DO CLOTHES MAKE THE PERSON ?
DO CLOTHES
MAKE
THE PERSON ?
The Significance
Of Human Attire
Marcos Pallis
Radical Essentials Pamphlet Series
Yusef Progler, Series Editor
A long with food and shelter, clothing must rank among the most important but least analyzed sites of colonization. And even those works that do examine focus almost entirely on the material dimension of dress. Few works, if any, take the necessary additional step of defining clothing as a component of spirituality. Thus, to find a work that addresses both the material and spiritual dimensions of clothing is no easy task. This is partly due to the segregation of knowledge in modern academia, where discussions of spirituality are eschewed by materialist scholars, while discussions of materialism—except to refute it—are ignored by religious scholars. However, a flaw in the current mode of organized intellectual activity in the rather exclusive world of modern universities should not hinder the rest of us from making the necessary connections.
March Pallis clearly saw the connections between dress and spirituality in his travels throughout India and Tibet during the mid 20th century. As a disaffected Westerner who was invited into the closed society of Tibetan Buddhism, Pallis was ideally situated to explore the life of spirituality in the modern world, and he paid special attention to the more mundane aspects of that life, such as clothing. At the same time, his years of study in Eastern religions gave him a keen insight to their spiritual traditions, especially Tibetan Buddhism but also Hinduism and Islam. It is due to this latter point that this pamphlet is perhaps more esoteric than previous pamphlets, but I felt that it was necessary to let Pallis present his ideas using the concepts of the religious traditions—Hinduism and Islam in particular—in order to make his point about clothing and spirituality.
One of the main points made by Paills in this essay is that clothing does not entirely make the person—for to say such a thing would be to seek refuge in thee materialist analysis of the academics—but that clothing does play a major party in forming and maintaining our identity, Both spiritual and social. However, this dual sense of identity is not that which is bound up with things like “identity politics” which seeks only to explore identity as a form ascription but without moving beyond relativism. For Pallis, identity was something that realizes our innate connection to an unseen world of the Divine, and how this intertwines with our connections to the seen world, that of society. Identity, then is two-fold, we are both spiritual beings and social beings, and clothing affects our identity in both realms. This distinction sets Pallis’s work apart from most discipline-bound academic scholarship on clothing and colonization.
In making this point, Pallis also concludes that clothing is equally complicit in unmaking the person; that is, clothing is a key aspect of losing one’s identity, both spiritual and social. For this, he turns to materialist and historical analysis by looking at how modern tyrannies, of the left and right variety, have attacked the spiritual authorities in various cultures directly while also attacking spiritual authority indirectly by demanding or coercing people to abandon traditional dress and wear the uniforms of modernity. These uniforms are of two types, those emphasizing conformity—such as the party dress of various communist and fascist movements—and those emphasizing consumerism—such as the types of clothing donned by those riding the fickle waves of fashion. Spiritual identity is unmade by particularly destructive to non-Western peoples who wear the modern dress, as it is so far removed from their own spiritual and cultural traditions.
In addition to being intellectually stimulating, this essay resonates with me on a more personal level. Since my first visit to the Third World, a summer spent in Syria in the early 1990’s I have taken to wearing various forms of Eastern dress, from the long robes of the Arabs and Africans to the two piece loose fitting pants and shirt of South Asia. For me, initially, this choice was about personal comfort. I felt more at ease and relaxed in Eastern clothing. But at the same time I began to notice how other people-acquaintances and strangers alike—changed their attitude and behavior toward me, and after several fearsome incidents on the New York City subway system, I confined my wearing of Eastern dress to home long. From then on I lived a sort of schizoid life, wearing Western clothes in public and Eastern clothes in private. More recently, after leaving the United States, I have taken to wearing Eastern clothing full time, and although it still irks some—many American expatriates and tourists I encounter see me as a sort of traitor to the Western tradition—I have found the Eastern societies to be by and large more tolerant of my choices.
When I first read Pallis a couple of years age, I realized that my comfort with Eastern clothes was more than just bodily; I had been feeling a sort of spiritual affinity with Eastern dress that I had not consciously articulated. Pallis puts those feelings into world, and it is my sincere interest that his world can reach those who are struggling to wear their own traditional dress, in public or private, as well as those who are pondering the impact of dress on identity and spirituality.
Yusef Progler
July 2004, Penang
THE APPEARANCE OF BEING CLOTHED
Of the many things a man puts to use in the pursuit of his earthly vocation there are none, perhaps, which are so intimately bound up with his whole personality as the clothes he wears. The more obviously utilitarian considerations influencing the forms of dress, such as climate, sex, occupation and social status can be taken for granted; here we are especially concerned with the complementary aspect of any utility, that of its significance, whence is derived its power to become an integrating or else a disintegrating factor in people’s lives. As for the actual elements that go to define a particular form of apparel, the principal ones are shape or,” material, color and ornamental features, if any, including fastenings and also trimmings of every sort. At the individual level also, dress is endowed with such a power to veil, (or reveal) as it has. The concepts of change of clothes and becoming (bhava) are inseparable: Being (bhuti) only can be naked, in that, as constituting the principle of manifestation, it remains itself in the Unmanifest. Ultimately, the whole task of “shaking off one’s bodies” (or garments) is involved—these including all that contributes to the texture of the outer self “that is not my Self.”
