Dear June,
As a kid, I remember being labelled as a tomboy for preferring jeans over skirts, Lego over Barbie, sports over makeup and Eminem over Spice Girls. My teenage gait didn’t have the girly hip swing, and my pubescent self began to slouch due to being conscious of my recent developments. Apparently, they didn’t go too well with my “sporty jockishness”. And yet, I was fond of applying French manicures, straightening my hair, and got my young heartbroken by doofus teenage boys.
Even now, I often perceive myself as tiptoeing deftly on the shores of androgyny. For example, I fasten the longer flicks of my cropped hair by a shimmering pin. On days that I don’t have corporate meetings to attend, I am found in oversized spectacles and plain T-shirts that are flanked by indie pants. My dressing ritual ends with a casual pinning of earrings and a smear of lip colour, in hues that range from subdued nudes to the boldest shades of scarlet. I enjoy musky colognes as I do fruity splashes, and focus on maintaining toned biceps despite failing miserably at performing basic pushups.
What does this hopscotch game amidst so-called binarisms make me? They make me who I am, and it is in this fluidity that my essence finds its home.
I was not exempted from the brigade of seemingly benign comments made by close as well as random people such as, “beta, it’s so nice to see you become all girly”; “you’ve cut your hair too short”; or “you would have been such an eligible boy, if only…” The lack of validation accorded to my nuanced androgyny did leave me feeling confused about my identity, and at times, frustrated. Overcoming the need to conform to several binaries does originate from a certain amount of privilege, and that is an undeniable fact. But it also arises out of an ongoing internal battle wherein these binaries are vanquished, little by little every day.
My contention against these binaries gained additional zeal when I began to increasingly realise the futility of their artificial imposition. While at LSE, I heard Judith Butler say that gender is nothing but an act of doing, or performativity that is assigned to us from the moment our birth is heralded with: “It’s a boy!”, or, “it’s a girl”. From that very moment, it is either this way or that. The pursuit of gender justice that unites Butler with humbler selves like me is our mutual wistfulness for a time when birth announcements sound more like, “it’s a boy/girl unless (s)he chooses otherwise!”
Oftentimes, my supposed idealism has been flouted as a bandwagon of Western modernity. Those who are well-versed with the diversity of Indian culture and heritage would agree with me when I say that heterogeneity is unapologetically Indian in its foundations, as is modernity. The temples of Khajuraho, Mahabharata’s Shikandi, the legends of Ayappan, Mohini and Brihanalla only form the tip of a colossal iceberg that swells me with pride for its ancient acceptance, but also pains me for its more recent shunning by the rudimental combinations of imperialism, capitalism as well as patriarchy.
I also wish to bandage an over-presumed affliction that rhetorically places a homophobic lot of the society as “villains” against an alienated queer populace as “victims”. There are two flaws in this assumption. One, that it is impossible to put an end to binarisms with yet another binary. Two, and more importantly, because this is a redundant mechanism of division. I’ll tell you why I say that. According to my naïve understanding, gender justice has little to do with vindicating queer identities and avenging homophobic myopias. Rather, the monster that deserves our unanimous fight is the homophobe as well as the queer victim that we carry within us due to the uninterrupted conditioning of heteronormativity wherein we eat, breathe, sleep, and essentially, live.
Even though my privilege and lived experiences make me more gender-sensitive, I am not a morally upright exception to the conscious or unconscious denouncements that we as a preconditioned society make towards fluidity and deviant identities. Like me, there are times when the homophobic villain in us takes the subtlest precedence amidst the best of us. And it is this constant internal conflict that I find to be the cause of our alienation. This alienation resides in the very sophisticated boxing of our own fluid selves, as well as everything that we happen to interact with or know. For, how can water be boxed without ice trays?
As the world continues to be gripped in the fangs of a dreadful pandemic, I welcome you yet again as the month of freedom and diversity. I hope for you to usher it to a more sincere, accepting, and liberating means of existence. May you end after weakening the impostors within us, and undoubtedly, the biggest impediments to our own freedom.
Sincerely,
Your fan.
Urvashi Singh is a writer and blogger.
