The Sexual Autonomy of Cisgender, Heterosexual Muslim Women in A Polarised Environment
By
Iqra Khan
05/SEP/2020
As a Muslim
woman situated in the communally polarised state of Gujarat, and as a protest
poet, I have woken up to rape threats, hate campaigns and innovative forms of
misogyny since the day I step foot in public spaces to express dissent.
Women near the Jama Masjid in Delhi. Photo: Flickr/Riccardo Maria
Mantero CC BY NC ND 2.0
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My
experience is shared by the vast majority of Muslim women in journalism, as
well as activism, who have been hounded for their religious identity and
political opinions. More than instilling fear, these attacks have created an
air of mistrust, in both personal and political spaces.
Since the
sexual autonomy of non-cisgender, non-heterosexual women is a vast area in
itself and there are limitations to my experience in that regard, I am
primarily speaking of cisgender, heterosexual women in this piece, so as not to
appropriate the struggles of LGBTQ community who can voice their struggles far
better than I ever could.
There are
two commonly assumed fronts of our oppression: on the first, we’re Muslims, and
on the second, we’re women. However, there is a third, where we’re Muslim
women. While the first two deny us social distributive justice in their own
ways – keeping us captives of the construct of gender, class and creed – the
third impinges on our autonomy in more ways than the other two, particularly
our sexual autonomy. This front has two sides.
One, where
Muslim women face challenges from Muslim men and patriarchal structures,
something that has been discussed at length in volumes on sexual freedom,
authored by furious insiders and curious outsiders. The other side, is one
where sexual mores and the attitudes of dominant communities, the perception of
Muslim women by dominant communities, and law and policy validated by the
dominant communities, dictate our sexual decisions.
Hussain’s
feminist ideas and her own life are both proof that the struggle for women’s
rights is neither a recent phenomenon nor a ‘Western import’ but rather has a
long and rich local history. Credits: Reuters/Amit Dave
Portrayals of sexually liberated women in mainstream culture exist only
for urban, savarna women. Photo: Reuters/Amit Dave
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While the
limits are defined by the Muslim patriarchal systems, they are reinforced by
marginalisation, and the lack of social mobility facilitated by majoritarian
governments which use social and legal instruments of control over our sexual
autonomy.
For
instance, the proposed population control legislation, paired with
dehumanising, Islamophobic rhetoric and a hostile establishment, is likely to
exercise unjustified control over the fertility and sexuality of minority
women, despite its egalitarian claims.
The Muslim
Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019 does not merely affect
Muslim men. It also takes away from the locus of Muslim women by giving the
state a share in it under criminal legislation.
This is a
prime example of lost autonomy since cases of abandonment would be likely to go
unreported when women only seek civil remedies or result in the frustration of
marriage due to the unfairly prolonged jail-term stipulated by the law.
The
National Register of Citizens paired with the religion-based Citizenship
(Amendment) Act, 2019, is likely to punish Muslim women who have exercised
sexual freedom since it is heteronormative, patriarchal family structures which
strengthen the construct of citizenship. Women disowned by these structures for
any reason will have weaker claims to citizenship, particularly in the case of
transwomen as has been discussed at length as one of the criticisms of the NRC.
It will also weaken the claims of cisgender women estranged from their parental
families for exercising sexual autonomy and making their own matrimonial
choices, especially those who do not have sufficient evidence such as
documentation of formal education, employment or ownership of property. This
will affect sexual liberties retroactively.
Western
literature imagines ‘sexual citizenship’ as the right to choose one’s partner,
and control one’s sexual, matrimonial and reproductive decisions.
Disenfranchisement is likely to create greater disparities in rights and affect
this sexual choice prospectively.
Conversely,
the existing lack of the liberty to choose also implies incomplete citizenship
rights. In The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities, Kenneth Plummer’s
chapter on “Intimate Citizenship in an Unjust World” argues that the validity
of sexual choice is determined by social, economic and cultural capital. In
situations of inequality, the choice is limited. In India, such limitation to
sexual choice itself is evidence that citizenship rights afforded to Muslim
women are insufficient, and are bound to diminish further.
