Title: Packaging Freedom: Feminism and Popular Culture
Author: Ipshita Chanda
Publisher: STREE, Kolkata
Year: 2003
Pages: 195 + XV.
Price: Rs.500.
Reviewed By: Arshad Amanullah
*****
The book under review has Media Feminism as its central theme. To build up its narrative, it engages the concept of modernity and delves into the realm of the media images and texts “to understand the realities inhabited by women, who are consumers of these texts, as well as the culture of consumption that spawn them”. It seeks to explore, in Indian context, the extent to which popular media uses the concepts of feminist movement and the strategies of such ideological negotiation. How these themes are received by women, has also been a major concern of the author.
Although Chanda makes it clear that she is a feminist and situates her study in the feminist discourse, she is convinced that “changing times demand that ideologies change as well”. Instead of toeing the official line of the feminism, she describes the book as “a couple of steps” in chasing truth, which according to her defies being an eternal companion to the feminist manifesto.
It is the middle class women of Calcutta and Jamshedpur who constitute the universe of the present study. Methodologically, it is based on a random-sample survey and multilingual (Bengali, English and Hindi) group-discussions between the years 1999 and 2002. The social/class and geographical bias evident in the sample points to one of the limitations of the study.
Women’s participation in the anti-price rise movement during the Emergency signifies the founding impulse of the women’s movement in India. Though feminism is one of the many western concepts ruling the contemporary discourse of the modernity, radicalism is the word very often used to characterize the nature of its charter. That is why a large number of women, though empowered even by the standard of the feminist movement, shy away from being branded as a ‘Feminist’. Interestingly enough, they relate to characters in soap-operas like K-serials of Ekta Kapoor and read women magazines like Sananda (Bangla), Femina and Meri Saheli. Thanks to this exposure to the popular media, they can argue in an idiom very identical to that of feminism though they prefer to be called ‘progressive’, etc. It is in this backdrop that Chanda argues that the popular media borrowed concepts of the Women’s Movement and made them part and parcel of the popular debate on the gender relationship. In other words, teleserials and print media ‘normalized’ the otherwise radical feminist concepts and goals. She suggests that women’s magazines “can be used for the purpose of rejecting the popular idea of feminism as ‘man bashing’ or ‘bra burning’ and replacing it with the notion of the movement as a strategy for coping with changes based on a certain vision of changed reality”. The author, thus, does not mind using the popular media for the furtherance of the feminist cause, though she finds it problematic that the same serves as nothing more than a propaganda machine for capitalist modernity.
The book provides a detailed account of how even in popular media, the discourse of the sexual relationships operates within patriarchal structure. The semiotics of media production must conform to what Kellner calls the ’social horizon’ of the target audience. Citing the example of the Pooja Bedi-Mark Robinson ad for ‘Kama Sutra’ condoms, Chanda makes the point that the advertisement offers an alternative vision. Instead of projecting as strategy to control women’s sexuality, the said advertisement posits sexual union as a fulfillment of desire for desire’s sake; thus de-linking desire from biological reproduction. According to Chanda, since this was precisely the feminist position on sexuality and reproductive choice, it had created waves across the country. Chanda argues that even the concept of aaj ki nari propagated by scores of advertisements like that of ‘Surf’ is problematic from a feminist perspective. She argues that though aaj ki nari manages both the worlds efficiently and has also got purchasing power, this restructuring of gender role symbolizes the consumerist modernity, driven by the market forces.
It was Stuart Hall who pointed out that in the process of cultural reproduction, texts may often be abstracted from social practices that produced them in the first place. In a similar fashion, Chanda asks whether feminist concerns and issues survive in a heterosexual patriarchal social context, and if they do, then in what form. Being confronted with the reality of “the breach between the popular media’s version of feminism and the feminist struggles of the women’s movement”, she discusses this breach in the light of writings that have appeared in women magazines like Elle. The ideology of this magazine which she dubs as ‘post-feminism’ is that the changes feminists wanted to make have already been successfully effected in the society. Hence, there is no need to make a fuss about the same any more and the battle of sexes should end in draw. She critiques post-feminism as ‘one-dimensional view’ of the nuances of the gender inequalities and the resulting power equations within the modern society and also accuses the popular media for encouraging this understanding of the feminist ideology, reducing the same to mere a battle of sexes.
The author also enquires into the characterization of the ‘other woman’ in television serials like Hasratein, Saans, Kora Kagaz, Amaanat, etc, and the way in which it has been debated in media as well as received by viewers. In her discussions, Chanda tells us that elder women generally castigate the ‘other woman’ like Savi in Hasratein while the younger ones see her as a positive character and empathize with her, despite marital fidelity being in doubt. This triggered off an animated debate in the popular media. Newspapers ran everyday reports and also opinion-pieces which suggested that “TV serials on extra-marital affairs provide social sanction to adultery”. Though the author critiques such journalistic approach of jumping to hurried conclusions, she discerns that ice is melting and that some of the feminist ideas are gaining currency, without following the feminist guidelines. This resulted in an increasingly manifested difference between the official feminism and its popular/mediatic counterpart.
Realizing this discrepancy between the feminist utopia and the ground-realities, she turns an activist and advocates for feminists to venture into popular media. Instead of keeping the feminist engagement with media restricted to alternate media which is destined to be marginal, she prefers to subvert the genre itself. She exhorts the feminist camp to script and produce soap-operas, foregrounding feminist concerns and themes. In the last chapter “scripts for future”, she provides a detailed outline for the future strategies of feminist movement as well as some suggestions to make them successful.
(This review article has been published in Contemporary Perspectives Vol 1,No.2.July-December,2007).
