Performing Gender

- Vishal Tondon

Paper presented at the Workshop on Curating Visual Culture organized by ACUA, IFA and Jamshetji Tata Trust. Kochi, February 2011

 

Thematic: Curating Visual Culture: The Questions of Region, Gender and Sexuality.

I would like to conceptualize a show, ‘Performing Gender’, and discuss through the visual material how the act of performing gender transforms lives. This transformation occurs through a process of Becoming, a creative process as described by Deleuze, who specifically implicated modern capitalistic society for the suppression of difference. But we see that this kind of suppression that alienates persons from what they can achieve is ever-present. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and difference, we must overturn established identities and so become all that we can become – though we cannot know what that is in advance. This becoming is made possible through the agency of desire, which is creative force. That the works I select for this show bring the epistemic/ontological regime into question is without doubt; they deconstruct categories of sex. But I would also like to discuss these works from the point of view of the concept of Becoming that celebrates the impossibility of organizing life into closed structures.  

I begin with Jehangir Jani. He searches for truths via his cultural history and its mythologies. While these works relook the established order of gender and sexuality, Jehangir’s protagonists get caught in, as Girish Shahane puts it, “a Foucauldian world, where desire and power face off without any apparent mediatory possibilities.”¹ The desires and forces of life exceed the simple actual bodies, and in Jehangir’s images we find these bodies torn apart by the excess, violence and disruption of life. Desire, then, is the creative force that transgresses the boundaries of persons, bodies and intentions. Against the Freudian explanation of desire from bodies, Deleuze describes a desire that produces and exceeds bodies. It is this desire that Jehangir addresses. The desire that exceeds and tears apart the body politic. 

The fragmented bodies, such as in ‘Sissy/phu’s Swing’ present desire as pre-personal, beginning from connections within body parts, and so this desire is also pre-human. Are the fragmented bodies in Jehangir’s work fetishistic? Maybe. But more than that, these bodies are effects of a sexual becoming. Violent fragmentation is the price one must pay if a more radical and revolutionary desire and sexuality is not to be repressed. If desire, as Deleuze puts it, is free flow, creative difference and becoming, then these fragmented body parts are a result of such desire. 

We see desire as creative difference in ‘Nu’s Boat’. The artist joins Deleuze in his rejection of anything like a ‘selfish gene’ theory. The gene is actually radically variant, for variation’s own sake. It is difference, not selfishness, which is the drive of life.

Jehangir visualizes sexuality, becoming and difference anti-oedipally. Even titles of his works manifest strong antipathy to logocentrism. In ‘Manish/A Colaco Divas’, the lived experience of the departed lover is revealed through a play of words that reveal his gender as performed by him; sometimes masculine, sometimes feminine. The work also muses over desire that exceeds and tears apart the body… perhaps by AIDS?

Jehangir discusses the possibility of a ‘sometimes masculine/ sometimes feminine’ personality rather than a rigid binary gender construct.

Abir Karmakar enters the discourse on gendered identity and self-definition by employing the possibilities offered by virtual reality. While he and his contemporaries were interested in investigating aspects of mediatic realism, Abir directed his thematic concerns on the examination of sex-gender equation. Virtual reality in his work is explored in terms of the performativity of gender, instead of in electronic terms as has been done by many of his contemporaries engaged with mediatic realism. By depicting himself as feminine or androgynous, Abir enters the discourse on masculinity. We see here the male trying to reclaim his autonomy, and eschewing the radical dependency of the masculine subject on the female Other.

He excuses himself from following the heterosexual social contract. Drawing on Irigaray’s concept, I would say his is an attempt to reproduce the living bond with woman… a rebirth allowing him to become a sexuate adult capable of eroticism and reciprocity in the flesh.

Another reading of his work could be that he explores the process of becoming. The becoming here is positive, in the sense that he suggests thinking beyond the logic of ‘man.’ Through becoming-woman, man would still be within the same logic of the subject. Woman is the opening away from the closed image of man.

And so, here is a new understanding of desire itself. In Deleuzean terms, becoming-woman is the opening of a new understanding of desire that does not begin with the loss or repression of an original object.

Abir, through the process of becoming-woman, addresses his crisis in the representation of the male figure. 

Tejal Shah performs transgender enactments that help make transgressive sexuality accessible. If ‘normative’ gender was a citation of all previous performances of gender, then Tejal definitely takes the social construct of gender to task. Her work disrupts the iterability and citationality that defines the social construct of gender.

Iterability is disrupted in the unlikely event of a hijra enacting a movie star or a goddess; traffic signal meets tinsel town in Tejal’s ‘Hijra Fantasy Series.’ The charm of this series lies in the possibilities it represents; the possibility for encounters to produce ‘lines of flight.’ The encounters are between the masculine, the feminine, reality, fantasy, banality and glitter, all at the same time. And human being is a power for multiple becomings through these encounters.

The images in this series are positive images; they speak of the positivity of desire and affect. Through these enactments, the hijras live their fantasies and desires; the desire to expand or become-other through what is more than oneself.

The images in this series are wholesome, and speak about the positivity of desire. The Freudian view of the oedipal drama suggests that all human life aims to return to an earlier imagined state before all desire and difference. What we see in ‘Hijra Fantasy Series’ is that life itself is desire, and desire is the expansion of life through creation and transformation.

Through these enactments, the hijras already at a remove from ‘normativity’, further demolish all possibilities of the suppression of difference. This is a world in which difference is celebrated. This world is real, as opposed to the fictional world questioned by Deleuze; the world of continuity and distinction that is an outright fiction of imagination.