For the human being, his choice of dress, within the limits of whatever resources are actually available to him is especially indicative of three things: firstly, it shows what that person regards as compatible with a normal human state, with human dignity; secondly, it indicates how he likes to picture himself and what kind of attributes he would prefer to manifest; thirdly, his choice will be affected by the opinion he would wish his neighbors to have of him, this social consideration and the previous factor of self-respect being so closely bound up together as to interact continually.
VIEW OF THE HUMAN SELF AND ITS VOCATION
Thus, the costume which a man wears as a member of any traditional society is the sign, partly conscious and partly unconscious, that he accepts a certain view of the human self and its vocation, both being envisaged in relation to one Principle in which their causal origin (alpha) and their final goal (omega) coincide. It is inevitable that such a costume should be governed by a Canon, representing the continuity of the tradition, the stable element, Being; within that cannot there will, however, be ample room for individual adaptation, corresponding to the variable element in existence, impermanence, Becoming.
The assumption of modern Western dress has often been the earliest step in the flight from Tradition : it would be but poetic justice for its divestment to mark the first step on an eventual path of return—to much to hope perhaps, yet the possibility is worth mentioning. In itself such action might seem little enough, for dress is not the man himself, admittedly. Nevertheless, if it be true to say that “clothes do not make the man” yet can it as truly be declared that they do represent a most effective influence in his making—or his unmaking.
Refusing Globalisation & the Authentic Nation
Feminist Politics in Current Conjuncture
Nivedita Menon
A useful entry point into the terrain I wish to explore is the recent drive by some militant groups in Kashmir to enforce the veil for Muslim women in the state. This drive is over a year old now, and began with an ultimatum issued by a little-known militant group in Kashmir, the Lashkar-e-Jabbar. The group announced that all Muslim women in the valley of Kashmir would have to wear the burqu and those who did not would be ‘punished’. There followed attacks with acid on the faces of unveiled women, and threats to shoot after the deadline passed. Apart from one major women’s organisation, Dukhtaraan-e-Millat, which supported the call, all other militant groups denounced this ultimatum, and raised doubts as to the existence of the group calling itself Lashkar-e-Jabbar, suggesting it could be part of the Indian state’s strategy to discredity militancy in Kashimir.However, the threat was real, and many women have taken to the burqa who didn’t wear one till now. After what seemed like a lull, once again the drive was intensified in 2002, this time in the name of another organisation. In this phase, the threat was no longer distant—three young women were killed for being unveiled.
For those struggling to protect democratic rights in India, this is yet another attempt in several over the past few years to control women’s dress and behaviour in the name of cultural purity. With the increasingly free circulation of images from western consumerist culture through television channels as a result of lifting of restrictions in the era of ‘libralisation’, concern has been expressed at various levels about the threat to ‘Indian’ culture. Organisations of the Hindu right such as the Bajrang Dal and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad have been trying to enforce dress codes for women in universities, claiming that sexual harrassment would decrease if women dressed ‘respectably’ and according to ‘Indian tradition’. Interestingly, the Lashkar-e-Jabbar in Kashmir also ‘appealed’ to unveiled ‘Hindu and Sikh sisters’ to wear a bindi in order to be spared from attack. Clearly, when it comes to the marking of female bodies with cultural signs,s the right wing is united across ideological lines. Additionally there is the characteristic homogenisation of the Other (in this case, the non-Muslim), for of course, the bindi is not worn by Sikh women.
It is by now a phenomenon well recorded by feminist scholarship and politics, that communities vest their honour in ‘their’ women, and that cultural policing begins with marking and then drawing women ‘inside’ the community. Particularly when a community feels its identity or existence under threat, then its proud assertion of identity is always marked on the bodies of ‘its’ women first. For instance, the increasing numbers of Muslim women wearing burqa in the state of Kerala, where this practice was rare, is often dated from the demolition of the Babri masjid. This phenomenon is not restricted to minority communities alone; majority communities too respond to the threat of ‘western’ culture in this way, as is evident from the violent reactions to the holding of the Miss World contest in India from the Hindu right and in Nigeria from the Muslim right. But this is something feminists have written and talked about for a long time now. What I am interested in here is another aspect of this phenomenon.
Let me take up a statement made by a young Muslim woman in Kashmir who took to the veil after the threats. In an interview with a journalist critical of the diktat, she said that she had never worn a burqa before, that It made her terribly unhappy, and that she felt restricted and bound. “I used to go the beauty parlour regularly”, she said plaintively, “but now I don’t have to bother about my face.” This statement is also put in a bold blurb across the article, so that it is what first strikes you, the poignancy of a young girl declaring sadly that she no longer has to bother about her face, because she has been imprisoned inside a burq. However, at another point in the interview, she conceded that she felt safer in public, because men were more respectful. ‘It can be liberatory’, she said, ‘you can go wherever you want to go.
