March 26, 2011

In December of 1996, the release of Indian-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s Fire ignited nationwide controversy, thanks to its intimate portrayal of two married Indian women, both named after Hindu goddesses, in love. After three weeks of popular ...]]>

Photo: Gay rights activists celebrated during a rally in New Delhi in July after the city’s highest court decriminalized homosexuality, Adnan Abidi/Reuters, intransit.blogs.nytimes.com.

By NATALIA THOMPSON

March 26, 2011

In December of 1996, the release of Indian-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s Fire ignited nationwide controversy, thanks to its intimate portrayal of two married Indian women, both named after Hindu goddesses, in love. After three weeks of popular women-only screenings, riots broke out in Mumbai when a far-right Hindu nationalist group stormed a theater and set the film’s posters on fire. Following similar attacks in New Delhi and Calcutta, the Indian government censored the film, and Hindu nationalists claimed victory, arguing they had demonstrated that lesbianism and Hindu nationalism were “incommensurate.”

In response to censorship, Mehta and others petitioned the Supreme Court and organized a candlelit protest in New Delhi on December 7. The following morning, national papers carried photos of the protest. One activist’s sign read simply: “Indian and Lesbian.”

In her recent talk on the emergence of lesbian organizing in India, “Indian and Lesbian and What Came Next: Affect, Commensuration, and Queer Emergences,” Naisargi Dave opened with the gripping anecdote of the closeted 23-year-old who was overcome with joy when she opened the newspaper that morning and discovered that two “incommensurable identities”—Indian and lesbian—could indeed coexist. According to Dave, this step towards queer visibility and recognition transformed what had been a “field of imminence,” in which disparate lesbian communities existed largely under the radar of Indian society, into a “field of possibility.”

Dave, the author of the forthcoming Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics (Duke University Press, 2012) and a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto, spoke at Yale on March 24 as part of a year-long series, “Transnational Histories of Sexual Politics,” sponsored by the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. Her lecture illuminated the vibrant landscape of queer Indian politics and the challenges facing the lesbian-identified communities caught in the crossfire of (neo)colonialism, Hindu nationalism, Indian feminisms, and sexual citizenship debates. Add in a handful of Western LGBT rights activists and some curious anthropologists, and you’ve got a volatile mix.

Throughout her hour-long talk, Dave wrestled with some of the thornier dilemmas impacting Indian “women-loving women,” from the fierce debates over lesbianism as a “Western, bourgeois” import that led to the ideological fracturing of lesbian groups in the 1990s, to the deeply classed semiotics, poetics and politics of burgeoning queer activism. But she interspersed these theoretical discussions with touching and even comical anecdotes collected over the course of her ethnographic research.

Dave shared several letters sent in the early 1990s to a lesbian network called Sakhi, which ranged from the innocent to the explicit. One woman wrote requesting “names and addresses of other friends who are your members and who are also interested in the world of lesbianism/bi-sexualism,” and closed her letter with “Yours-in-L/Bi.” Scrawled across the top of another letter was a joyous “long live lesbos!” Yet another arrived with downright graphic drawings in the margins. Meanwhile, other letters revealed the world of lesbian cruising. (Yes, you read that right: queer ladies cruising. No gay men involved.) One letter to Sakhi described cruising at a local health club: “Many married ladies come for seeing films and dances and nude bath, but they do so without the knowledge of their husbands. They enjoy homosex, but in secret.” Evidently, the explicitness of these letters is just the tip of the iceberg: when I did some online research on queer organizing in India, I came across a Mumbai-based group named LABIA: Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action.

Middle-class married women watching lesbian porn and hooking up at health clubs isn’t quite what came to mind when I thought about Indian lesbians. Then again, Dave’s talk shattered many of my preconceptions about what queer communities look like in India. I especially appreciated her commitment to interrogating the limitations of “lesbian” politics, particularly their failure to migrate across linguistic and class lines. Dave noted that one group of queer activists decided to use “single women,” as the term proved more accessible to non-English-speaking women, including those living in urban slums and rural areas.

But shades of Western (neo)colonialism isn’t the only reason why a “majority of women in India don’t refer to relations with other women as lesbianism.” (According to Dave, some simply called their experiences with other women “magic.”) During the post-lecture Q&A, Professor Karen Nakamura mentioned that in Japan, many queer women shy away from identifying as “lesbian” because it is widely associated with “lesbian porn” marketed to straight men. To my surprise, Dave replied that many Indians believe that the only “lesbians” are women who have sex with other women in porn; it is unimaginable to them that women would wish to have sex with each other for reasons other than money. Dave noted that during her stint as a volunteer for a help line and support group, Sangini, she frequently fielded calls from Indian men hoping that Sangini would “send them” some lesbians to have sex with them and/or their wives—a whole new twist on gay-for-pay.

