There is a strong performative aspect to this striving to become the embodiment of the teenager. Girlhood is sold as a consumer choice and a form of self-definition that points up affluence and exclusivity. In an aggressive job market, the perfected girly self leverages a competitive edge.
The…
Packaged girlhood and its anti-
The Dacca Gauzes
Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. “No one
now knows,” my grandmother says,“what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.” She wore
it once, an heirloom sari fromher mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleyswere distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that onlyin autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.
—Agha Shahid Ali. The Half-Inch Himalayas.
Fear, anger and being a (middle-class) woman in Calcutta
I hear that the average middle-class woman in this city finds it increasingly scary to negotiate its public spaces, given the recent rise in the media coverage of gruesome rapes. I hear many long for those prelapsarian times when the streets felt safe even late at night (when was this, I wonder).
I find this attitude extremely irksome.
Just because rapes are now being reported more widely (post December 16) does not necessarily mean that women are at any greater (or lesser) risk than when untold numbers of rapes and other instances of systematic violence against women would fail to garner any attention.
We have always been at risk. Life in this city, like life anywhere else in the ‘Third World,’ is precarious.
We have to constantly learn to negotiate our lives in whatever fashion we deem most suitable for ourselves, using whatever tactics we find most feasible.
Did our mothers not tell us that it would be a relentless struggle? What is the point of being scared? Let us be angry instead, and stop paying attention to 10-second solutions that involve removing ourselves from public spaces, as if somehow, by doing so, we will escape any risk of harm. Life is precarious here. Anything can happen to anyone at any time.
The more women disappear from the sidewalks, the metro, the street, buses, trams, autorickshaws, and invest in cabs and private cars, the more risk there is of their absence becoming ‘normal.’ And that, for me, is a far scarier prospect than the daily struggle with paranoia and fear that most women face simply by going about their lives.
We are all at risk, whether we are at home, in our own vehicle, in a cab, on the street, at the mall, or anywhere else. This state does not guarantee our safety anywhere. If that is the case, what is the point in participating in this fear-mongering? Is it not more reasonable to simply exercise our rights (does this state guarantee any?) by refusing to vacate those spaces that belong to all citizens and resist their transformation into male fiefdoms by remaining visible participants in the everyday life of our city? Is it not more reasonable that instead of letting ourselves be cast as essentially rapable and desecrable bodies that need protection through appeals to sisterhood, daughterhood, motherhood, wifehood, we affirm other roles we play, other hats we wear, other ways in which we participate in the civic/economic/political/cultural/social/intellectual life of our city? Is it not more reasonable that instead of cowering in fear or wallowing in apathy, we stand tall and work to mobilise our outrage and extend our solidarity to those that are denied their rights of participation in the shared spaces of our city?
pâro
n. the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, colder, colder, colder.
meet Moza bint Nakhan, who was the first Emirati woman to get a driver’s license.أول مواطنة تحصل على رخصة قيادة (by Mohammed Al-Khatip)
#kolkata #monsoon #nofilter
If the goal is to normalize mixed-race families, as Hatcher-Mays applauds Cheerios for, then we should all be scared for our lives. Normalization is a bit like reform—as simultaneously boring and dangerous—and, as American sociologist and race theorist Howard Winant wrote in a nod to Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, “reformism is better understood as incorporation and absorption of conflict than as conflict resolution.” Multiculturalism, multiracialism, pluralism, diversity, and the endless etc. of 21st century neologisms fit into this schema of subsumption rather than disruption. What isn’t embraced in the script is that Blackness isn’t that normal at all. (via love, desire, and impossible measures | THE STATE)
Tumbling before Tumblr.
Amitav Ghosh. The Shadow Lines.
(via lastmutations)
#kolkata #monsoon #nofilter
