IN — Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Vaishnavi Sundar is an independent filmmaker, writer, and radical feminist from Chennai, India, whose filmmaking is unapologetically female-centered, despite men’s utterly entitled demands upon her. Her previous work includes direction of But What Was She Wearing?, shot by an all-woman crew, as India’s first feature-length documentary on the sexual harassment of working women. Contrasting first-world consumable narratives of white saviorism and poverty porn, Sundar’s film takes into account differences across caste, class, and religion among Indian women, focusing on women speaking collectively as women for women about women.
However, the response to her radically feminist filmmaking has revealed the failures of a fundamentally superficial liberal feminism positioned on the politics of platitudes. “Our fight for rights today – despite the many lives that were lost in the process – remains toothless and cosmetic at best,” Sundar reflects.
Currently, Sundar’s upcoming film titled Not My Cup of T will explore the unprecedented increase in young women in the Western world coming to clinics with ‘gender dysphoria’ and, in their desperation, seeking drugs and surgeries as ‘solutions’ to their distress. Drawing on the work of Dr Lisa Littman, Sundar considers what has been described as rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). From a feminist point of view, then, Sundar will take a critical look at this psychological and sociological phenomenon and the profitable, global medicalization of gender nonconformity, notably as it pertains to female youth.
We decided to engage in a dialogue with Sundar related to her work on Not My Cup of T, the trials of womanhood and girlhood, and the lengthy work toward women’s liberation.
For 4W, you write about your own experiences with body dysmorphia, trauma, and the alienation between the mind and the body experienced by women and girls during their lives. In expanding upon your previous reflections, what have been among your research findings, so far, that you have connected to your own womanhood and girlhood, with correspondence to other women and girls?
It is still so vivid in my mind, the way my clothes would get ‘vetted’ by my family members before I was ‘allowed’ to leave the house. Absence of a dupatta (a long scarf-like cloth that is part of the Indian attire called Salwar Kameez) would be received with condemnation. A dupatta is supposed to be draped over the breasts and, even if I was wearing a pair of jeans with a t-shirt, I was supposed to cover my breasts with a cloth/scarf/dupatta, regardless.
I cannot recall the number of times I was groped by men despite my dupatta. Men in my family, fathers of friends and neighbors, random male passengers in public transport, have touched my breasts – and any complaints about such abuses were met with a stricter vetting procedure and impossible curfews.
I hated my breasts; I wished I did not have them – or, better yet, I wished I was not a woman at all.
In the past 35 years of my life, many such acts of sexual violence have rendered me helpless, self-loathing, and inconsolably suicidal. As an adult, I understood, rather painfully, that my experiences were not unique, and to this day, I have yet to come across a woman with no history of sexual abuse in her life.
Despite my traumatic childhood and adolescence, I must admit that I had privilege that a majority of women did not. In the past decade of my life, I have come to understand how, in India, a woman is oppressed not just on the basis of her sex, but also her caste, her class, and her religion, too. This understanding has helped me approach male supremacy and male violence with a more nuanced point of view.
In Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, which, as I think, relates to your film, she writes about how girls now “flee womanhood like a house on fire, their minds fixed on escape, not on any particular destination.” How do you respond, both personally and politically, to this desired flight from femaleness?
I sprained my neck reading Irreversible Damage, because I was nodding my way through every word Abigail wrote! I perceived my womanhood as a plague, and so did many of my peers at that time. It is harder to be a ‘tomboy’ too because you get bullied endlessly for your lack of femininity; it was a crippling catch-22 situation.
I spent so many years of my life like a confused hermit, because it hurt me when I tried disowning my womanhood, alienating myself – also, as I thought, when I tried to live up to it. I am so grateful that I steered from substance abuse, but some of my friends have fallen prey to it. That was their flight, but, of course, there was never a destination.
The only way to tackle this politically is to lead by example. I stopped fleeing, took stock of the situation, and vowed to make my life and the lives of women better, even if the progress is extremely slow. Of course, it is not easy, especially when a woman is raped every fifteen minutes in my country. It is demoralizing on most days, and I wish I could just stay in bed forever.