As Dave revealed, the cultural and political weight of the “l word” is tremendous, as the emergence of “lesbian” politics and communities of lesbian-identified women has reshaped queer women’s lives across India. Although Fire “catapulted” both lesbian rights activists and lesbianism into the public sphere, this increased visibility of lesbianism took a toll on less-privileged women, who had to “choose private support over public action.” Dave referred to this as the “social paradox of emergence”: for many Indian women, including the closeted young women in her opening anecdote, “lesbianism’s emergence was both triumphant and melancholy.”

Although Dave discussed class divides throughout her talk, I was disappointed by her nearly exclusive focus on the political work of middle-class sexual rights activists, from artists and intellectuals to straight feminists. Dave said little about the realities of other queer women, and she barely mentioned what (if anything) India’s middle class-dominated LGBTQ rights movement is doing to address the concerns of women in low-income communities. And though it was clear that she had easier access to middle-class, lesbian-identified activists, Dave didn’t explain how her own positionality shaped her interactions with her informants and her participation in lesbian groups; she offered little reflexivity about her own subjectivity. Although recent works in queer anthropology have gone so far as to explore the role of an anthropologist’s “erotic subjectivity” in the field, the role Dave’s sexuality played in her research went unmentioned.

I was also surprised by how little Dave said about how a new generation will shape the future of lesbian organizing in India. During the Q&A, Professor Joanne Meyerowitz asked Dave to discuss the role of digital media in the formation of queer Indian women’s communities. In contrast to the rich material she culled from letters written two decades ago, Dave had virtually nothing to share about how younger Indian women are expressing their identities and connecting with other queer women online. Dave mentioned some “Delhi dyke” chat rooms, but then hastily explained that Indian gay men were much more likely to use the Internet for both sexual and political purposes. Still, considering the vivid portrait of Indian queer activism Dave painted in her talk, I look forward to reading her book. It promises to be a fascinating and fiery read.

Natalia Thompson is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

By NATALIA THOMPSON

February 14, 2011

For too long, yoga has been one of this feminist’s guilty pleasures. Since I began practicing yoga in high school, I’ve grouped yoga with those things that scream “bad feminist!” to some. (Make-up and ...]]>

Photo: Wikipedia

By NATALIA THOMPSON

February 14, 2011

For too long, yoga has been one of this feminist’s guilty pleasures. Since I began practicing yoga in high school, I’ve grouped yoga with those things that scream “bad feminist!” to some. (Make-up and high heels, meat-eating, frat(ty) parties, all things BDSM, most chick flicks…) As a freshman, I even went so far as to hide my yoga mat at the back of my closet, lest I conform to my suitemate’s stereotype of privileged queer women (“the kind who do yoga and shop at Trader Joe’s”).

It was only recently that I began to consider the feminist potential of yoga, while reading an essay from the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape. The essay, “What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life,” traces the author’s experiences surviving incest as a queer feminist of color. For her, that included practicing yoga: “I do yoga taught by a mixed-desi queer girl who teaches yoga for people of color, who believes that it has the power to heal and decolonize our bodies. I do stretches and breathe into where I can’t feel, where my hips still turn in to protect my pussy. I breathe into where my legs shake when I try to raise them an inch off the ground.”

That paragraph knocked the wind out of me. Though I had already started thinking about what it means to practice yoga as a feminist, as a survivor, and as a queer woman of color, it was the first piece of writing on yoga that really spoke to me. And it was the first to affirm that practicing feminism and practicing yoga aren’t necessarily contradictory.

Unfortunately, my ideal vision of yoga shares little in common with how yoga is practiced today in most parts of the United States. There’s a reason that yoga is a contentious topic on many feminist blogs: not only is yoga a “bougie” trend (striving to “just be” is a pretty privileged state of existence), but the commercialization of yoga carries distinctly sexist undertones. American Apparel’s recent reappropriation of yoga poses in their notoriously sexist ads is hardly the only offender; Yoga Journal is also guilty of “tapping that yoga ass.” The feminization of yoga has become all too common: as one blogger notes, images of yoga frequently depict women in “bounded, contorted, sexualized positions.”

