Seeing Like a Feminist

by Nivedita Menon

That is, sexuality strictly policed to ensure the purity and continuation of crucial identities, such as caste, race and religion.

In other words, a large number of women in the sample had found being a domestic servant to be more demeaning, exhausting and ill-paid than sex work (Sahni and Shankar 2011). For the middle-class employers of ‘maids’, in whose imagination becoming a prostitute is a fate worse than death, this fact should produce an utterly shaming moment of self-reflection.

Wow

The Indian servant knows neither the safety net of the feudal servitor nor the formal equality of the capitalist contract; at the same time he or she bears both the humiliation of the feudal hierarchy and the cold exploitation of capitalism.

‘as if the explanation for their involvement in this occupation is to be found in their breasts, or … in the X chromosome.’

Gilligan argues, in women having a more subjective, relational way of engaging with the world, while men have a more objective, autonomous mode. Women relate to others, while men learn to separate themselves.

‘One day, I will hear hurled at me the words, loose woman, chhinaal, prostitute … And I will turn around and say, “Thank you for the compliment”.

Thank You patriarchy

The sheer callousness—of the moral framework that declares sex work and bar-dancing to be intolerable but can, with equanimity, tolerate the poverty and desperation of people thrown out of this work—is mind-boggling.