I recently posed a perturbing question to the male audience in one seminar on gender empowerment: “What is the edge of authority you hold on the women in your household?” There was pin drop silence in the hall and everyone took a defensive position instead of giving me a straight answer to the question. The bottom line is that the legitimacy of their power over the lives of the women associated with them has never been questioned or challenged.
Despite the soaring claims, signing of formal commitments and designing policy frameworks the engendering of society and institutions still remains a distant dream. The imprints of power dynamics in society today follow the murky shadow of religious, cultural and social interpretations of gender hierarchy. There is an abundance of evidence of lip service to promote gender equity but the root causes remain largely untouched. The majority of power pillars do not share a gendered vision of society. The narratives have been frequently reshaped, reaffirmed and reinforced as per the convenience of the powerful elite class to maintain the status quo.
Nowhere on the planet have the powerful given up their powers voluntarily. Power sharing has never been a trade of convenience; it requires rebelliousness. It is the subject who is ruled in a society of patriarchal power dynamics who stands against the way she is governed that matters the most. Giving up dignity will only make the unruly ruler stronger.
In such an arrangement of power affairs, the party in power always keeps analysing the situation to uphold his power position. He has a plethora of experience in how to control the subject either by rewarding or punishment. And the subject, in order to get rewarded or skip the punishment, does her level best to please her masters; she can even be disposed to hurt the other subjects for that matter. This is a vicious circle of power politics within its own pecking order. It continues until either the subject or the master goes through a paradigm shift in ideology.
Patriarchy imbeds the historical nature of gender-based violence and confirms that it is not a wretched abnormality but systematically ingrained conduct in culture and society, reinforced and empowered by patriarchal power dynamics. In organised gender subjugation, violence commands larger concentration and fear; bigotry and misogyny do their share to shape discrimination by defining and keeping limited gender norms.
Culture has been predominantly worn to validate gender inequality and violence by evoking customary cultural attitudes about the image of women in any given society. The cover of culture is in fact a guard of the culture of patriarchy in that society. In our society, culture is a central determinant to define the spaces within which supremacy is uttered, gender affairs are negotiated and gender roles structured. Cultural contexts are grave for the examination of gender dimensions and are always key determinants of societal behaviours around gender sovereignty.
Changing narratives is a sluggish and plodding process. Society as a whole needs to be educated on how such a misleading gender hierarchy is exposing them to vulnerability for not being just to their own selves. It requires passion and a great amount of vehemence to engage in such processes, especially in a social infrastructure where power is concentrated in mainly one group.
Unaccounted power corrupts and that is a thumb rule. Societies where the concentration of power is solely masculine could potentially pave the way towards decline. The power equation has to be balanced in order to save society from social, moral and political decline. Exercise of absolute power at any level is fatal. The UN Foundation’s Alaka Basuargues: “Ideological change really requires you to question patriarchy.” Yes, the paradigm shift in the ideological framework of society is desperately required to poise the power equation between both the genders. This is where the salvation of society lies.
The writer is a freelance columnist. She may be contacted at [email protected]