So there you have it—the burqa offering a refuge from sexual harassment and some of the restrictions in mobility faced by young girls, and the beauty parlour representing the realm of self-expression. What this formulation hides is the more complex coercion on the ‘beauty parlour’ side of the equation. Is cultural policing any less effective when not backed by a gun but by societal consensus ? When Brazillan women die on plastic surgeon’s tables, or when American teenagers risk death and eat less and less in order to stay beautifully thin, is that cultural policing too, or an expression of ‘free will’? If that young Kashmiri girl could continue to go to beauty pariours, would she have been much freer to express ‘herself’? I must emphasise that this is by no means a simple rhetorical question, but a significant dilemma for feminist understanding. Consider the increasing numbers of middle-class Indian women, who would have been housewives with no income of their own, who are now setting up beauty parlours in their homes. In doing so, they become small entrepreneurs (government documents recording loans given for this purpose list it as a ‘non-traditional’ method of income generation, along with enterprises like desktop publishing and managing public phone booths). Presumably, these women then acquire a slightly greater degree of control over resources than they had as housewives. However, the mushrooming of such beauty parlours reflects also the new overwhelming pressure on even women from traditional backgrounds to ‘look good’ in the new way, and to spend time and money doing so.
There is a peculiarity to this moment in history, particularly when one is located in a post-colonial democracy like India. In the face of a renewed and relentless moral rhetoric through the 90s from the right, which targets women as the repositories of cultural purity, one kind of critical response has been from the globalised elite, celebrating ‘choice’, ‘individual freedom’ and ‘women’s right to their bodies’. For instance, a story in the Wall Street Journal about beauty contests in Pakistan was titled ‘Lifting the Veil from Pak Ramps’.6 thus, when the right has attacked beauty contests and celebrations of Valentine’s Day as being ‘western’ and ‘morally corrupting’, the westernised Indian elites have reasserted pride in our ‘modernity’, and our women’s’ confidence on the international stage. In this debate, the left seems to have fallen into the trap of equating ‘anti-globalist/anti-imperialist’ with ‘nationalist’. In the process, it has taken positions similar to those of the right. For instance, the two state governments that banned beauty contests in 2001 were the BJP ruled Uttar Pradesh and the Left Front-ruled West Bengal. Neither party made the move from the perspective of a critique of the commodification of women’s bodies; rather the justification was in terms of ‘cultural purity’ in both cases.
The challenge for feminist politics in this context is the working out of a different space for a radical politics of culture, one that is differentiated from both right and left wing articulations of cultural and economic nationalism, as well as from the liberarian and celebratory responses to globalisation from the consuming elites.
Responses to Globalisation
Here it is instructive to consider a significant argument that presents globalisation as uniformly oppressive, especially because of what is assumed to be its seamless compatibility with the politics of the Hindu right in India. Kumkum Sangari, in a paper titled ‘The Beauty Queen and the Bomb’ correctly points out that both the defence of the beauty contest by the new Indian middle class as well the opposition to the event from the Hindu right “hinge on nationalism and carry an overt antifeminism”7 However, she attempts to understand this contradictory response exclusively within the frame of political economy. She delineates the two responses as corresponding to ‘two distinct historical moments’. On the one hand, the Hindu right represents “the era of merchant capital, which favoured extraction through maintaining pre-capitalist relations in colonised formations”, during which’ ‘backward’ enclaves cordoned from the marked and ‘the west’ became synonymous with authentic indigenous culture”. On the other hand, the new middle classes represent the “modernised’ enclaves” that in the current period are becoming the ‘epicentre of authentic culture’. Thus, Sangari separates the two responses as corresponding to temporally different moments of capitalism. However, as the argument proceeds, the distinction becomes impossible to maintain, for the contradictions are too many. After all, the new middle class also forms part of the Hindu right’s support base, and this is partly the reason why the prime minister leading the right wing coalition applauded the successes of Indian women in beauty contests. This fact is too easily dismissed by Sangari as a “division of labour in the Hindu right between ‘moderate’ parliamentarians and street-smart vandals”, with the former supporting structural adjustment and liberalisation policies, while the latter maintain the myth of Hindu right wing nationalist claims through overt opposition to “some of its epiphenomenal forms”. The latter (whom she exemplifies by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) she holds, no longer even mention the economy.”9
Advocacy Internet
CONSUMPTION STYLES
Consider these facts as presented by the US-based World Watch Institute-Industrialised nations are home to 22 percent of the world’s population but consume 60 per cent of the world’s food and 70 per cent of its energy. The average Americans energy use is equal to the consumption of 33 Indians, 147 Bangaladeshis or 422 Ethiopians. Every child born in America consumes approximately 30-40 times the natural resources that a child does in a developing country (Facts, courtesy : Humanscape). All researches and evidence points to the fact that ‘America’s wasteful consumption patterns and emerging population is steadily degrading (and eroding) the world’s natural resource base and robbing the present and future generations of a decent quality of life (‘Zero Population Growth’-a non mainstream US think tank.)
The irony is that this slow genocidal destruction of the lives of the weak and vulnerable of the world by this high consumptive life style is legitimised and accepted in the name of development and progress. And those bearers of destruction are given protection while those who protest this destruction are penalised. And so when the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) showed their ire with the MNCs by breaking down the premises of a retail outlet of KDC, the management of KFC was extended full protection by Mr. Deve Gowda only because he did not want to scare away the MNC’s. On the other hand, a group like the KRRS, that has stood for the interests of the small farmers whose livelihood is at stake now with the influx of multinationals, which was forced to resort to a symbolic protest to convey this intensity of their concern, were quickly condemned as vandals and extremists.
