Women and the privilege of nurturance

Why women should celebrate the fact instead of allowing ourselves to be strait-jacketed by capitalist patriarchy that prescribes the opposite

Last week I had to contend with seeing one of my feminist godmothers in a hospital bed in a state of utmost fragility. She's a single woman who had the audacity to live life on her own terms, always, and if today there exists in me any trace of fierceness and a preternatural discomfort with misogynist bullshit, it is the result of her imprint. When I left her I was convinced that there is only one thing that matters most in life--our capacity for nurturance. The feminist sisterhood is meaningless if it cannot accommodate within it the space for fostering ecologies of solidarity based on the caretaker's touch.

The evening I returned to Delhi, over drinks and dinner, I found myself in the midst of a heated argument with a male friend over the subject of vulnerability. He contended it was a sign of weakness and therefore had decided to make no room for it in his life. Like me, two feminist friends at the table felt the opposite. We posited that vulnerability had in fact become for us a survival strategy. I've written before about my decision to embrace vulnerability, but I'd also reflected separately about my own obvious issues with acknowledging when I need help, then mustering the courage to ask for it. My cisgender male friend and I had two different semantic considerations of the term. He understood vulnerability as a condition of fragility that easily exposes one to being attacked, whereas I perceived it as a state of being in which one is predisposed towards trusting others instead of functioning from a position of defensiveness. Both strategies were the consequence of forms of conditioning. He had been betrayed many times before in moments when he had allowed himself to be vulnerable. I had, too, but had decided some time ago that I wouldn't allow my behaviour to governed by my wounds. I had chosen to trust the world not because it hadn't failed me repeatedly, but in spite of that fact. To me, there is wisdom to be found in not allowing oneself to be defeated by the world's cruelty; to place one's faith in radical optimism.

I have become particularly attentive to the qualities I want to associate with feminism. Aggression is not one of them. Kindness is, as is consideration. And it comes not from levelling the playing field such that we internalise the sameness of our humanity, but rather, from revelling in our differences.

When we were speaking last week, Partho shared with me an essay I'd already downloaded but hadn't yet read. I remedied it that night when, before sleeping, I immersed myself in Audre Lorde's 1979 essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House". I was blown away by the intensity of her language and made several screenshots of certain paragraphs. Like these two, in which she says: "For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women. Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being."

From my mother, a private nurse all her life, I consciously inherited a proclivity towards caretaking. She may not remember, but I have memories of her telling me through my childhood and adolescence that the most important mediation with another person was through touch, just as she advocated that half of medicinal healing was constituted by faith. The act of touching had to transcend the clinical. It had to be invested with much more than contact between skin cells. Love was crucial. Under such a circumstance, vulnerability is no longer representative of one person allowing herself to be fragile and therefore open to attack; it means there are two or more people who are equally invested in creating an atmosphere of trust and nourishment. (Is this how we envisage a "safe space"?)

I have no answers. And by no means am I trying to prescriptively police what feminist behaviour should look like. My concern with nurture stems from my understanding that capitalist patriarchy proposes the opposite, through its privileging of competitive behaviour, its evangelising of the gospel of the survival of the fittest, how it preys on fuelling an atmosphere of interpersonal suspicion and surveillance. As feminists, our goal has to include more than just the fight for equality. It is imperative that we actively dismantle structures whose proliferation is premised on the oppression of others and ourselves. Lorde cautions us: "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," she reiterates. "They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support."

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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