Oversexualized ads aside, the roots and philosophy of yoga also pose a challenge to feminist yoginis. As one feminist scholar and yoga teacher explains, “On our mats, we have the opportunity to cultivate a witness to how things are [and] learn to accept reality as it is, without judgment… But as a feminist, I am not accustomed to accepting things as they are.” Another feminist blogger troubles the origins of yoga: according to her, it “is wrought from patriarchal ideologies and power structures that are historically and contemporarily pervasive in culture.”

From my own experiences practicing yoga, I’ve become painfully aware that the yoga studio isn’t always a safe space for women and queer folks. I’ve had male teachers who have made sexual comments and touched female students inappropriately, and I could certainly empathize with a queer yoga teacher’s account of attending a Yoga Journal conference that was anything but inclusive: the (hetero)sexist norms reflected in yoga ads too often shape the spaces where yoga is practiced. The yoga studio should be a place where we escape the (unwanted) male gaze or the policing of gender non-conforming bodies, but that’s not always the case.

Despite the crass commercialization of yoga—and the discourses that present yoga as yet another way to discipline (white, heterosexual, privileged) female bodies—I still roll out my yoga mat every day, committed to this form of healing, energizing, and pushing myself. And I take pleasure in knowing that claiming this space is itself an act of resistance. In the words of one feminist blogger, “Historically, yoga has belonged in the domain of men. It was developed by and for male bodies, and often draws on the language of male experience,” referring to the Warrior series of yoga poses. But I believe there is something subversive about striking a Warrior pose. And there is something beautiful about finding power—and peace—within your own body, whether through a round of Sun Salutations or through a long Pigeon pose.

So what does a feminist yoga practice look like? In the United States, I have found few studios that feel like safe spaces for women, for survivors, for people of color, for queer and gender non-conforming folks. Since I’m not a fan of checking my identity or my politics at the door when I enter a yoga studio, I often end up practicing at home.

But while living in Cochabamba, Bolivia last summer, I stumbled across a make-shift yoga studio in a woman’s backyard. There was no heating, the floor was uneven, and the music the instructor played was often drowned out by a nearby party. But the class was attended by Bolivians of all ages and backgrounds (none of whom wore tight yoga pants), and the instructor spoke often of honoring and connecting with la Pachamama, the venerated earth goddess of the Andes.

La Pachamama is celebrated everywhere in Bolivia. In bars, you can’t make a toast without first spilling a little on the ground as an offering to la Pachamama. But within the canvas walls of the Instituto Boliviano de Yoga, honoring la Pachamama took on new meaning.

While in Cochabamba, I interned at a center for teen survivors of sexual violence. When I first began attending yoga classes after work, I slipped out furtively at the end of the day. My privilege gnawed at me; I knew that while I stretched my hips into Downward-Facing Dog, the girls I worked with would still be trapped within the walls of the center—struggling over their homework, washing the floors of the center, taking turns working in the communal kitchen and bakery.

Eventually, I started teaching yoga classes at the center. I didn’t expect that reading guided relaxation scripts in Spanish that I’d found online would mean much, but suddenly, the yoga classes I led became more important than the workshops I had prepared on human rights and feminist activism.

One afternoon, I led the teen girls from the center on a field trip to the Instituto Boliviano de Yoga. As we bowed forward on our mats and honored la Pachamama, I realized we were also honoring ourselves. We were practicing yoga, but we were also practicing a feminism best described by Cherríe Moraga: one “that decolonizes the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth.”

Natalia Thompson is a sophomore in Yale College.  She is a con­trib­u­tor to Broad Recog­ni­tion.

This arti­cle does not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the views of Broad Recog­ni­tion.

January 31, 2011

People find feminism in different places. Every feminist has a different ‘aha’ moment; a different time when the f-word suddenly starts to resonate with them.

I have lots of them. Over and over, I remember why I have ...]]>

Photo: Adriel Saporta

By NATALIA THOMPSON

January 31, 2011

People find feminism in different places. Every feminist has a different ‘aha’ moment; a different time when the f-word suddenly starts to resonate with them.

I have lots of them. Over and over, I remember why I have a Yale Feminist t-shirt hanging in my closet.

Recently, I found feminism in the snow. Let me explain.

A couple weeks ago, on the day that should have been a snow day but wasn’t, my anthro class was canceled. Stats, however, was held in spite of the snowpocalypse.

My suitemate and I trudged over to Science Hill, passing several work crews shoveling and snow-blowing en route. After class, we sat down to lunch with a friend.

