Organizer: David Ludden, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Amrita Basu, Amherst College
Discussant: Shahnaz J. Rouse, Sarah Lawrence College
This panel challenges universal propositions about patriarchy and explores comparative modes of theoretical and empirical inquiry into patriarchal formations of power. Basic concepts in social theory-from capitalism and rationality to bureaucracy and feudalism-are routinely subjected to questions about their universal applicability, and especially about differences in their meaning and construction outside Europe. Critiques of orientalism make us wary of any assumptions or simple assertions that Asia is essentially or necessarily different in its fundamentals, but creative new research on gender has opened up the question as to whether the term "patriarchy" can be deployed universally without using contextual qualifiers. Do Asian types of patriarchy require distinctive theorization? The papers on this panel focus on this question by considering case studies from South Asia. The authors are specialists in anthropology, sociology, political science, and history, who work on various regions within South Asia. Our discussant is an anthropologist who studies history, gender, and southeast Asia; she will seek to expand our interdisciplinary discussion into other regions of Asia. This is therefore a "South Asia Panel" that seeks to contribute to Asian Studies more generally.
Exploring the Assumption of Universality in Theories of Patriarchy: A Perspective
from Contemporary Bangladesh
Shelley Feldman, Cornell University
The question of patriarchal power and its various expressions is a hallmark of what constitutes the study of contemporary gender relations. Patriarchal power has been used to frame questions about women and work, constructions of nationalisms, formulations of exploitation, and conceptions of the household, state capacities and citizenship. Does this framing have regional specificities? If so, how have they been shaped by debates in South Asia? Or, conversely, how have these concerns shaped debates about South Asia? In this paper I examine contemporary struggles between Bangladeshi women and changing institutional practices in order to question the assumed universality of particular patriarchal relations. In the context of a continually changing fundamentalist politics and the dramatic reorganization of political and economic relations, what does this exploration suggest about the historical and cultural particularity of patriarchal power? Does recognizing the construction of specific gender relations in Bangladesh challenge appeals for a universalist theory of patriarchal domination? Or, as is more generally inferred, do patriarchal relations merely take varied expression and have different consequences across spatial and social domains?
The Creation of Modern Patriarchy in Agrarian South Asia
David Ludden, University of Pennsylvania
Today, "patriarchy" refers to the power of men over women, but older meanings of this term indicate other aspects of patriarchal power that demand attention. Historically, patriarchies involve the ranking of men within and across families and generations. This process of social ranking involves the agency of both men and women; it also changes patriarchal formations of power dramatically, if slowly, over time and space. Patriarchies have thus come to differ significantly across regions and sites in the contemporary world. In South Asia, patriarchal power is distinctive in Rajasthan, Bangladesh, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, for instance; and urban patriarchies work along rather different lines than their rural counterparts in the subcontinent. In this paper, I focus on the creation of modern patriarchies in agrarian regions of South Asia during the early modern period, circa 1550-1850, when early modern states-from the Mughal to the British-formed the institutional basis upon which modern entitlements to family property would be built, and thus put patriarchy on a distinctive footing in different regions of state power. In this period, urban and rural differences also emerge that would evolve into the modern dichotomy between "feudal" and "capitalist" forms of patriarchy.
Capitalizing on Patriarchy? Female Factory Labor in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
Dina M. Siddiqi, University of Pennsylvania
Collusions between "patriarchal" and capitalist modes of domination are often critical to multinational production that draws on a female labor force. The effect of industrial employment, frequently, has been to rework older forms of domination, as well as to produce new forms of gendered power relations. Despite cultural and historical specificities, studies of women industrial workers in south and southeast Asia reveal a striking similarity in the deployment of patriarchal modes in industrial settings. Certain tropes-sexuality, respectability, modesty-are consistently invoked. At the same time, on closer examination, the analytical distinction between capitalist and patriarchal domination can be difficult to sustain.
Can we then speak of patriarchy as a separate system? If so, is there something specific about patriarchies in South Asia? Or about the deployment of gender relations in multinational capital? This paper approaches these questions by studying the processes through which gendered forms of domination are exercised in multinational factories in contemporary Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Engendering Communal Violence: Men as Victims, Women as Agents
Amrita Basu, Amherst College
"Engendering Communal Violence" seeks to challenge the widespread assumption that patriarchy inevitably entails male domination and female victimization. Although this may be true in the long run, the varied forms that patriarchal domination can assume correspond to varied relations among gender and communal inequalities in South Asia.
Here I explore the two most important periods of communal violence in contemporary India: of Hindus against Sikhs, following Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984, and Hindus against Muslims amidst the riots that accompanied the Ramjanambhoomi movement between 1990 and 1993. In both instances, communal violence revealed and reconfigured gender relations. It revealed Hindu men's perception of the Muslim and Sikh men as "hyper-masculine" and of themselves as emasculated. It enabled Hindu men to humiliate men from minority communities in a manner in which women are often degraded. The figurative emasculation of men also created opportunities for Hindu women's expression of agency. Encapsulated within communal violence are complicated interconnections between gender and communalism that have important implications for social relations in everyday life.