In Mona Ahmed, a self-castrated eunuch, we see the embodiment of desire as the expansion of life through creation and transformation. Representations such as ‘Myself Mona Ahmed’ serve the larger function of widening the scope of feminist discourse. Mona’s acts dramatize, as do Abir’s paintings, the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established.

Politics begins with the image of ‘man’ as other than woman, as the being capable of renouncing biological life for cultural needs. ‘Man’ is therefore produced through the repression and prohibition of woman. Here we refer to woman in terms of mother as an object of desire. But it is also true that politics begins with the othering of the woman within the ‘man’. The prohibition of woman produces the law and bodies are regulated by the law. Bodies are effects of the law.

Mona flouts ‘the law’ by making a choice of a body she would inhabit. In spite of biological limitations, she becomes a mother by adopting. Her “drinking too much” is an expression of desires and ambiguities she cannot contain. So she is culpable of flouting ‘the law’ on three counts. ‘The law’ gets back at her with force and punishment. She is excommunicated and her daughter is taken away. Ironically, ‘the law’ is an ominous presence in her hijra community too.

As one follows Mona’s life through the years Dayanita Singh documented her, one is hit with the realization that in the end it is ‘the law’ that had its say – at least to its own satisfaction.

Mona Ahmed – as does Jehangir Jani – follows a radical politics, which will not assume the closed human body as a basic political unit. Mona performs gender, but she is not just a body. She is the total of overwhelming desires that tear her body and life apart.  

In Mithu Sen’s work, timid rosebuds metamorphose into bold and beautiful whorls of scarlet flowers as the vagina dentate devour the phallic order, and woman discovers the singularity of her jouissance. The fragmented body in Mithu’s work too are a result of desire that exceeds and tears apart the body politic. This is the kind of desire that Deleuze describes – a creative force that produces and exceeds bodies. 

Much of Mithu’s work can be read in the light of Luce Irigaray’s ‘The Encounter With the Maternal Body’. “The womb”, says Irigaray, “is fantasized by many men to be a devouring mouth…a phallic threat…there are no words to talk about it except filthy, mutilating words. The corresponding affects will therefore be anxiety, phobia, disgust, a haunting fear of castration.”

And Mithu plays on these fears of men. The vagina dentate here can be seen to savour culture itself, represented by the masculine symbolic as delectable and perishable phallus-shaped plantation.

Here, we see woman ready to take on the slurs in a rather sporting way, and she seems to be saying, “Our vagina are gaping, monstrous mouths, an abyss into which you might lose yourself, and what is more horrifying, your manhood too.” I am sure every man would like to hear that. Man is left with no choice, and in a bid to save the phallus, would have to reconsider the phallic erection as a masculine version of the umbilical cord. Irigaray hopes that if man were to consider the phallic erection a masculine version of the umbilical cord, he would in the act of penetration reproduce the living bond with woman. Seems like Mithu won’t wait forever for such realizations to dawn on men. If they don’t get it, she will make them understand by the hand.  Unless woman’s role in culture is acknowledged as autonomous and positive, she will assume the role of the devouring goddess and dispose of the masculine symbolic of culture itself.

With her depictions of vagina dentate, Mithu takes potshots at masculine anxieties and demonstrates that the world of madness, originally attributed to the feminine, is actually the world of the masculine. As Irigaray puts it, “We would do better to take back our own madness and return men theirs!”

In the work of Pushpamala N we again see the refutation of the ‘selfish gene’ theory. Her feminist explorations take off from her outrage at the Freudian notion of the bounded individual, and more specifically woman as the bounded individual. The identity and the possibilities of this individual are limited by the workings of a ‘selfish gene’, that determines her biological role once and for all.

 

Anthropometric studies compared the skulls of aboriginals, criminals, prostitutes and insane as primitive and under-developed types. Pushpamala mockingly adds woman to the list of the ‘primitive and under-developed types.’ The attitudes behind these anthropometric studies are not a far cry from those of the hystericization of women’s bodies, a concern even Tejal Shah has addressed elsewhere in her work the iconography of hysteria.

Finally, I would like to mention the work “Unity in Diversity” by Nalini Malani, which focuses on the cultural forms that nationalism takes and how the agenda of nationalism spills into the subject of gender. If the female body represents national territory, then in the light of the Gujarat pogrom it should now be represented as corrupted and disintegrating. It is precisely through this process of disintegrating that Nalini reclaims the woman shorn of attributes and affiliations – a person of her own. The nationalist agenda works on the basis of suppression of difference. Nalini reclaims the woman for the purpose of overturning established identities, so that she can become all that she can.

Notes:

1.        Mortimer Chatterjee. ‘Jehangir Jani, the Making of ‘Peers’.’ ALTERNATE LYRICISM Jehangir Jani. Mapin Publishing 2006

Bibliography:

1.        Claire Colebrook. Gilles Deleuze. Routledge Critical Thinkers. Routledge. 2002

2.        Judith Butler. Gender Trouble. Routledge. 1990

3.        Pamela Thurschwell. Sigmund Freud. Routledge Critical Thinkers. Routledge. 2000

4.        Luce Irigaray. ‘The Bodily Encounter With the Mother’. Modern Criticism and Theory; A Reader. (Eds.) David Lodge and Nigel Wood. Doring Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd. 2010

5.        Mortimer Chatterjee. ‘Jehangir Jani, the Making of ‘Peers’.’ ALTERNATE LYRICISM Jehangir Jani. Mapin Publishing 2006

6.        Twentieth-Century Indian Sculpture; The Last Two Decades. (Ed.) Shivaji K. Panikkar. Marg Publications. 2000

7.        Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. Thames and Hudson Limited, London. 1997

8.        Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857-2007. (Ed.) Gayatri Sinha. Marg Publications. 2009