PATRIARCHY, PROFIT AND BEAUTY
So existing markets had to be widened and new markets captured or created for the produce and that led to aggressive competition between companies (now against corporatiqns) and countries. They quickly resorted to further means of exploiting women by using her body as a medium for marketing through advertisements. And the more intense the competition, to lure men into buying their commodities lesser the attire on women.
The big corporations were not thus satisfied with killing millions of people world over with their armament industry. They ventured into drug manufacture destroying the human immune base to initiate as increasing demand for Non-Essential Drug Therapy. But not enough. They were greedy for a continuous flow of huge profits which was possible only through an insatiable demand in an ever greed market for the very same products in different disguise. They plunged deep into creating wasteful industries and fanciful products. Entertainment as an industry flourished. Fashion jewellery and designer wear, cosmetics, detergents, perfumes and creams, so-called health care products, tonics and syrups, sports goods and sports wear, musical album and equipment filed the market, Media as industry in itself churned out much nonsense on ‘Fashion’, Beauty’, ‘Sex’ and kindled a craze for specific types of sports and entertainment packages. Video and beauty parlours mushroomed. Mega musical nights and sports events were sponsored and organised at national, international levels. Similarly fashion shows and beauty contests were organised, all out on the profit race.
Under this vast canvas of market concern where people matter next to nil women face a three fold danger, of being used as an objectified medium for commodity sale, of being used as a commodity on sale, and of being the target consumer.
The inhuman ploys of lowering the woman to a sexual frame for narrow political and patriarchal ends denies woman a basic, human existence. She is just an object for consumption in the male market, the claim that Beauty contest will promote the tourism industry aim only at promoting prostitution, as an industry.
WOMEN-THE TARGETED CONSUMER
• White hair-watch out-Dye it immediately
• Eyabrows are too thick-Pluck it
• Nose is flat-Reshape it through cosmetic surgery
• Lips protruding-cut to size
• No not red enough-use lipstick
• Breast is too small-Add silicone
• Breast is too big-subtract some flesh
• Breast is pendulous-use padded bras
• Waistline is widening-Horror-use the slimmer, exerciser
• You are too fat-Join health clubs
• You are too thin-Take the tonic
• Hey hair is falling-Apply the right oil
• The skin needs nourishing-use vitamin
• Got to remain soft-use the moisturiser
• Got to be modern-go to the parlour cut the hair, curl it.
• Cut the nails-apply polish.
• Fill the cheeks-foundation.
• Got to be fair-solution-fairness cream
• Need to smell good-try this soap or use that perfume
• Wrinkles-Never-protect the skin-use sun screen lotions.
• Dryness-Avoid-use could creams.
• Lakme, Ponds, Revelon,–use, use, Use the right dress, Use the right shoe, Go on using-Never Never stop.
• A woman has to be young always
• A woman has to be ‘Beautiful’
• A woman has to be sexually appealing etc.
There are regular columns on Beauty queries in so-called magazines. There are articles after articles on ‘how to please the partner’. Books on the ‘art o f make-up’ and the ‘Secrets of Successful Sexual life’ etc.
Male domination required that the woman view herself only as the man-as a Sex object. It required that she considered the service of man as the sole aim or the primary motive in her life, just as the man did. It required that she subordinated herself to his domination on her own. All this was possible through the whipping up of a mass Hysteria on the need for a race towards a set concept of beauty as appreciated by the trade-this was said to be the fundamental criteria for the evaluation of a woman and thus for her very existence. It was essential for any exchange, food, shelter, security, love which was all said to be provided by the man. It meant that if a woman is not beautiful she could be ignored, of she appears old, she will be neglected. Having hammered such concepts in, the woman was now the slave who not only voluntarily submitted herself to slavery, who not only justified and glorified this slavery but also ended up paying for this slavery literally.
Excepted from Beauty Conttest : Its Ugly Face – A Mahila Jagruti Publication
“MANUFACTURING CONSENT”
Analysing Media Reportage of the Miss World Beauty Degeant 1996
Bhargavi Nagaraja
Introduction
Marketing the World through Media
Whether we like it or not, media has arguably become modern society’s most important institution of cultural reproduction. This also reflects the changing lifestyles and changing family structure and practices where both parents are away at work for the better part of the day and children are left to the tender mercies of child-minders and more than ever now to the indefatiguable television set in the living room. Notably, television has already been wholly colonised by corporate interests. Print media has not lagged far in countries like India where electronic media is not as well-directed or as expansively used as in the West. Therefore the rapidly escalating collective onslaught through the media to project a vision of the good life and make it prevail. The goal is not merely to sell products and stregthen consumer culture. It is also to create a political culture that equates the corporate interest with the human interest in the public mind. In the worlds of Paul Hawken (see ‘The Sustainability’). “Our minds are being addressed by addictive media serving corporate sponsors whose purpose is to rearrange reality so that viewers forget the world around them.”
