Gayle Rubin’s
‘Traffic in Women’ and the Kinship-Marriage Nexus in Austen and Bollywood: A
Reading with Reference to (P/)Bride Prejudice
Zohra Kanth
Independent Researcher,
Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi, India
Abstract: Of the foremost preoccupations of feminist interventions
is to determine the locus and mechanics of women’s oppression. This paper
tackles this question based on Gayle Rubin's foregrounding of the traffic in
women in her essay of the same title, with reference to Jane Austen's Victorian
canonical Pride and Prejudice and its Indian adaptation as the Bollywood film
Bride and Prejudice. Starting from the failures of Marxist understanding of the
phenomenon and the questions it leaves unresolved, the focus is to unravel the
kinship structures as proposed by Mauss and Levis Strauss and argue for
marriage and women’s customary exchange as the root of women’s subjugation
across social systems. Further, the paper will look at the Bollywood’s
deployment of male gaze to reinstate the objectification of female bodies in
the film. The study therefore hopes to contribute to the ongoing discourses on
deconstructing social systems and cultural traditions to understand the
formation of hierarchies in identity markers.
Keywords: Gayle Rubin, Traffic in Women, Kinship, Gift-giving,
Marriage, Pride and Prejudice, Bride and Prejudice.
Introduction: Rubin's Fundamental Question
“More important, the analysis of the causes of women’s
oppression forms the basis for any assessment of just what would have to be
changed in order to achieve a society without gender hierarchy.” ~ Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women: Notes on
the “Political Economy” of Sex
Feminist scholarship is permeated with the predicament of
oppression. From nascent renderings in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication to radical
foregrounding in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the history of feminist discourse
grapples with the question of women’s subjugation under male-oriented
normativity. Yet a lacuna remains largely unasserted and hence unaddressed.
Amidst unpacking of the “whats” of social subjugation based on gender—women
being largely relegated to domestic spheres and liminal spaces in literary and
social terrains—and unveilings of the “whys”—phallic anxiety to ensure power
and the “soul-making” logic of Spivak (1988)—a seminal yet overlooked aspect is
the undoing of the fundamental “hows” and “whereins” of this unrelenting
despotism.
Scholars have started seeking answers to the “how”
question of gender-based oppression to decode and eventually dismantle its
generative and regulatory mechanisms. Among these, the most prominent critic to
uncover the roots of the modus operandi of women’s oppression is anthropologist
Gayle Rubin. In her seminal essay “Traffic in Women” (1975), Rubin intersects
Levi-Strauss’s kinship structures with Freud’s psychoanalytic reproduction of
gender to decode the locus of phenomenally pan-cultural female subjugation (the
focus of this analysis is limited to kinship structures).
Acknowledging the ubiquity of gendered oppression, this
paper reads Rubin’s aforementioned essay through two anachronistic and
culturally distant texts: Jane Austen’s Victorian classic Pride and Prejudice
and its 2004 Bollywood adaptation Bride and Prejudice. Austen’s writing offers
a mirroring of and meditation on the submissive subservience attributed to
women of her age. Through a cast of complex characters and expansive
exploration of the Bennet family dynamics (subsequently appropriated as the
Bakshi family in the Indian adaptation), the texts offer a potent site for
understanding the dynamics of women’s exploitation through and within social
structures.
Marxism and Its Discontents
Rubin begins her analysis with an acknowledgement of the
bearings and borrowings of Marxist thought on the feminist scholarship of
oppression. Marx exemplified the social interpretation and consequent genesis
of the ‘black slave’ as a category. He argues that this presumptive attribution
of black people to slavery is not incipient essentially but instead thrust upon
them socially in relational conditions.“What is a Negro slave?...A Negro is a
Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations.” Rubin rewords this to
(re)consider the praxis of gender and domestication of women: “A woman is a woman. She only becomes a
domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human
Dictaphone in certain relations.” She thus at the outset hints towards the
non-essentialist nature of gender and gender roles.
Literary and cultural texts have from time to time been
testaments to these firmly established gender roles and division of space. Mrs.
Bakshi in the film Bride and Prejudice embodies nearly all traits of the
typical ‘Indian housewife’ prototype. Her concerns and considerations are
confined to the domestic space. She is adamant on ensuring the continuity of
this normative apparatus by wedding off her daughters to affluent bachelors
whose “Big houses” she envisions as their new place of belonging. Mrs. Bakshi,
as a paranoid housewife, appears to be so devoted to her domestic structures
that anything that ripples its stability or delays its continuity becomes a
point of contention to her. Having her daughters assumes a stable identity—that
of being married or rather ‘settled’ in the Indian societal parlance—is the
persistent aim of Mrs. Bakshi. This corresponds with Mrs. Bennet of Austen’s
novel. As Austen writes of her desperation, “The business of her life was to
get her daughters married” (22). Mrs. Bennet constantly advises and administers
her daughters to behave in a ‘womanly’ way—the Victorian moral genteel and
cultural coyness ascribed to women. She sternly strives to incubate her
daughters into the Victorian women’s ideally designed domesticity.
