COVID-19 has been a time of reckoning as we come face to face with the injustices that have created structural inequality at so many levels. It could be the plight of the urban labourers as they trudged back to their villages, traversing hundreds of miles, rejected by the very people who used them mercilessly while they could. Ours is the society that turned its eyes away from the predicament of millions of street children and women who were made more vulnerable in abusive homes. Globally, the #BlackLivesMatter movement became even more significant with the stark contrast of racial discrimination in the COVID-19 deaths. People are taking to the streets to protest as centuries of cruelty continues to be called out. The present times are like X-ray (a metaphor used by the activist Arundhati Roy) exposing the fault lines of a society built on indifference and injustice. “The personal is political” is a quote by the American activist Carol Hanisch from the second wave of feminism, where she challenged the dominant idea of politics as being out there in government structures, elections or positions of power. Politics is not something external, but it is present in our homes, streets, and our workspaces. It impacts everything we do, our choices and relationships. In that sense, everything personal is political. The personal is political in the way power and privilege define where we live, how we live and why we die. It is in the way the mother of a child with a disability is shamed for “being a failure” or a girl who does not follow the social rules of a “good girl” is rumoured to be a “slut”, or, in the culture where girls are killed even before they are born because their life is seen as a curse. French intellectual thinker Michel Foucault discussed how modern power operates on social control through normalising judgements through incitement to perpetually evaluate and police ourselves. Women are indoctrinated into this self-surveillance from a very early age. What is most dangerous about this indoctrination is that it is “invisible to those who experience it the most intensely.” We are not aware of it, we are the fish when asked, “How is the water?” exclaim in confusion, “What water?” We swim in this water daily in our homes, schools, public spaces, movies, literature, advertisements, news, TV programs — it is there everywhere. It is our choice how we become aware of it, opt into it and perpetuate it, or mindfully opt out of it as deliberate practice. Language is the thread through which we weave narratives of “good” girls, mothers and wives, where they become the truths and the givens. These constructs do not mean that they are not real for the people experiencing it. The shame that a child on the streets experiences, when she is mocked as “kachra” (dirt), is as real as the shame of the 13-year girl whose older cousin raped her and blamed her for “asking for it.” These dominant discourses can be oppressive as they locate the problem in the individual rather than in the social-cultural-political context. When we talk about socio-cultural political context, it becomes essential to talk about intersectionality. I had been grappling with the idea of intersectionality much before I came upon Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work some years ago. Reading it was definitely an “Aha!” experience. The complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination combine, overlap and intersect to create marginalisation is important to highlight. I use an acronym — DISGRACEFUL — to describe intersectionality and the structural inequality it creates at various levels: Disability (ableism); Income (classism); Sexuality (heteromorphism); Gender (sexism, misogyny, transphobism); Race (racism); Age (ageism); Culture (which I break into — communalism, regionalism, casteism); Educational measurement (institutional violence in schools against children who do not fit in); Family (the normative idea of “good family”); Usefulness (how productive we are in a capitalist society on the basis of which we get exclusive memberships); Looks (colourism and obsession with “fair and lovely”) and Language (English as a sign of power and privilege). Our various identities intersect to create marginalisation. For example, two girls of the same age might face gender discrimination in different ways, depending on DISGRACEFUL. Privilege is something we are born into and we own it like private property, without really doing much to deserve it. From a feminist lens, intersectionality plays out in different ways to create subjugation: Single working mother being shamed and blamed for “neglecting” her children Poverty rendering girls more vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking LGBTQ + persons being targetted and abused on social media Muslim girls being stalked and heckled to go to “Pakistan”, “where they belong”, or being threatened with rape otherwise Dalit girls getting raped and killed and their deaths dismissed as honour killings Wives being labelled as “mental” and put on anti-depressants to make them “calm down” when they show displeasure Girls being pushed to prove their worth and “usefulness” at every step of their lives The normative idea of how every child comes from a typical home with cisgender, heterosexual parents, completely overlooking single parents, homosexual, non-cisgender or unmarried families and for children who do not have a “family” but grow up on the streets, in the shelter and foster homes The educational violence at neurodiverse children, who have disabilities or are from marginalised communities Foucault says, “Where there is power there is resistance”. Resistance has taken shape as social movements led by women as well as resistance in their homes, street corners or shelter homes. Women have led social movements such as Justice for Nirbhaya, Narmada Bachao Andolan and the recent Shaheen Bagh protests. But simply waiting for social movements is not the solution. If the political is personal, then social justice is personal, too. It is not external, something out there that we have to wait to change. We have to do it in our homes, on our streets, in our public and workspaces. We have to start micro acts of resistance against the operations of power that subjugate and diminish people. Let’s be mindful of the beast of intersectionality — DISGRACEFUL — and its silent and invisible workings. The answer is not to invisible the discrimination (dismissing casteism, misogyny, classism) but to expose it and make sure we do not end up becoming its teeth and claws; to be subversive and stand up for each other. I was in awe of the 14-year-old who stood up to the male principal in her school who asked her to take her male classmate’s comments on her body as a compliment. He also advised her against putting kajal to avoid male attention. The next day, all the girls (and some boys) turned up in school with kajal! A big salute to micro acts of reclamation of justice and solidarity. Dr Shelja Sen is a narrative therapist, co-founder, Children First, writer, and, in this column, she curates the know-how of the children and young people she works with. Write to her shelja.sen@childrenfirstindia.com
