No matter how you celebrate Karwa Chauth, it is not a feminist choice

All these pop axioms of individual agency and choice look empowering and feel like a relief — as we can all finally have a piece of the feminist cake and eat it too. Now we can continue to adhere to the status quo and still believe we are taking part in women’s liberation. Except, it doesn’t work that way. Don’t get us wrong, women can act out of their own free will (if there is such a thing in today’s world), and make their own choices. They will not necessarily be feminist choices, though.

This “choice feminism” makes it more palatable to believe that any act by a woman is a choice, and anyone who questions such choices is essentially creating a rift between women. Never mind that in-fighting among women is often perpetuated in our society through myths of women being the worst enemies of other women to weaken solidarity and to make male validation its substitute. The answer to that, however, is not to assume that there is an abstract idea called “women”, and that all our choices work towards the betterment of that abstraction. “Choice feminism” — the rage that has pretty much hijacked all conversations about feminism today — is such a success because it is convenient. It is easier than questioning our own privileges and complicities which aid, and not hinder, patriarchal domination.

In a country like ours, a woman’s consent is often not her own — it is a product of societal conditioning and androcentric norms. So, when we perpetuate these norms as our sources of feminist comfort, we peddle the idea that the violent histories of these rituals on women’s bodies don’t matter as much as our individual choices of observing them; that the rituals can continue to remain patriarchal as long as we can convince ourselves our part in it is feminist. What this paradigm of choice does is boil down the entire conversation of feminism into an ironic situation, where our individual actions are all active, agential, “feminist” choices, but they are also somehow inconsequential to the larger schema of patriarchy. As long as we are making our choices, patriarchy and feminism can continue to co-exist, it’s fine. And this is exactly where the problem lies with choice feminism — that it believes all choices are the same, and everyone is on an equal field and able to envision, and exercise their choices. Some of us can choose to wear what we want, be where we want to be and do what we want to do. The majority of us don’t have that luxury. For some of us, it’s a constant negotiation with our husbands, families, communities and the society at large to make a space for ourselves to exist the way we want to. Some of us have it even worse, as it is the state that actively prevents us from exercising our choices. So clubbing everything together as a “choice” without fleshing out the particular socio-political context from which these “choices” emanate is reductive, to say the least. It is also problematic, when we carefully construct this false equivalence without taking into account the intersectional nature of our choices.

Depending on our class, caste, religion, sexuality and other social markers, we almost always have it better or worse than someone else. We can all be women, but we are not in the same boat together — because some of us are in yachts, some of our boats have holes in them and are sinking, and some of us are just trying to stay afloat on a broken log. For example, while many women are forced to stay at home as custodians of their community’s honour, many others can choose to stay at home because they have the privilege to do so. For many women, especially in the informal semi- or unskilled labour force, staying at home is not a choice they can afford. However, saying that staying home, rather than working, as a woman is a feminist choice not only obfuscates such structural inequalities that govern these choices, it also does nothing to address the domestic and emotional labour women are routinely, and almost singularly subjected to at home and in their workplaces. It does nothing to address the lack of state support, the uneven distribution of labour within families, and the uneven assumptions of society on the basis of gender. The gender pay gap would still exist, your co-worker would still expect you to take notes in a meeting, your husband would still expect you to teach him about menstruation, and domestic labour would still be terribly underpaid, and criminally precarious.

Boiling down the entire idea of feminism into something that is only determined by individual choices is a dangerous precedence to set. It assumes that everyone has the same access to choice — except that in reality, they don’t. A woman was stabbed on Karwa Chauth by her husband for whose health she was keeping the fast this year. Women were prevented from going to parlours on Karwa Chauth to apply mehendi as such mehendi artists are Muslim ‘love jihadis’ this year as well.

So, we are not all in this together. Some of us are more in it than others. It is completely alright to exercise your individual choices to follow and find comfort in rituals and traditions. But it is not alright to say that such choices are ever going to bring any structural or institutional changes for women’s liberation. It is not alright to deliberately conflate our personal choices with progressive ones.

This is what choice feminism does. “Instead of talking about a vision for a more equal future, we are left with inward-looking, futile discussions about whether or not individual women are ‘bad feminists‘.” Under choice feminism, instead of choosing to subvert patriarchy, “…we now have activities that were once held up as archetypes of women’s subordinate status being presented as liberating personal choices.” So we agree with the author that “choosing to carry on with a regressive tradition — even if you insert liberal twists into it — makes the battle harder for women who don’t want to.”

When we are faced with the question, “is abandoning traditions the answer?”, we would like to say, yes. We need to abandon traditions that have patriarchal roots, that are still largely forced on women and are regressive without a doubt. If we cannot, we should not be veiling our collective inability to tackle patriarchal rituals, and try selling them in a different package — neither to ourselves nor to others. Following those traditions as a choice can be an individual choice indeed, but not a feminist one. After all, feminism is a way of life that cannot be cherry-picked. It is a life-long battle. A daily subversion of patriarchy is the only choice we have.

Bhattacharya is a PhD scholar, Department of English, University of Cambridge. Sarmin works in the Indian Express podcast team (utsa.sarmin@indianexpress.com)