While Marxism glosses over the production of labour and
the mechanics of social oppression, it remains heedless to the sex-gender
identity of its ‘subjects’. In Marx’s map of the social world, human beings are
workers, peasants, or capitalists; that they are also men and women is not seen
as very significant (Rubin 2). Engels, in his The Origin of the Family, Private
Property, and the State, takes a step ahead and situates sex oppression as
inherited from prior social forms and integrates sexuality into social theory.
Engels distinguishes “relations of sexuality” from “relations of production.”
Both of these ought to be understood in their own regard—a project that Rubin
endeavours to unravel: how the “relations of sexuality” are chiselled to
complement the relations of production.
Catherine Gallagher observes in her assessment of the
social conditions of England between 1832-1867, “whatever their social rank, in
the eyes of the law women were second-class citizens” (57).What ensures the
stability of these social laws which subjugate women’s rights, dignity, and
agency? How has submission and subordination come to be deemed as essentially
‘woman’s’ traits, as evinced by the characters of the film and novel? The question demands an understanding of
women’s oppression through a more holistic, expansive approach which takes into
account not only the anthropological aspects that work together in constricting
these relations.
Unravelling the Sex/Gender System: Kinship Structures and
the Necessity of Marriage
The sociological category of gender is not inevitably
consequential from the biological trait of ‘sex.’ Rubin argues that social
machination constructs and shapes how biological sex (male, female) and gender
(socially constructed roles and expectations) are understood and experienced.
She calls this the sex/gender system. It pertains to the systematic
contrivances which package the biological selves into gender systems conducive
to the oppression of women. Every society also has a sex/gender system—a set of
arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation
is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in a conventional manner,
no matter how bizarre some of the conventions may be (Rubin 39).
One of the essential tenets of this manoeuvring is
through the apparatuses of kinship. A ‘bizarre convention’, logically cloaked
into an age-old tradition, is that of gift giving. Gift-giving is seen as a
crucial ritual in maintaining and strengthening kinship bonds within families
and communities. For Mauss, gift-giving is “a primitive way of achieving peace”
in the absence of institutionalized governmental systems. This implies that it
also helps establish and subvert a set of power relations, more evident when it
comes to gender. Amongst all the entities of socio-communal exchange, women
have since the inception been pivotal to this primitive reciprocity. As the
most valuable gifts of exchange among communities, they solidify and synthesize
social affiliations and affluence.
History is profuse with instances of women being traded,
from women being exchanged informally as compensations for debts and offences
or in officially ornate traditions as wedding. Rubin explains how the modern
kinship structures bedeck this trading as rather more admissible practices:
“It is certainly not difficult to find ethnographic and
historical examples of trafficking in women. Women are given in marriage, taken
in battle, exchanged for favours, sent as tribute, traded, bought, and sold.
Far from being confined to the ‘primitive’ world, these practices seem only to
become more pronounced and commercialized in more ‘civilized’ societies” (22).
This civilized tactic for trafficking is best embodied in
the custom of marriage. In his study on the structural anthropology of kinship,
Lévi-Strauss traces marriages as the most basic form of gift exchange. Two
people may meet in friendship and exchange gifts and yet quarrel and fight in
later times, but intermarriage connects them in a permanent manner
(Lévi-Strauss as cited in Rubin 21). It is a social and—in modern social
systems a legal—mode of exchanging women between families to establish
alliances. Not only is it pivotal for underpinning social ties but also in
maintaining or escalating social-cum-financial stature.
This can be realised in most of Austen’s novels. Her
plots of marriages are underlined by economy and class, where the future of the
women (and their family ultimately) hinges upon the prospects of the men they
marry. Mrs. Bennet declares Bingley as a desirable match for her daughter Jane
only after an appraisal of his wealth and inheritance of the Netherfield Park
(Austen 21). She sees Bingley as the single man in possession of a good
fortune—Austen alluded to this in her very initial lines of the text. Marriage
is presented as effectively the only path to female respectability, so that
even those who recognize its drawbacks opt for it, focusing their attention on
when, whom, and how to wed (Lanser 302).
