Legitimizing Disparity?

-By Kamalraj Sigdel

She could not notice how the ad legitimized the "violence against women" as the ad's Buhari is tortured simply because she falls short to meet the taste that her Saasu might prefer in her dinner. She, the audience of the ad, who watches the same ad more than hundred times a day without any objection, is a diehard feminist acting as a Chairman of some social organization advocating against gender disparity. And the channel, where the ad appeared, was the most responsible Nepal Television. And the whole theme was, Family cooking oil, a commercial brand, which "could exempt" the Buhari from her Saasu's scorn as its ad ensures.

 

I would love to explore here the role of Lacanian "unconscious" that is dormant yet active in the case. At manifest and conscious level, all seem to go against "gender disparity" but the unconscious erupts in many cases out of the blue.

 

It's pathetic; all the TV channels and radio stations have been broadcasting hundreds of such anomalous ads and not a single voice is coming up against them. If we count the organizations, they are more then enough: MGEP, OXFAM, Maiti Nepal and many others including HMG/N's Ministry of Women and Social Welfare. All come under a category and all are supposed to fight "gender disparity". They broadcast awareness documentaries in the same channels, which sometime coincide with the same flawed ads. Their negligence at such issues has arisen a doubt whether the organizations are really serious about their objectives. Someone said, it could be because they have no time to think about such "minor and insignificant" issues while they are busy with their CEDAW and Beijing Platform of Action or any other UN conventions. But it must not be so, as i have explored recently.

 

Gender disparity is rooted so badly in the Nepalese society that those who speak against it are unconsciously speaking for it, unless they have a deep understanding of the issue. That is what happening here – the intermittent eruption of Lacanian unconscious. The media sector, even the government owned NTV has not been able to free itself out from the grip of old conservatism, let alone the private and non-governmental sectors. In fact, unless all the media sectors become "gender sensitive", they can't virtually speak against gender disparity.

 

We need to understand, what does it mean when we say "gender disparity is all-pervasive" – i.e. to look within at first. Then the outer space is discernible in all its originality. Looking at the Nepalese landscape through gender perspective – the behavioral pattern of people in our societies, representation of male and female in literatures, in films, in cultures and traditions and even in advertisements – we see females represented, in its worst manifestation, as commodity and, in its lighter expression, as the "Other" in the conceptual sense of the term.

 

However, in discriminating women in our socio-cultural structure women are equally blameworthy. The women themselves are accepting their "objectification" and playing the role of "Other" as defined by men. It is obvious in the public acceptance of the above ad and in the women audience's inability to see nothing wrong in it. The crux, I think, lies here. The females themselves should be aware, for they are themselves responsible for their "othering" with capital "O". Unfortunately, it is lacking and that is why, females are still being subordinated and made passive, limited to an identification with the woman being looked at or consumed.

 

In both of the cases, either male or female, the problem is of "unconscious" that has not been purified yet: the traditional memory or the "Sanakar" is so badly rooted in the people's mindset that it may take more than one generation to cleanse it completely. And this argument may seem a "nonsense and whimsical thesis" to the development planners while they strategize programmes to change the society. Let us try to believe, development is a multidimensional phenomenon and needs a similar approach that could address multiple dimensions in parallel. (kamal.sigdel@gmail.com)

[Date: June 2004]