The new golbal culture uses many items/things all of which have been pushed to appropriate status as cultural symbols like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Nike Shoes, MTV, etc. With deep-rooted changes being nudged into popular consciousness, it is only a matter of time before old symbols are quickly rejected in the name of modernity and culture. New props as symbols are willy-nilly embraced and propagated. But more dangerously, old values once prescribed to with faith and even a kind of religiosity, are now attached to these new props. The best example of this is reported by a friend from Bangkok, Thailand, where The Little Buddha temple attracts a great many visitors. Offerings have traditionally been flowers and candles for the altar. But in recent years another offering has been laid at the feet of The Enlightened One, and one can see here and there that new symbol of popular culture-a can of Coca Cola. Shocking and offensive to many, it raises the nagging question : Can a Coke be equated with an offering of reverence ? Sarah Ferguson believes that the commercialisation of youth culture, especially music that was once a primary instrument of expressive rebellion for adolescents, keeps youth from owning even their adolescents, keeps youth from owning even their own rebellion and actively inhibits the development of a counter culture. She writes (see Sarah Ferguson. “The Comfort of Being Sad : Kurt Cobain and the Politics of Damage”. Utne Reader, July/August 1994). “The loop taken by a new musical style from the underground to the main stream is now so compressed that there’s no moment of freedom and chaos when a counter culture can take root..
Let’s now look at a the marketing of consumer culture through a variety of products. Among the most aggressive marketing efforts to universalise consumerism is that of the Avon beauty products campaign. On August 2, 1994, the show TV Nation documented Avon’s campaign to win new customers among dirt-poor Campesinas in the Amazon basin of Brazil, where 70,000 saleswomen took the Avon message to every rural doorstep. Ademar Serodio, President of Avon Brazil, explained, “Instead of asking people to from us, we start discovering people who never bought from us before.” Further footage reveals Avon saleswomen making door-to-door house calls in the remote village of Santarem, where many of these new customers are emaciated, aging, wrinkled women living with their barefoot children in shacks with dirt floors. Most people in Santarem don’t read or write and the average household income is $ 3 per day. Avon’s agents wooed these women, broken by years of child-bearing and toil in the sun, with persuasive hype : type could be beautiful if they used Avon products. One of the products promoted was a skin-renewal cream called Renew, costing $40 a jar, which was supposed to work by burning off the top layer of the user’s skin. The TV ad used special effects to create the image of a woman peeling away years of aging from her face to appear magically younger. According to Rosa Alegria, Communications Director for Avon Brazil, the women did everything to buy it, stopped buying other things like clothes and shoes, as they felt good with their skin, using something on TV, people thought it a real miracle. For others it was a wonder that women in such poverty were targeted by corporations selling cosmetics which did nothing for women’s health, nutrition, education, job opportunities, etc.
The techniques used by corporate giants are simple. They centre on manipulating the cultural symbols in which individual identities and values are anchored. Historically, these symbols have been collective creations of people relating to each other and expressing their inner feelings through artistic media. They have represented our collective sense of who we are.
But all that has changed now with the entry of mass media’s deployment for commercial purposes. The more time we spend immersed in the corporate-controlled and packaged world of the media, the less time we have for direct human exchanges through which cultural identities and values were once traditionally expressed, reinforced and updated. The bottom line is those who control the core culture of a society. And as the volume and variety of the Pepsi-MTV generation grows, detached from place, meaning, faith and loyalty other than what corporate dictates demand, market tyranny may be more subtle than state tyranny. But it is no less effective in enslaving the many to the interests of the few.
In conclusion : Gender, Power and Culture
Symbolisation and representation. Which are also the strategies used by multinational corporations for legitimacy and gaining power. That they use the media to relay their messages is part of a process of enculturisation of the new attitudes dictated by market, trade, global finance, information highways, etc. For ordinary people the message is if you are not in, you are out, excluded from the new logic and the technology fashioning the market place.
How is it all really done? The magic key is Marketing the World; persuading people they need anything and everything in the market place.
Nudity is in the mind
Looking Glass
Should Sushma Swaraj have taken a stand against FTV ? There has been surprisingly little debate on the issue. Perhaps supporters and opponents of free speech are tired by the rapidity with which issues of public morality keep cropping up. We do know however how this one went. Apparently, Sushmaji horrified by the level of exposure on the fashion channel called a consultitive committee to view a tape of clips. Within minutes, according to one news report, all except one of those present called a halt to the viewing and claimed to be in agreement with her views.
Shabana Azmi was said to be the lone dissenter maintaining, among other things, that she was against censorship. In any case a hasty visit by FTV managing director, Francois Thiellent, and a promise to modify the programming to suit Indian tastes now appear to have mollified the irascible information and broadcasting minister. FTV, like MTV before it, stays.
The storm may have blown over but the episode raises issues of significance that need to be discussed. But first an introduction to FTV. For those who have never seen it, it is a channel devoted to the exhibition of international fashion. All through the day, it shows men and women displaying (sometimes revealing) clothes on a catwalk. It showcases collections, covers shows and goes backstage. Apart from brief profiles of models, the focus is wholly and solely on covering fashion. What makes such a channel objectionable ? In a recent interview, Swaraj referred to the ‘single TV syndrome’, maintaining that since ‘the entire family site around one TV the comfort level and coment level are important.’