Legislations
are not the only instrument of control. Portrayals of sexually liberated women
in mainstream culture exist only for urban, savarna women. When they do
represent Muslim women, the depiction becomes more of a comment on our
victimhood, our appearance, and even on Muslim men. The Muslim woman is rarely
imagined without her situated-ness within some context of violence, and it is
that violence that is emphasised, not her act of sexual liberation – in itself and
absolute.
Moreover,
these depictions almost always juxtapose our attire with our desire, imagining
us with our scarves flying away to satisfy the obsessive curiosity of “What’s
underneath”, and refusing to acknowledge that we may possess the agency to pursue
desire in any attire.
But there
are far more sinister portrayals to be discussed. It is our depiction through
the Islamophobic male gaze, which looks a lot like that of the protagonists of
movies like Ishaqzaade, where the Muslim woman is seen as a conquest and the
Muslim patriarchs are the enemy from whom she is won. This movie normalises the
rape instincts of the male protagonist, who pretends to fall for the woman he
hates, so that he can avenge a slap by sleeping with her. It also goes on to absolve
this degenerate character through a climax where the two are shown to fall in
love and eventually die for this forbidden love. The real-world equivalent of
this Islamophobic male gaze can be seen in the denigrating campaigns against
the women who sat in protest at Shaheen Bagh, particularly activists like
Safoora Zargar, under whose name pornographic videos were falsely circulated on
several right-wing groups.
Safoora Zargar. Photo: Public domain.
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The
nauseating expressions of toxic desire that were directed at Kashmiri women
after the scrapping of Article 370 of the constitution last year, highlighted a
pre-existing, hate-driven fetish.
This
epidemic of communal dominance has created a sense of control. It restricts the
sexual decisions of Muslim women in terms of trusting a potential partner with
our bodies, because we have internalised large volumes of Islamophobia and
misogyny, and can only imagine ourselves as a fetish, as a conquest, and on
better days, as victims, thanks to the saviour complex of those seeking to
deliver us from centuries of oppression. All three self-images form part of the
suspicion as to how our potential partner views us. Movies like Ishaqzaade and
their eager consumption by males whose morbid fantasies the movie reflects,
reaffirms these fears.
This
state-validated Islamophobia has created a power dynamic where Muslim women are
at the mercy of the majority’s will. This dynamic has seeped into individual
spheres and it undermines the choice exercised by a Muslim woman in choosing a
partner. A variant of this is the Hindutva narrative of “love jihad” which
controls the sexual autonomy of Hindu women.
Even if a
Muslim woman moves past these fears and constraints on her self-understanding
and enters a relationship, she is expected to sever herself from her political
and religious identity. After all, it is a truism in most households which is
casually repeated by educated, urban savarna men and women, and is reaffirmed
by caste and communal violence from both communities, that ‘one can marry
anyone, but a Dalit or a Musalman’.
The worst
state is that of the sexual freedom of Dalit Muslim women (yes, they exist),
who do not merely have their self-understanding and sexual conduct defined by
gender, class and religion, but also by caste endogamy, at the hands of
upper-caste Muslims.
Alarming
similarities can be observed in the language of genocide that is gathering
momentum in India – the gradual dehumanisation of the Jewish community in the
political rhetoric and propagandist literature, concepts like Rassenschande,
which were used to prohibit interracial sexual relations in Nazi Germany, in
the years leading up to the Nuremberg laws. These trends continue to grow in
the absence of social and legal sanctions, enabled by the state and complicit
social media platforms like Facebook.
Despite
this, Muslim women of all classes and sexualities continue to form the
frontlines of resistance in what is going to be a long night, in the hope of
better times, borrowing strength from songs of love and revolution, and from
each other.
Original
Headline: The Sexual Autonomy of India's Muslim Women Is a Political Prisoner
at Best
Source: The Wire
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-women-feminism/the-sexual-autonomy-cisgender,-heterosexual/d/122814
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