– Pranoo Deshraju
The Day of Pleasure
It is Wednesday. Today is Ladies night in one of the most prominent pubs in the city, 10 Downing Street,
located within Lifestyle Mall, Begumpet about 5 or 6 kilometres away from our university hostel. By evening, we have mobilized a set of women to come with us. “This is going to be fun, don’t be such a prude”. There are free drinks! (This was always hard to believe, until one of our more perceptive friends informs us that this is how they are able to lure more men into the club). We are dressed in outfits we wouldn’t normally dare to wear on campuses, much less outside it. We are ready to go. As we begin to leave, we gather our shawls, dupattas, shrugs and jackets to “protect” our bodies from the ravaging but more than that, the suspecting and scandalized eyes of the public: the auto or cab that will take us there, the men/women we are likely to encounter on our way and even to some extent our peers on campus. After all this preparation, we step outside the gates of our campus and wait for an auto (this is ofcourse a narrative before the emergence of on-call cab services). As we wait a number of vehicles pass us by, staring, whistling, passing comments. Sometimes we try to shoo them away, more often than not, we meet their eyes with a steely gaze until they turn away, and sometimes tired of this incessant harassment we just shrug it off. Finally, we reach the club and even before we pass the bouncer at the entrance, our protective gear is off and we enter—made up, free and bursting with excitement.
(Narrative based on interviews 2013-14)
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A Lesson in Conduct
I was with two friends… We just wanted to see the trains go by. To stand under the bridge and hear the sound of the trains crossing. That’s all we wanted to do. That’s it… I was in a party dress. We had this freshman’s party and we were just taking a detour. They (the police) just came. “So you are taking advantage of this girl and you are prostituting for them”. And I said we were just coming from a party at our institute. And they were like “your institute allows you to have parties at this hour”. “It was a freshman’s party other institutes have that too”. But they don’t want to understand the situation. They want to take the worst of it. Without any concrete proof how can you throw these accusations and be so mean and harsh about it? I mean try to get your facts together. Then they took us to the police station and harassed us, kept us there for three hours…just seated. They just kept on saying, one policeman after another. They would not shut up.
Like “how are you dressed?” It was not like I was…. I was wearing a knee length dress. I mean a dress that is up to my knees, it is not above my knees or something! It was not exposing anything, and I was wearing dark coloured stockings… I mean don’t people wear dresses, shorts, sarees? I was completely covered. It was just my hands that were bare. Even then I was wearing a shrug. They just saw what they wanted to see.
Someone from college came and talked to them. He wrote a letter, said “I have all these contacts”. Called up lots of people. It was a lot of drama. They called the hostel office, checked our id cards. We had already shown them our ids. They were just not ready to believe anything. Then my friend came, two or three other people came and I think because of his contacts they were a little scared. It was really good that he was there. For the guys with me it was really funny. In the beginning it was scary but later they laughed it off. For them it was funny that I was accused of being a minor and one of them a pimp, while the other, a client. For me, it was like total disbelief… What the hell are you thinking? Can’t you see our faces? Don’t children from universities exist in this universe? Can only prostitutes and pimps exist?
(Excerpt from interviews conducted between 2013-14)
***
There have been concentrated state efforts towards making urban centres into educational, professional hubs. This process, alongside the struggle for education and autonomy from within various social movements has aided increased migration of minorities, particularly women, to city spaces for jobs and education, in search of freedom and social mobility. Often, their gendered engagement with and visibility in urban public spaces is overshadowed by concerns for protection (Fester: 2005). The production and performance of the sexualized body in the city both reconstitutes female embodiment, and genders the city topography. This process delineates places of belonging and non-belonging through which female conduct is governed. For women who visit pubs, this experience of urban life is marked by the chaos and threat of the city on one hand, and the freedom and pleasure of the pub on the other. Urban sexuality for these women is constituted through this dialectic of the exclusive space of middle class leisure that is the pub, and the ‘public’ space of the city.
‘Pub-going women’ is a term that has gained some popularity in recent years as financial autonomy and liberalization have enabled the entry of middle class women into the leisure economy. The pub is often constructed as a liminal space, even as it is saturated in the pleasure economy of liberal capitalist enterprise, often functioning as a modern day ritualistic space for heterosociality. Liminality could be understood as a threshold that straddles both norm and margin—offering perspectives or modes of being not available in everyday life1—in this case, to dance, drink, or dress provocatively, performing in ways that question and challenge the construct of femininity in public spaces where the demand is often to be ‘demure and modest’.In order to understand female embodiment and leisure in urban public spaces, I have juxtaposed the normalized liminality of the pub in contrast with the expectations of public life in the city, where women often encounter harassment, or even assault for their attire and conduct.
***
“I don’t feel restricted in pubs I feel free to wear what I like and not worry whether people will look”
“Only in clubs, campuses, malls I see but otherwise I don’t see women wear what they like and be comfortable.”
“We tend to go in groups. Two people may not, one definitely won’t. The more, the merrier but it is actually the more, the more safe you feel. When you are standing on the road waiting for the cab to come even those moments are really nervous. All the people walking by just spy on you . you are all dressed, you will go and trash the place, you are like skanks. ”
(Excerpts from interviews conducted between 2013-14)
***
Clubs or disco-pubs are sustained by a permissiveness that is prohibited by the normalizing forces of urban public space. Urban city life is marked by separations; belonging and non-belonging are constantly mediated by these walls. Clubs grant an illusion, a polarization with the norms of the city that allows for the existence of pleasure ensconced in legitimized social structures. They are architectural enclosures of permitted transgression, one whose illusory liminality allows for the sustenance of the norm outside its spatial boundaries, a subversion that reiterates even more firmly the structure it purportedly subverts. Ladies Night, a themed night that provides alcohol free of charge to women, reiterates the masculinist performance of these spaces. Not only are free drinks a way to attract the ‘paying’ male crowd, perceived by these clubs are financially capable individuals, the very idea that women are provided free drinks anthropomorphically reiterates the club as ‘gentleman-provider’. Surveillance here is made explicit, not only through bartenders that often limit the consumption of alcohol per women for safety concerns, but also the presence of cameras and bouncers (male personnel employed to ‘regulate’ club revelry).
The female body in the metropolis, on the other hand, is governed by self-surveillance. The entry of single women into the metropolis, either from smaller towns, or other metropolitan spaces, allows for sexual reconstitution with respect to the spatial difference of cities. Not only do women reorient their behaviour to the city, they sculpt the topography of the city into a cartographical construct of their experiences, often rooted in community affiliations and linked to perceptions of biological/social vulnerability. These are further shaped by the structural bias against singlehood that defines their experience of the city and increased vulnerability to violence in city-spaces. These techniques of self –surveillance as protection are sustained by the repressive albatross of punishment that coaxes an embodied performance of femininity in urban spaces.
As Foucault has pointed out, surveillance, that had a direct, menacing presence prior to what could be safely termed as ‘modernity’ has undergone a semantic, even ontological shift from the beginning of 18th century Europe with the transformation of power as discursive, embodied knowledge (Foucault, 1975). This shift entails that mechanisms of control are often internalized, as Foucault writes using the architectural metaphor of the Panopticon:
the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers (Foucault, 1975)
The internalized gaze embedded within the social contract, a silent yet ubiquitous social agreement bound by values of the self/other. The idea of self-surveillance is central to the functioning of modern society; orienting, constituting and engineering ideal subjectivity. In the Foucauldian premise power in modern societies “…reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Foucault 1980,30). Our bodies are discursively constituted through internalized forms of control. The city, with its myriad spatial differences, legitimized and sub-cultural spaces of leisure and the anonymity of subjects to one another, holds out new and unimagined potential for transgression and for subjective reconstitution for single women, yet these are constrained by the spatial organization of urban life and subjectivity. Transgression of the city’s spatial organization contaminates and threatens patriarchal boundaries of conduct. It grants community the agency to employ corrective mechanisms, either morphed in subtle ways by the family, or in the case of single women, friendly neighbourhood aunt/uncle, strangers, police sometimes culminating in explicit physical, sexual or psychological violence and violation.
To understand this better, we return to the narratives in the beginning of the text. The two narratives contrast and contradict each other, but they are very much two sides of the same coin, to use a clichéd expression. If in the first narrative, navigation of city-space before entrance into the club highlights inventive techniques of self-protection:
travelling in groups, covering one’s body with shrugs, jackets or dupattas, techniques embedded in the perceptive reorganization of conduct in city-spaces. The second narrative opens the register of ‘masculinist ownership’ within the metropolis, the non-belonging of the female body in city-space, where regulation of her conduct is defined by time/ place, clothing and company. The experience of women in clubs is a counter to such incidents where we are expected to “be stylish”, “look fashionable”. If clothing legitimizes the body, marking its intelligibility in and compatibility to the conduct of spaces, thus delineating the body’s place in the social structure, our experiences between the regulation of public space and the equally sexist, yet contradictory demands of club spaces means that urban femininity is performed through an unstable yet socially recognizable code of sexuality in urban space. The reversal between the space of the club and the city often means that for women who visit this space, the enactment of femininity in urban spaces is marked by navigating respectability in the city and the need to ‘dress up’ in the club, indicating the two extremes of performative possibilities for women in and as urban publics. Her conduct in public and demeanour in pubs are both subject to social scrutiny.
References:
Fester, Toni, “The Right to the Gendered City: Different Formations of Belonging in Everyday Life” , Journal of Gender Studies Vol 14 Is 3, Taylor and Francis, 2005. Web.
Foucault, M., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Writings 1972-77, Pantheon Books, 1980.
Foucault, M., “Panopticon” From Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) pp. 195-228 translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, 1977.
Lefebvre, Henri, “The Right to the City” From Writings on Cities (Blackwell Publishers, 2000 Reprint) pp. 147-209 translated from the French by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, 1996.
Wahlang, Maranatha and Tejaswini Madabhushi, “Midnight March- Hyderabad Report”, Sexuality and Harassment: Gender Politics on Campus Today , Anveshi Research Center for Women’s Studies, 2013. Web. Accessed July 2014.
Pranoo Deshraju is a research scholar at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Hyderabad.
pranoo.d@gmail.com
1The term was proposed by Arnold Van Gennep and later taken up by performance studies, particularly Victor Turner to describe theatre space. Van Gennep used it to distinguish the transition period between ‘reality’ and trance states in tribal rituals. Contemporary usage of the term broadens its possibilities by exploring various states that pass from the fabric of everydayness into novelty and non-ordinariness that are also located in the everyday, though exceed it. The argument remains whether institutionalized and legitimized experiences such as that of the nightclub would be considered liminal- even though its habitus is quite unlike that of everyday life.