It is, I think, a significant consideration. TV viewing in India is a largely family or communal affair. In most homes—even metropolitan ones—it is very common for the nuclear family to have others an aged relative or a domestic servant living in. Which means that whatever appears on the small screen is potentially to be viewed together by people of various ages, classes, genders and levels of education. In fact, in the early days of satellite television, a common complaint was that much of the programming embarrassed the family. Many complaints incidentally centered around Hindi films. Nevertheless, given these circumstances, one can sympathise with Swaraj’s concern.
But is it a good, enough reason ? I think not. To begin with, there is the question of free access. Only consumers of cable currently have aces to FTV. In all likelihood the rise in pay channels and the widespread availability of technology will soon allow or force us to limit access to a few select channels. In which case FTV will be like a Sak’s catalogue, a book on knitting, pornography—available but you have to go out and get it. Besides, most families by now must have already devised ways of dealing with what they consider unsuitable. If daddy, mummy, grandma and Pappu’s idea of dinner entertainment is to view the spring collections in Paris, then their comfort levels with FTV are probably in no need of tweaking any way.
No, the problem with Swaraj’s argument like the controversy over Fire, nudity in art and so on is that while it claims to be based on the physical fact of a lack of privacy in the Indian home, it is actually based on the mental or emotional consequences of to the phenomenon. By this I mean the need to keep everything ‘clean’ and to treat anything remotely sexual or disturbing as ‘dirty’ and undesirable. Some years ago I heard a talk show participant (ironically a prominent women’s rights activist) describe obscenity as anything that ‘we would be embarrassed looking at in front of our children.” Nobody contradicted her. It was one of those things people commonly say. What it suggested, however, is that there is no difference between adult pleasures, interests or tastes and those of a child. D we really need to set such infantile standards for our morality ? Swaraj has another argument, though.
Speaking generally on her recent actions against various TV advertisements and FTV, she claimed that women were being demeaned by an excessive emphasis on physical assets—a trend that was being condoned in the name of broadmindedness. In general, I find this difficult to argue with. The overwhelming trend towards body worship and beauty extravaganzas has silenced even vocal feminist critics and Swaraj’s determination to speak her mind at the risk of being called a prude has its merits.
Yet, in the case of FTV—I don’s quite know if it applies. A camera focused 24 hours on a catwalk may have few takers. But for those with a serious interest in the subject, transparent clothing and bare breasts are hardly a novelty. By extracting concessions to Indian tastes from FTV (which means among other things no lingerie shows at prime time) the guardians of our morality have equated both simple nudity and a straightforward fashion channel with prurience. Really this is a step back rather than forward. In more ways than one. Like in the case of MTV, the government can take pleasure in having implemented the swadeshi agenda. But in an era of globalisation to insist on indigenisation is to put one’s own people at a disadvantage by denying access to information and competition from the outside world.
Indiatimes.com-Most wanted
So many beauties, Millions of views. Who is the Most Wanted ? Miss India : Celina Jaitly. She commands a lion’s share of the attention from the pictures of the most wanted beauties on the indiatime.com Photo Gallery. The place where you can find gorgeous pictures of the world’s most beautiful, most happening women. So log on to www.indiatimes.com and glimpse the most popular contestants at the Miss Universe pageant and get transported to Puerto Rice today !
Miss India Viewed : 131,633
MISS WORLD CONTESTS TO BE R EVAMPED
Sanjay Suri London 15 April
This may come as a surprise, but the woman who runs the Miss World contests says it is “stupid” and “awful” and a revamped version is in the offing. The Miss World contest in going to be reinvented, says Julia Morley, the woman now incharge. She took over after her husband Eric Morley, who started the contests 50 years ago, died in November last year.
Mr. Morley had organized the last Miss World contest at the Dome in London only a few days after the death of her husband. But now she reveals what was going through her mind when winner Priyanka Chopra and the other contestants were parading themselves. “It did seem very unnatural to me as a woman that girls should turn, turn, turn on the stage, for a start,” she told The Observer, “And I didn’t feel comfortable with swimsuits on stage. Not because I thought there was anything wrong with them, but I thought that you did’t generally feel comfortable if someone’s interviewing you in a dinner jacket and you’re in a swimsuit. I thought it was pretty awful to see women standing there with practically nothing on, with old (Michael) Aspel (compere for the show) saying. ‘What did you eat for breakfast?’ It was so stupid.”
The new plans will include some education for contestants, she said.—IANS
The New Barbie Dolls
By Sandhya R. EDITOR’S CHOICE
Guess what the newest buzz after match fixing is? It’s beauty context fixing. We’re talking about India’s growing monopoly of the Miss World, Miss Universe and the Miss Asia Pacific title. India’s hat trick in last year’s beauty pageants—thank you Lara, Priyanka and Divya-has led to both celebration and speculation that beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder but also the pockets of the sponser.
There’ve been rumours aplenty that powerful cosmetic MNCs who sponsor these pageants are eyeing the huge middle class market in India. Having saturated developed countries with their powders and potions, they have turned their greedy profit margins on Indian women. And what better way to get them to part with their meagre earnings then to hold out the promise of universal beauty? Chumsy as it may seem, it works.
