"The Lie of the Land: Notes on Gender, Globalisim and the Nation-State "

Abstract

This analysis of the contemporary "Indian" context is occasioned by the visible rise of new forms of cultural chauvinism concerning women's lives and their bodies; as also a proliferation of different modes of commodification of women's bodies in global culture. Despite the insertion of modernity during colonialism, with its enlightenment ethic of rationality and individuality, postcolonial "India" under globalizing capital only redeploys a rarefied pre-modernily. I argue that the sudden interest in the dominant media to re-deploy the woman's body as sexual self-representation submerges an insidious commodity-fetishism, predicated on consumerist masculinities. Indeed the figure of the women in this era of globalization and nationalist democracy, I argue, continues to collapse into the continuum between masculinist control and the male gaze. Liberal global culture today revisits traditional patriarchy largely to revise its forms than to dislodge its content. It is this contradictory process of contemporary culture, that of masculinist and male pleasure on the one hand and the discourse of self-assertion and emancipation on the other that I wish to track and delineate in this analysis. I also wish at the end to comment on sexual economy, gendered subalternity, masculinities and the cultural in order to expose its many serious cultural and political fault-lines.