“Did you see your people cleaning up the sidewalks this morning?” my Mexican friend asked my black friend jokingly.

“Yeah,” she laughed, “but there were more of your people, I think,” referring to all of the Mexican men in reflective vests we had passed en route to stats.

We were joking, but none of us were surprised to see that Latino laborers—a workforce largely invisible to Yale students much of the year—just so happened to be those charged with the task of dealing with the messy aftermath of the snowpocalypse.

I felt more than a little guilty as I downed my salad and falafel, remembering in vivid detail how tiring shoveling can be. (I’m from Wisconsin; I’m no stranger to shoveling.) Your lower back aches from lifting snow onto banks that rise higher and higher. The exhaust of the snow blower gives you a headache. When it’s windy, gritty snow blows into your jacket and stings your eyes. Your fingers go numb.

When I returned to my suite after lunch, I pulled opened the gate to Davenport to find four Mexican men and a Mexican woman in jeans and a jacket that hardly looked warm enough clearing the walk. (I know shouldn’t have assumed they were Mexican, but when one guy shouted to the rest, “Este frío me está matando!” his Spanish sounded pretty Mexican.)

Most Yale students navigate their interactions with Yale workers and New Haven residents by following an unspoken code. Chatting and bantering with dining hall workers is acceptable. But acknowledging the existence of black and Latino workers shoveling snow outside your bedroom window apparently breaks that script.

The sidewalk was narrow, and since the workers had their backs to me and couldn’t see me, I knew I had to say something. I felt foolish speaking in English, though. I mumbled “sorry” and “excuse me” as I brushed by, but it felt rude and unfriendly. Later, I realized I didn’t speak in Spanish because I didn’t have the courage to acknowledge that there is at least a tiny connection between this privileged Yalie and those immigrant workers; that we all grew up speaking the same language. In Spanish, there is solidarity; in English, only an uncomfortable power difference.

Feminism, for me, is about much more than wearing a Yale Feminist t-shirt or working at the Women’s Center. It’s about crossing borders, about creating solidarity across all the lines that divide. It’s about challenging hierarchies that are not merely gendered, but racialized and classed.

It’s not easy to cross those borders, of course. But every interaction, spoken or unspoken, either reinforces those boundaries or chips away at them. And language really does matter, as I realized last week, when another student activist asked me “if I came from a Chicano background.”

I was annoyed by his question—I knew he was asking because he was trying to figure out why I’m a member of MEChA. Despite MEChA’s history as a Chicano student group, most members of MEChA de Yale feel strongly that anyone can fight for immigrant rights, regardless of ethnic background or immigration status.

Reluctantly, I answered, “Yeah, my mom’s Mexican-American. I grew up speaking Spanish.”

“Oh, so you’re not like the rest of us, who have to learn Spanish in order to communicate with the communities we organize?”

I smiled and walked away, but later, as I recounted his comment to my friends, I became incensed. In one thoughtless sentence, he had reinforced what I already knew subconsciously: language is power. And if feminism is about deconstructing power, it is also about deconstructing language.

That’s why I’m constantly tongue-tied as I move through all of the bilingual (and multilingual) spaces on and off campus. Each time I open my mouth and English comes out, I feel guilty for maintaining the palpable distance between me and the Latino workers who shovel our walks, clean our bathrooms, prepare our orders at coffee shops, sell us tacos on the street. Yet speaking in Spanish means assuming that the person in question won’t be offended by the presumption that they prefer Spanish to English (or that they speak Spanish at all).

Despite that caveat, language builds community and solidarity. Speaking in Spanish with other Spanish-speakers resists the stigmatization of our language, and it challenges the powerful trend towards assimilation that dishonors our culture(s).

Next time, I’ll smile and say “con permiso” as I walk by.

Natalia Thompson is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a contributing writer for Broad Recognition.

December 2009

Beatrice Mategwa is a “one-woman show,” according to Marie Claire, which named her one of its “Women Who Rock the World” in 2007. At age 37, Mategwa is a broadcast journalist who directs the television unit ...]]> by NATALIA THOMPSON

December 2009

Beatrice Mategwa is a “one-woman show,” according to Marie Claire, which named her one of its “Women Who Rock the World” in 2007. At age 37, Mategwa is a broadcast journalist who directs the television unit of the United Nations Mission in Sudan. Since 2005, she has lived and worked in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, covering the nation’s North-South conflict. Originally from Kenya, Mategwa has also worked as a producer and reporter for Reuters Television, focusing on conflicts and humanitarian crises in regions across Africa; she has also covered stories for the Kenya Television Network and for other media outlets.

This semester, Mategwa has taken a break from her work in Sudan to participate in Yale’s World Fellows program. On November 20, Mategwa sat down with Broad Recognition staffer Natalia Thompson to discuss her experiences as a journalist and her perspectives on women’s rights in Africa. Below is a version of the interview that has been edited for clarity.

NATALIA THOMPSON: After college, you worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Nairobi, Kenya for three years. How did you make the switch to broadcast journalism?

BEATRICE MATEGWA: I got an offer from Reuters [Television], and I didn’t know whether to take the job. I asked my thesis adviser, and he said, “Take the job, jobs at Reuters don’t come every day.” To me, that was a clear sign that I should take the job. So I took the job, and I haven’t looked back since. It’s been great; I’ve traveled so many places [and] met with so many people who have humbled me with their stories, with their struggles.

NT: Were there other women at the news agencies where you worked?

BM: [At Reuters] I was the only woman reporter working for television news, but there were also women working for the photo and text desks at Reuters… At my first TV job in Nairobi, there were a handful of women, so it wasn’t necessarily a man’s domain. I had four women colleagues there.

“Sudan recently passed an electoral law whereby 25% of the parliament in Sudan will have to be women. For me, I think it’s a bold step…”

NT: After years of working throughout Africa, you’ve spent the last four years in Sudan. What’s the current status of women’s rights in Sudan?

BM: Recently, I attended a women’s conference in Sudan, and the women were talking about what their role would be during the elections [in April 2010]. One woman raised her hand and asked, “How do we educate ourselves as women, so we can vote for women?” For me that was an important question… I did interview some women about what it is that they want, and why it is that they have their own parties registered. Looking at the peace agreement and the peace process, I didn’t ignore the fact that women exist in the whole process.

Sudan recently passed an electoral law whereby 25% of the parliament in Sudan will have to be women. For me, I think it’s a bold step for a country that is ready to embrace peace, in a country whereby twenty years of struggle resulted in a lot of killings, a lot of negative influences on women. Women did suffer… I don’t ignore that fact… not because I’m a woman, but because they’re a part of the whole system.

NT: For seven years, you worked for Reuters Television’s East Africa bureau, which spans fourteen countries. How do women’s rights vary among the countries where you’ve worked?

BM: I didn’t focus on women, per se, but looking back at South Africa, [the Democratic Republic of the] Congo, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, for instance, I think women are doing what they can to be able to get their voices heard… It’s good some of the women have raised their voices. Look at elections in Kenya – we’ve had a number of women presidential candidates. I don’t think the country is ready for a woman presidential candidate, but I think the fact that women were able to go out and campaign was an amazing step.

“Equal opportunity doesn’t mean, ‘I jump, you jump.’ It could mean, ‘How do we help each other symbiotically to benefit different genders?’”

NT: In your experience, are issues of gender and women’s rights different here than they are in parts of Africa?

BM: Women here have more opportunities because there are more resources compared to elsewhere… In my home village, Kakamega, a lot of women forgo or sacrifice what they should have for the other gender – and I think the world over, that’s what happens with a lot of women… A lot of [American women] realize that if they do not do what they have to do, then they won’t get anywhere. But they’re able to do that because there are so many opportunities, compared to where I come from.

NT: You’ve worked in many countries across Africa. Do you think feminism is relevant in those countries? Is it more relevant in some places than in others?

BM: Feminism has been embraced by different communities around Africa, in different ways. Sometimes, it’s been misunderstood by different people; for instance, a lot of people sneer at feminists, because a lot of people understand [feminism] in the extreme. I think it should just be understood for what it is – it should be understood as something that is helping women get equal opportunity. Equal opportunity doesn’t mean, “I jump, you jump.” It could mean, “How do we help each other symbiotically to benefit different genders?”

NT: Do you consider yourself a feminist?

BM: I support women’s rights, I support women’s development, [and] I support women’s progress… I think it’s important to support both genders and let both genders understand why it’s important to be diverse in the thought process… It’s important to give both the men and the women equal chance. For instance, someone would say to me, “Hey, you do a man’s job, running around, carrying cameras, filming… It’s a man’s job.” But I think, “If I can do it, why not?” I mean, I’m doing it because I love to do it.

Natalia Thompson is a freshman in Yale College.