Bride and Prejudice presents Mrs. Bakshi constantly
striving to seek affluent immigrant bachelors for her daughters. We see her
anxiously scrolling through matrimonial sites, looking for young men with high
income in Canada, USA, and UK. Since the adaptation transposes the Bakshi
family as being Punjabi, Chadha must also have taken recourse to the plethora
of news articles that testify to the Punjabi affinity for non-resident men,
notably Canadian. In an interview with Khalsa Vox, Raminder Singh, the founder
of a local marriage bureau, noted this increasing propensity of parents
demanding immigrant matches for their daughters: “The desire to secure avenues
for children to settle abroad is burgeoning. Nearly 90 per cent of the marriage
profiles we receive revolve around finding compatible NRI matches” (Sodhi).
“Typically, NRI women want to marry NRI men, and NRI men want to marry native
Indian women,” a similar observation by Sandeep Amar, business head for the
matrimonial website SimplyMarry.com (Khullar). This brings one to the pertinent
predicament of desirability and conditioning of women as prospective gifts.
Women are throughout conditioned to meet the
male-manifested normative ideals of desirability and suitability. Their
demeanour, behaviours, and bodies are disciplined to cater to male gaze and
desires, which form the bedrock of normative social codes that often dictate
which types of women, are deemed desirable based on appearance, behavior, and
roles. Butler sees this reiteration of roles as the performative basis of
gender; the sex-gender system is regulated, if not constructed, through this
incessant enactment of normative roles or what she calls “a stylized repetition
of acts” (Butler 179). A classic enactment of this is in a scene from the film
when Kohli (Collins) is to visit Bakshi House from the US, hoping for a
suitable match. Mrs. Bakshi summons and examines her daughters on impressing
the suitor. She instructs: “It is very important to lay a good first impression
on Kohli Sahab. Stand Straight. Smile. Don’t talk unnecessarily, and don’t talk
anything too intelligent!”Although the scene is shot whimsically and with a
touch of humour, it clearly highlights the overtone of women’s disposition
being policed, almost being packaged as commeilfaut presents, ‘brides’ or what
Rubin calls “sexual semi-objects”. The film’s titular choice and emphasis of
Bride entails the cultural burden of the Indian marriage where the social
institution is permeated with patriarchally subjected traditions, customs, and
logics. In India, marriage holds immense social and religious significance,
often seen as a cornerstone of societal order and a means of maintaining family
and lineage. Owing to the primacy and rather urgency attributed to weddings in
India—evinced from Mrs. Bakshi’s melodramatic wailing amidst other
neighbourhood women consoling her over the fear of living in “a rotten house
full of spinsters”—these customs are effortlessly legitimized and seamlessly
inculcated into the cultural fabric.
Rubin observes about the ratification of marriage as an
imminent societal institution:“Many customs, clichés, and personality traits
seem to make a great deal of sense (among others, the curious custom by which a
father gives away the bride)” (22).This curious custom referenced is the ritual
of Kanyadaan in Hindu marriages. From the Sanskrit roots, Kanya
(woman/daughter) and “daan” meaning “donation” or “giving away”, it symbolizes
the father giving away his daughter and her responsibility to the groom. A
proprietorial treatment of women is grounded in scriptural dealings of the
Manusmriti. It holds the essence of women as totems which throughout their life
course ought to be handed over from one male to the other:“In childhood a
female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is
dead to her son; a woman must never be independent” (V.148).There are manifold
cultural, ethnic, and religious variations to this proclamation, yet the common
denominator of traffic, trading, and (gift-)giving remains largely unchanged.
It is in this ubiquitous, universal system of ‘traffic in
women’ where Rubin locates the root cause of female oppression, and a history
of subjection, subversion, and subservience thereby unfolds. It robs them of
their agency and autonomy, which they are entitled to as fellow human subjects,
rendering them instead as demi-objects for exaction of masculine desires and
control. This mechanism offers to answer the questions raised earlier in the
paper: what fundamentally leads to women’s oppression, why are they limited to
the domains of domesticity? It is so for they are civilly gifted, trafficked,
and conditioned into that sphere and, in Marxist understanding, trapped in a
perpetual cycle of the reproduction of production.
Bollywood and the Male Gaze
“The total
relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between
a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as
one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners”( Lévi-Strauss
(qtd. In Rubin 21).
Throughout the traffic in women, the trader and the
receiver—only people (predominantly males) by and upon whom they are conferred
presents—are empowered with the benefits of such social linkages. Loci of power
in all forms are skewed towards the giftees and gifters, consequently
generating a stringent hierarchical relationship. Women, since they are in the
first place devoid of a choice to be given away or otherwise, are throughout
the flux of traditions perceived as commodities of sexual gratification by men.