Read the breathless interviews in the papers after every victory and you’ll learn that every Indian girl thinks, at heart, that she can also be a beauty queen. Well, she isn’t wrong. I remember meeting the freshly crowned Sushmita Sen in may office. She walked down the corridor of the male-dominated office without raising as much as a glance. I had to swallow my surprise at her average girl-next-door appearance. You can say the same about Priyanka-her nani says she doesn’t have the looks of a beauty queen.
Yet , even though Priyanka goofed on Mother Theresa’s death, she walked away with the crown. Designer Ritu Kumar, who has been creating wardrobes for our beauty queens for years, admits she has heard rumours of contests being fixed.
The question then is : how dependent is the Miss World contest on the largesse of its sponsors ? According to one estimate, the contest costs nothing less than six million pounds sterling to stage. That’s a serious amount of money for a show that went largely unreported in the British media, even though it was celebrating its 50th year at the new Millennium Dome. So here’s the truth : Western women are not interested in beauty shows-that is why the focus has shifted decisively to Asia Latin America and Africa.
Remember the Sun City extra vaganiza ? It pulled in two billion viewers- but not from the western hemisphere, where the debate on political correctness had long since dealt the pageant a deathblow. So where could the owners of Miss World, the Morleys, go from Hollywood, but to Bollywood ? By 1996, the had persuaded Amitabh Bachchan to but the rights for the pageant for the next two years.
As feminist writer Germaine Greer puts it : “The Miss World contest reinforces Anglo-capitalist values-by recognising only one physical type as having any pretensions to beauty.” Make no mistake western cosmetic companies, apart from the pageant sponsors.
CONFESSIONS OF A FAILED FASHION WOMAN
Catherine Redfern
Well, I don’t know. But what I’ve been wondering lately is : does fashion mean anything ? Do clothes actually mean anything ? Do they signify anything ? Are they an issue feminists should think about ? Is fashion political ? This may seem like a stupid question : does fashion mean anything ? But even at such a young age, I knew damn well that it did, when just the thought of wearing trousers made me scream. Nowadays I think I know what was going on. At that age, children are so intent on identifying themselves with one gender or the other (thus affirming their own identity) that they become gender police. Everything has to be strictly defined. Girls like pink : boys like blue. By expressing a love for pink, a girl is affirming her identity as a female creature. So fashion surely means something, even at that age. But does fashion mean anything for adults ? IN a world where in certain female circles, a shoes is not just a shoe-it’s Manolo or a Choo (Carrie Bradshaw : “I lost my Choo!”)-you bet your Fendi handbag fashion means something.
I’m not entirely sure what a fashionista really is. All I know is that I’m not one, but I know I’m supposed to be one. You just look through any mainstream woman’s magazine and you’ll see what messages are being sent out.
But what’s feminism got to do with it? Today there would seem to be no contradiction in being both a feminist and a fashionista. Young feminists have reclaimed everything traditionally feminine, including a love of dressing up and fashion. Feminism has reclaimed the girlie look. Nail painting is a pleasure, not selling out the sisterhood. The baby doll look is an ironic riot girlie comment. Lippy is no more than something to express yourself, to make yourself loud and proud. Feminists can take enjoyment in fashion now. Makeup ads use slogans like ‘Empowering’ and ‘Be Radical.’
Indeed, writers like Natasha Walter and some in the American third wave have argued that feminism has over politicised things like fashion and dress, the reason why women say things like “I can’t be a feminist because I like wearing miniskirts.” Feminists have argued, and rightly I think, in general, that the simple enjoyment of adornment and clothes should be beyond the influence of feminist argument. “The catwalk will then cease to be a symbol of our subordination.” Wrote Natasha Walter, “and become a path to simple delight.” Fashion, it is argued, is today seen as a source of power for women and girls. If anyone suffers from the constraints of fashion, it’s boys and men.
This may all be true. I don’t see anything wrong with enjoyment in clothes. But, I don’t know, something still disquiets me, but it’s difficult to pin down what it is. I think fashion can be a source of joy and fun for both sexes, but to place it beyond feminist comment and criticism at all, I think, might be going too far. I wonder sometimes if fashion sometimes if fashion sometimes is political. I think this is an unpopular view.
In fashion, all traditional ethnic clothing is explicated and eroticised, all the real meaning sucked out. “Foreign looking women, to white male, Western eyes, can be simply photographed as sexy exotic objects. In another fashion shoot called Bollywood Nights, a heavily made up woman wears middle-eastern veils, binds and purdah-like capes and scarves. In one picture, her feet are chained together like she’s some kind of slave. In another. She has her eyes closed submissively and her hands are raised up,. Held together at the wrists as if waiting for them to be tied. Was it Hussain Chalayan thtat infamously sent his models down the catwalk, naked except for a black, middle-eastern veil which covered their head completely but only came down as far as their navels ? Sometimes fashion seems to be nothing more than the worst kind of sex tourism.
Not My cup of tee
Slogans on women’s T-shirts
Jo Knowles
Fashion per se is not the problem here: it’s male-focused fashion. By all means wear clothes that make you feel good, but why should women have to do that by wearing T-shirts that announce their need of male approval ?
Why not describe yourself in a way that appeals to you, not some male-orientated view of how a woman should be packaged for sexual consumption ?
