of the IPC for “filing a false report of crime.” Today both the sisters are with Samadhan. Their father died of TB two years ago and their mother lives alone in their Uttarkashi village, barely able to fend for herself.
It’s an issue Amrita says she will take up once she is armed with a lawyer’s degree. “Across police stations in India, it is simply impossible to report a rape. The police do everything in their power to thwart you. In nine out of 10 cases the victim gives up,” she said. “A much longer and tougher battle awaits us in court. Few can go through such humiliation and pressure, that too over months and years.” Rehabilitation is another problem. “Even if you win the case, compensation from the government either takes ages to come or doesn’t come at all. The system doesn’t support you. Jobs are tough to get, often your family deserts you and men think we are easy meat,” she said.
Listening to Amrita talk is a quiet woman in well-tailored salwar-kameez and sandals. Speaking in English, with a hint of make-up, she does well to hide her scars – emotional and physical. But at Samadhan, she must be the only one who is still scared of harm from her tormentor – the man she married. A helper at the centre said, “Her husband, a police inspector who recently took voluntary retirement, still wields a lot of power. For the longest time the cops wouldn’t even listen to her. Some of them would tip off her husband about the case.”
Nalini (her name changed) says that after several months of visiting the police station in Dehradun was she able to file an FIR in September 2011. She alleges her husband, a man with psychopathic tendencies, would at the slightest provocation gag and sodomise her. Once when she complained, he flung her to the ground, sat on her and poured a bottle of floor cleaner down her throat. One day he tattooed his name on her arm with a needle in front of her five-year-old son. “I was so smashed up, inside and outside, that when I came to Samadhan I could barely talk,” said Nalini. “I was terrified that my husband, who had once beaten me up in front of some colleagues and chopped off my hair, would find and kill me.”
Thirty-five years old now and divorced, Nalini has done her Masters in Child Education and Development and now wants to do a PhD. “Maybe I will work as an educationist some day. I like to be with children,” she said. Her son is still with her husband because she has been to doctors and psychiatrists so often that it is difficult to prove in court that she is normal enough to fulfill her role of a mother.
Amrita, meanwhile, is studying hard to crack her law exams, while her sister, who completed class X recently with 74% from a school in Roorkee, has written 108 poems in both Garhwali and Hindi and is waiting for someone to publish them. Even DGP reads and writes a bit, and has started to paint, drawing babies and flowers.
Survivors like Nalini, Amrita and DGP, across India, at home and in rehabilitation centres, are attempting to put the past behind and build their lives anew. But Singh knows it will be tough. “The fact is that there is little sympathy for victims of sexual and domestic violence in our country,” she said. “We need to talk about rape in our society more than we do – in our midst, in the media, policy circles. In India, nobody really does.”
Least of all, it seems, the government. Despite a steep spurt in the sexual crimes graph – while the US Justice Department says the rate of such violence against women and girls aged 12 or older fell 64% in a decade there (1995-2005), India has witnessed a 74% increase over the past 15 years, according to a study based on stats released by the National Crime Records Bureau – and the MHA’s urgent advisory to state governments on it in 2009, few, if any, have set up rape crisis centres and specialised treatment units.
Sasha: Yes. We in Femen are anti-religion, and that includes Christian symbols like the church and the cross.
Do you think being naked is empowering for women?
Sasha: We in Femen are naked because we want to take charge of our body. We don’t want our nakedness to be pleasing or erotic. In places like Ukraine another patriarchal version of women is visible — women in short clothes, high heels. This is to look sexy and attract men in order to get married. I realized that my parents wanted me to do a Master’s not because they wanted me to be independent but because that would help me get a ‘better’ husband. I was a doll. Women in Arab countries cover their hands and faces because that is the tradition. A chaste, virgin who covers her face will attract a better match. Different countries have different ways of enforcing patriarchal values.
Femen staged the first naked protest in the Arab world in Tunisia. What did you seek to achieve?
Sasha: Three Femen members, two French and one German, had gone to protest the arrest of our Tunisian member, Amina Tyler. The Salafists and other conservative forces in Tunisia are suffocating women in the name of religion, much like the rest of the Arab world. Earlier, Amina was punished for posting online her topless photos with the slogan “my body is my own” written on her torso.
What do you have to say to women who are against Femen?
Sasha: The most hopeless situation is when people who are slaves can’t see their shackles. Women in the Arab world don’t see their chains just like I didn’t when I was dressing up like a doll. We are protesting for those who don’t see their chains.