While there can be a contrapuntal view on this in Austen’s version, its Indian
adaptation primarily succumbs to the male heteronormative inspection of the
gendered bodies.
Pride and Prejudice follows male characters like Darcy
and Bingley from the gaze of Lizzi or Elizabeth, subverting to an extent the
normative domineering gaze of the male characters. As Douglass Murray contends:
“Austen mentions Elizabeth’s eyes with almost
predictable frequency, every ten pages or so. Elizabeth’s abilities to attract
more than a cursory gaze and to return others’ gazes indicate her resistance
and independence of mind amid powerful forces of conformity” (qtd in Grate 103).
However, this deflection and defiance in gaze is not as
prominent in the character of Lalita (starring Aishwarya Rai), much less the
other women characters from Bride and Prejudice. The most apparent and decisive
explanation of that would simply be the fact that this adaptation is of
Bollywood of the early 2000s, where the satiation of male pleasures was not
just normative but nearly a necessity for a film’s commercial success.
The representation of women in popular Indian films often
perpetuates a voyeuristic gaze, fetishizing their bodies for the male viewers.
As Mulvey holds, the male gaze views women as ‘sexual objects’; film reflects,
reveals, even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of
sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle
(Mulvey 803). This is most vividly captured in the song-and-dance sequences of
Bollywood movies, which are an inalienably pivotal segment therein. Through
these scenes and “item songs”, filmmakers can convey romantic and erotic
tension without crossing the boundaries of censorship. Bhattacharya and Mehta
maintain that these sequences are often diegetic representations of sexual
desire:
“…the song and the dance sequences stand-in
for sex scenes. The focus is particularly on the heroine, the fetishized female
sexualized through the close attention to her costumes, graceful body
movements, and carefully angled shots that heighten scopic pleasure…they feign
unawareness of their sexualized bodies and the camera’s voyeuristic gaze” (qtd.
In Balakrishnan 137).
An item song sequence from Bride and Prejudice aptly
references this vantage point. Goa Groove or “my lips are waiting” is set at a
beach in Goa. The woman dancing, clad in a shimmery one-piece golden top, is
seen dancing in a steady sensuous rhythm. Her movements oscillate between slow
and swift, as she dances to the song, lip-synching:
My eyes
are searching
My hips are working
My lips are waiting for you
As the camera constantly shifts from her swaying waist to
swinging hips, its frame momentarily flips to the audience, amongst which Darcy
(Martin Henderson) is seen looking intently with a faint smile. In the song,
lyrics, the choice of camera alignment, and the spectacle, all work together
culminating into the voyeuristic exhibition of the feminine body.
It is no exaggeration to say that the greatest obsession
in history is that of man with woman’s body (Gilmore 17). The film and the
novel effectively exemplify this aspect. From their depiction of gender roles and
subjugation of agency and desire, which are rooted in the traffic in
women—Rubin’s lexicon, being traded and exchanged as gifts for sexual
appeasement to the disciplining and displaying of docile bodies—they underscore
the means and mechanisms of women’s oppression and the regulation thereof, as
hammered into our socio-economic, mythoreligious, and cultural nexus..
Conclusion
Rubin’s approach to anthropology of social relations,
deflects from the Marxist economic univocal standpoint on oppression. The study
tried to dismantle the structures under which this power imbalance thrives. The
Victorian morality and economy of marriage and the Indian traditions’ paramount
prominence attached to it and the associated rituals like Kanyadan,
offer insights into the deep-rooted mechanics of domination — that is, the
exchange , trading and traffic— into which women are systematically ushered as
sexual objects of reproduction. The paranoid fixation of Mrs. Bennet of the 18th
century and (in continuation) of Mrs. Bakshi in the 21st,
corroborates the seamless exercising of these oppressive forces as imminent
social Institutions. Treatment of women as gifts and quai-objets for
appeasement of masculine desires is further regulated and perpetuated by modern
media catering to the male gaze. This is instantiated by the songs sequences in
Bollywood films as the Goa Grove item song featuring in Bride and Prejudice.
Such a lens of
studying hierarchical disparities in identity markers including gender, where
the locus of oppression is sought within social systems rather than biological
orientation, is indeed “seductive and powerful” ( and rich with potential.
Egalitarian ideation cannot begin without the understanding and undoing of the
obscured social mechanisms that impede it. This includes understanding how
dominant narratives and cultural practices create and reinforce inequalities,
and how marginalized groups can resist and reimagine their identities.
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