Curated lists and round-ups crowd the news space now, eliminating any doubt that the year is up already...that is if you were ever in denial about it. That’s why there is no point in repeating the highpoints of the last 12 months in this column. Having said that, I begin by pinching myself to be sure that I am not dreaming — a mainstream daily is still allowing a column that is rarely funny, sometimes emotional and mostly angry, but one clearly on gender still appearing in its pages. And that’s definitely something considering the times we live in.
The only lists I dig are the to-do kinds but if your list palette is more diverse than mine, I highly recommend the Ladies Finger’s ‘100 times we were thrilled to be a woman this year’ for remembering and reliving the gender highpoints of the year. Here’s to many more years of The Ladies Finger, Feminism in India, Fearless Collective, Dalit Women Fight, FemPositive, Agents of Ishq, and all other independent media that have a gender focus.
While I’m at it, a shout out to dear Nalini aunty, who well into her 80s continues to run the Giggles bookstore, meeting every obscure reading request, and thinks the hardest when her regulars are taking the ‘read harder’ challenge.
In addition to discovering fabulous women writers and artists in 2017, I rediscovered several friendships, several of them female and understood the real power of a sisterhood. In protesting and in partying, in making voices heard and in having fun doing that, I learnt that no one could beat a bunch of women — this is from conference notes in Chaibasa and Chiang Mai.
This year, I also learnt to love and think about love without inhibition, began to see love and dependency as choices that fall well within the realm of independence and freedom, and decided that to be a ‘Bad feminist’ is better than not being feminist at all. The personal is political as we all know, but in a world that takes on and takes apart everything on social media, the public forum is really a huge political learning ground.
By giving us the hashtags #notallmen, #fopleave, #metoo, #thelist, 2017 has successfully set the agenda for the coming year. We only have to look away from our black mirrors to be shown that men can make a mess of the state, but on a more serious note, that we live in a society that restricts women’s choices and mobility, that though not all men are the same, there is not one woman, nor gender non-conforming person who has not been harassed because of their gender.
As we plunge into another year, we are to remember that the demand for first day of period leave is just as important as keeping girls in school, improving sanitation and access to clean water, breaking stigma around menstruation, improving women’s health, or recognising that we have a majorly informal workforce, because one fight does not have to wait for another.
While the Weinstein scandal helped create a climate to talk about sexual harassment, we need to build and strengthen more ‘Women in the Media’ collectives to oust our own Harveys and penalise them. But before that, we need a build a culture that is intolerant of harassment instead of the other clutter, and to do that, we need feminists on all sides of the infamous ‘list’ to work together. In short, if ‘Feminism’ is the word of this year, it’s got to be the #mood of the next.
Archanaa Seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton