A #mustread article about dress codes, the kind that Rajkot mayor Ms #Boriya was the latest to recommend. Shilpa Phadke & Sameera Khan remind us: Yes, it is important to fight the dress code, but it is equally important to fight it as only one manifestation of a larger malaise -- where not just the way people dress is sought to be controlled but also the way they walk, behave, and exchange thoughts, ideas and affection. The largely unopposed move to impose a dress code -- with the media expressing faint disapproval at the pre-modernity of it -- is not pre-modern at all. It is a very modern response to the very modern anxieties that, today, women will wear spaghetti straps to college, tomorrow they will have careers, the day after refuse to be chaste Indian women, the next week make love to the wrong kind of men, the next month declare they prefer women to men, and from there who knows what else... I would add a key anxiety here - the anxiety isnt just to create chaste Indian women, but docile Indian women workers. A key fear is that Indian women at work will form unions, refuse to accept the image of docility and codes of respectable conduct that makes them valuable to global capital. So, the anxiety to keep Indian women this way isnt just that of khaps or some silly backward netas. Global corporations have the same anxiety. Surprised? See the report Flawed Fabrics on women and girls working in the Tamilnadu textile industry. Those factories punish women workers for speaking to co-workers, esp male co-workers. They keep large numbers of the young women workers in hostels, where cell phones are banned - yes, banned - for the women; phone calls home once a week are allowed only in the presence of the warden; and CCTV cameras and wardens keep a close eye on the movements of the workers inside the complex (they arent allowed outside). And the justification? Exactly what #AMU and #DU colleges and every college give - this is Indian culture, we are doing what the girls parents want us to... These factories produce for a range of major global brands. Now, the media is willing to do stories on the politician or khap or college or Univ that does moral policing. But we never, ever, are told that tens of 1000s of women workers are made to live and work in semi prisons, where moral policing and bans on mobiles etc are no empty threat by some backward panchayat but a strictly enforced reality. Moral policing, then, is one of the key tools used to discipline and control women workers in globalized India - it is the condition sought by global brands to persuade them to Make in India.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 20:45:10 +0000