Internalized gendering mistaken for ethical responsibility blocks women’s resistance most stubbornly.

Evidence

In my estimation, in the case of “Douloti,” Mahasweta confronts a much more severe truth: that one of the bases in women’s subalternity (and indeed in unequal gendering on other levels of society) is internalized constraints seen as responsibility, and therefore the very basis of gender-ethics. Here woman’s separation from organic intellectuality is a complicity with gendering that cannot not be perceived by many as sweetness, virtue, innocence, simplicity. If in the case of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”) and Jashoda in Mahasweta’s “Stanadayini,” it is parts of the sexed body—menstruation, lactation—that are invested with meaning and yet are not heard and not read, in “Douloti” it is the bonded prostitute’s body that Mahasweta makes visible as graphic comment on the entire map of India. It is a mistake to think that this fierce love is the jaded pessimism of the bourgeoisie. … Yet sweet, innocent, responsible Douloti is not a subject of resistance. Mahasweta dramatizes that difficult truth: internalized gendering perceived as ethical choice is the hardest roadblock for women the world over. The recognition of male exploitation must be supplemented with this acknowledgment. And the only way to break it is by establishing an ethical singularity with the woman in question, itself a necessary supplement to a collective action to which the woman might offer resistance, passive or active. Douloti as a subject is a site of this acknowledgment. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2190

Categorization

• XREF: Reconnects to Bhubaneswari Bhaduri from ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ — Spivak’s own core example of the subaltern’s suicide as failed speech. — connects to: Refusing to acknowledge a woman’s own ethical framing paradoxically strengthens the misogyny feminists oppose — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2242; Mediated female confession now risks titillating men instead of politically alienating them. — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 63
• ADDENDUM: The claim that internalized ethical self-sacrifice is the deepest gendered roadblock parallels the sacrificial logics in ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — where invested bodies become sites of meaning that go unread.

Broader Connections

• Refusing to acknowledge a woman’s own ethical framing paradoxically strengthens the misogyny feminists oppose #corroborates (0.80) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2242