It sucks to be a woman in a woman-hating world, but the problem is patriarchy, not womanhood itself. I have taught myself to be proud of my sex class; I derive my strengthened determination from the achievements of other women from around the world. It is promising to know that women, historically, have managed to accomplish so much, despite all odds stacked against us. I wish to hold on to those moments, and pass that strength on as a reminder to others like me. There is so much to feel proud about in being a woman!
With my film, too, my hope is to break this cycle of flight afflicting my sex and beseech young girls to stop hating womanhood itself. In India, a lot of Western pop culture is consumed so voraciously. Whenever we will observe a spike in the ROGD cases in India, through self-declaration via Twitter, of course, I bet the social media influencers and American TV shows will play a huge role. No doubt the errors, damages, and horrors are about to repeat themselves here, too – I hope to potentially mitigate said problems, at least to some extent, through this film.
“We live in a reversal society,” Mary Daly reflected in 2001. Liberal feminism seems to have forgotten to focus on females, selling them self-annihilation as self-actualization and prioritizing any group of males over all females. Also exemplary of these reversals, in a kind of doublethink, artificiality has become synonymous with authenticity. Given your critiques of liberal feminism, how has the bizarre overemphasis on ‘choice’ and ‘individualism’ queerly backfired against women and girls?
A developing country riddled with abject poverty, illiteracy, despicable healthcare, and an extremist, fascist government makes for a dangerous society for women, aside from being a reversal society. Historically, the othering of women has been the norm in my country; you are taught, from the beginning, that you are a ‘non-man,’ a subclass in a society: ‘Other.’ Add to this the evils of caste system, religion, language and skin color- and it feels absurd and defeatist to even summon the courage to stand against it.
Enter liberal feminism, a ‘patriarchy lite’ version of feminism that has manipulated women into believing that their oppression is, in fact, ‘empowering,’ cornering them into ‘choosing’ it for individual ‘empowerment.’ It is industry-driven, gaslighting propaganda that, in effect, shames an individual woman for not ‘choosing’ to ‘empower’ herself out of being oppressed on the basis of her sex.
At first, I was so taken by the liberal movement when it talked about caste injustice and religious oppression, but, then, I found a huge problem with the liberal model: Men erased women, and, worse, women happily helped erase themselves at the whims of men. We see the same with groups that claim to espouse critical thinking and freethought – until a woman calls out a porn-sick man. Liberal feminism often becomes their excuse, their refuge.
My experience in and exit from liberal feminist groups felt so Orwellian, because women tried to be ‘not like other girls,’ alienating themselves as individuals from women and girls collectively. And, then, men held opinions supporting pornography and prostitution, even supporting the erasure of female-only, single-sex spaces, none of which concern these men’s own rights as a sex class, but which further disempower all women subject to all men.
The rabid manner in which men have marketed pornography as ‘empowering’ for women, as if it can act as a means for boosting sexual expression and self-confidence among women, has been lost on me. I wonder if such men would be willing to have their bodies penetrated, over and over, every night, by random members of their sex, where the sum of their entire bodily existence, what ‘womanhood’ is in men’s eyes, horrifically becomes limited to holes.
Liberal feminists follow this same approach, in trying to prioritize any group of males over all females, debating how trans-identified males strangely face oppression so awful that being a ‘cis’ woman, that is, being female, has become itself perceived as a ‘privilege.’ Now, women have become a subclass of our own sex class. Against reality, the authoritarian demands for ‘validation’ over ‘feelings’ and ‘identities’ often tread a very dangerous path, far beyond the original, clinical and psychiatric concerns pertaining to individual cases of gender dysphoria.
It is 2020, and Indian women belonging to the ‘lower caste’ still work as manual scavengers, picking among feces and other garbage with their bare hands. This is after the government ruled manual scavenging to be unconstitutional. Women have a long way to go before we can be free from the shackles of patriarchy. And I strongly refuse to support any social movement that continues disempowering women to serve men in the name of women’s ‘empowerment.’
If you are interested in making a donation to help in funding Sundar’s upcoming film Not My Cup of T, then please contact her at [email protected]. Her website is limesodafilms.com. She would be willing to make arrangements that would be workable for sending money, since, otherwise, PayPal claims an enormous cut from donated money. Any sisterhood, solidarity, and support for Sundar truly would make a difference in her dedicated work for women and girls.