Advocacy Internet
THE 21ST CENTURY POLITICS OF COLLEGE CLOTHING
Shilpa Phadke Sameer Khan
The French government insists that Muslim women do not wear headscarves, Sikh men do not wear turbans and nobody wears their religion on their sleeve to school. The Iranian government insists that women wear not just the headscarf but the chador. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is convinced that jeans are a provocative and un-Indian form of dress. Some maulanas take offence to Saniz Mirza wearing skirts on the tennis court, claiming it is un-Islamic attire. Universities all over India appear to be in a race to institute what they think is the appropriate form of attire for their students.
We would like to argue that this ‘something’ constitutes not one thing but a variety of different anxieties : for the French it is the pluralism of a mixed society in the context of opening European borders; for the Iranians, the VHP and the maulanas worried about Sania Mirza’s clothing it is the purity of narrowly-defined religion marked on the bodies of women; and for an apparently increasing number of Indian universities it is the contradictions wrought between tradition and modernity, the Indian and the global, the private and the public, the respectable and the sexual (if one were to use crass and ultimately often fallacious binaries).
On the face of it, it seems rather incredulous and contradictory that at a time when Indian fashion designers are successfully entering world fashion markets, we should simultaneously be discussing dress codes for college students. But if one digs even a little deeper, it’s not at all surprising—in fact, it is perhaps the one that creates the other. The increasing visibility of global fashion (on Indian catwalks, advertising, restaurants and streets) and the perceived lack of ‘morality’ that goes with it creates no little anxiety in the minds of various self-appointed protectors of ‘Indian culture’.
As part of our research on a Gender and Space project, we asked students in Mumbai their opinion on a dress code. At first, our conversations left us bewildered. Students in figure-hugging T-shirts and sleeveless vests with messages that read : ‘Eye-candy’ or ‘Single and Unavailable’, were the most ardent votaries of the dress code, arguing the need for limits, boundaries and clothing appropriate to the space that is “the temple of education”. The unfashionable students, the ones in the oversized jeans and baggy T-shirts or salwarkameez, and who by the most conservative standards were appropriately dressed, were the ones fuming about “patriarchal control of female sexuality”.
It is therefore not surprising that the ones espousing more conservative ideas are the ones also conforming to the new codes of feminine sexual desirability.
Some of the concern with regard to women’s dress arises out of fear. That by revealing a little bit more of her arms or her legs, a woman will invite unwarranted male attention and thus be more open to sexual harassment and violence, including rape. Even the judges in our courts feel that way. In a study conducted by the Delhi-based NGFO Saklshi, among 109 judges, 68% said they believed that “provocative” clothes were ain invitation to sexual assault (Outlook, November 3, 2003). But in our connnversations with young women across Mumbai, it is clear that girls in sallwar-kameez, ever those in burkhas, are just as harassed as those in skirts. The difference is that a girl in a salwar-kameez will be able to garner more public support to thrash her perpetrator than the girl in a short skirt.
There’s another opinion we encountered that contends that women in tight jeans are harassed less because they come across as more confident, and molesters prefer to focus on those they consider meek and less likely to retaliate.
The other reason why society concerns itself with women’s clothing has to do with wanting to control a woman’s body and her sexuality, in idea as old as Adam and Eve and the apple in the Garden of Eden (remember, Eve got them kicked out of paradise). Women’s clothing, actions and behaviour are reflective of the honour of the entire community. A violation of their bodies is considered a violation of the honor of the community as a whole. Community honor may also be besmirched by women’s consensual actions, and steps are taken to ensure women do not have the opportunity to meet the wrong kind of men. For instance, in Indore, the Bajrang Dal has demanded that no Muslim men be permitted to enter commercial garba celebrations as they believe Muslim men will mingle with Hindu girls and elope with them at the end of Navratri (The Indian Express, September 30, 2005).
The dress code debate then is about much more than clothing—it encompasses ideas of family and community honour, community and national identity, appropriate femininity and masculinity, rules of endogamy and the drawing of a number of other boundaries. When we take on the dress code, these form the implicit sub-text of our arguments. As feminists, this places us at the locus of multiple contradictions. How do we assert that women have the right to wear what they desire without endorsing the mini-skirts-and-lipstick brand of market-modernity-led-liberation ? How do we problematise the pressure on women to achieve gravity (and other natural law)-defying body shapes without suggesting that certain kinds of clothing are unilaterally bad ? How do we articulate the need to promote the widest variety of choices, while articulating that all of these choices are located in contexts of class, caste, gender, race, community and sexual preference that influence our capacity to exercise them ?
Yes, it is important to fight the dress code, but it is equally important to fight it as only one manifestation of a larger malaise—where not just the way people dress is sought to be controlled but also the way they walk, behave, and exchange thoughts, ideas and affection. The largely unopposed move to impose a dress code—with the media expressing faint disapproval at the pre-modernity of it—is not pre-modern at all. It is a very modern response to the very modern anxieties that, today, women will wear spaghetti straps to college, tomorrow they will have careers, the day after refuse to be chaste Indian women, the next week make love to the wrong kind of men, the next month declare they prefer women to men, and from there who knows what else…
Source : www.infochangeindia.org
Advocacy Internet
RSS feed