Undoing Gender
Photo Credit: https://www.imagesofempowerment.org
My friends and I were sitting in the college cafeteria when another friend joined us and said, “I just saw your mother eating alone at a restaurant.” It was a bit embarrassing; women did not go alone to restaurants in Mumbai in the 1970s. One disadvantage of going to college across from my home was that there was very little privacy. However, we all accepted that my mother, Madhuben Desai nee Tamboli, was a bit odd. She rarely did what other women did. She was a doctor in an era when women did not attend medical school and, even less, were primary earners in a family. At social gatherings where women assembled in the kitchen, Madhu was usually found in the living room discussing politics with men. Eating alone at a restaurant was minor in comparison.
However, if norms of appropriate behavior are passed down from mother to daughter, it failed in my case. I did not eat alone in a restaurant as a college student. Even today, if I stay in a mid-range hotel in India, I prefer to have room service rather than eat in the restaurant with the predominantly male business travelers staring at me. What made Madhu brave the stares and act in a way that set her apart from the other middle-class women?
Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s pathbreaking 1987 paper titled Doing Gender describes gender as not something we are but rather something we do. Our smallest actions, most of them unconscious, express internalized normative beliefs about what men and women are supposed to do. However, this focus on doing gender does not help us understand how and why some people undo gender.
Two aspects of Madhu’s life experiences may have turned her into a gender troublemaker. She grew up with a mother who suffered from severe mental illness and was an ever-present shadow in the household but could not be relied on to be a parent. For several years, Madhu and her sister alternated going to school to care for their younger brother. This early responsibility might have laid the foundations for the highly competent and self-confident woman that I knew.
Indian Independence movement was the second force that shaped her life. For a few years, Madhu lived near Bardoli Ashram, run by Sardar Patel, where Mahatma Gandhi spent a lot of time. She attended prayers and other activities at the ashram. As Gandhiji tried to create an army of women protesters to confound the colonial administration, preparatory training included developing a mental and physical discipline for everyone – men, women, boys, and girls. Before the prayer meetings at the ashram, exercise sessions were routine. In an era where sports and physical exercise for women were unheard of, this gender disruption was acceptable because it was in service of a greater cause. Coping skills generated by early responsibilities and practicing gender-atypical behavior, even in small ways, may well have been the ingredients that set Madhu on the path of undoing gender.
Over the past few years, the discourse in the development world has moved towards changing gender norms. An interesting brief by Overseas Development Institute identifies five drivers of changes in norms: economic change, education, migration, communications and media, technological change, and political mobilization. I wonder if these top-down changes are sufficient to create innovators and risk-takers. They may sustain change, once it is initiated, but from where will the innovators come in the first place? Watching the British Baking show has not turned me into a baker; it has just convinced me that baking requires skills far beyond my comprehension. My friends speak fondly of learning to bake with their mothers after coming home from school. Madhu neither baked nor did she cook, and I am intimidated by the idea of cooking anything beyond scrambled eggs and toast.
Anil Bordia, the famed founder of Lok Jumbish, once spoke of teaching girls to climb trees to achieve gender equality. I wonder if the way to disrupt gender norms is to find opportunities for people to practice breaking gender norms. Evaluations of the famed microcredit programs in Bangladesh offer exciting insights. Although set up as income-enhancing programs, micro-credit programs like Grameen Bank have had virtually no impact on increasing incomes, but as Simeen Mahmud notes, women’s participation in group-based programs has transformed how they interact with power structures within their households. Perhaps all we need are opportunities to practice breaking gender norms and learn that we are capable of doing it; that we can survive the cognitive dissonance; that the world will not turn against a man who enrolls in a cooking class or a woman who wields a chainsaw; that women can eat in restaurants alone.
