Economic and Political Weekly October 21, 2006 4469 Making Space for Feminist Social Critique in Contemporary Kerala Women’s literary writing in Kerala has gained a fairly wide market. Even as younger women authors have succeeded in breaking earlier stereotypes and frameworks of depiction, the category of ‘pennezhuthu’ has come to be questioned as a defining term that limits, instead of enabling. Incisive feminist critiques of contemporary patriarchy now draw upon a variety of disciplines, with the result that long held notions defining Malayalee womanhood are being questioned with increasing regularity. Concomitantly, stereotyped frameworks and the pulls of the market continue to exercise a powerful influence. It makes it all the more necessary to foster independent initiatives in feminist knowledge generation in Kerala. “Women’s Imprint”, a women’s publishing venture in Malayalam is involved in such efforts to help create new networks of resistance and towards ensuring that gender remains a contested category in public debate. J DEVIKA, MINI SUKUMAR reminds us that the media visibility women have gained, and the new possibilities opened up by gender mainstreaming cannot in any way replace feminist activism or intellectual work in the public. Yet the 1990s and after have also opened up unmistakable possibilities. The twists and turns of feminist politics in this period have alerted us to the need for greater reflection on the challenges of building genuinely pluralist politics. 2 These critical insights offer hope for complex and incisive forms of feminist social critique and activism. Secondly, the 1990s and after have also seen a greater number of Malayalee women migrating to uni- versities and research institutions in the national metropolises and abroad, attaining higher levels of competence in the social sciences and humanities. Today, the possibility of extending the scope, sophistication and sensitivity of feminist social critique in Kerala seems to have grown in unprecedented ways. Within Kerala’s own university system, critical spaces – such as in the women’s studies units and centres – are being slowly cleared. 3 This reflects in the relative rise of scholarly writings by women and in the number of active women participants in public debates in the 1990s and after. Thirdly, though women are still in the lower rungs of the media in Kerala, more women now work in the media than ever before. Lastly, though an explicitly feminist position in literary writing – ‘pennezhuthu’ in Malayalam – has faced considerable hostile criticism both from masculinist critics and women authors to whom it appeared to be yet another form of labelling or ghettoisation, women writers continue to produce powerful critiques of everyday patriarchy in Kerala. Against this backdrop, we wish to reflect upon the history of gender difference in Kerala’s public sphere and its contemporary shape. Also, we would like to put forward a few thoughts on the link between feminist political and intellectual work in Kerala in the present. II Something in the shape of a “public sphere” began to concretise in Malayalee society only around the second half of the 19th century. In this arena, ‘public interest” became the key concern, and issues came to be debated in its terms. By this we mean the I T hese are times in which the marginality of women to public life in Kerala is increasingly coming under critical scru- tiny. The issue, it appears, is not really the invisibility of women in public arenas. Indeed, the vast expansion of the media since the early 1990s has assured that the “sites of enunciation” have increased phenomenally as far as gender issues are concerned: we have now, an ever-increasing number of talk shows, discussions and special slots for gender issues on TV. The attention that the mainstream media pays to such issues is also not negligible. In the discourse of development, a dominant presence in the Malayalee cultural sphere since the mid-20th century, “women” have always been a significant presence, especially as a way to represent Kerala as the utopia of social development. This continues with telling variations in the present era of “gender mainstreaming”. However, we question glib readings that interpret the greater visibility of women as evidence for the widening of their access to the public. The decade of the 1990s also saw the firming of the feminist presence in the arena of politics in Kerala. The implementation of the 33 per cent reservation of seats for women in local bodies has brought a considerable number of women into these bodies. “Gender mainstreaming” has also proceeded apace, and now “gender training” is an eminently familiar, technical and mostly non- threatening term. The Kerala government’s “women-oriented poverty mission” has been lauded as a successful innovation in women’s empowerment. Yet, the extent to which these initiatives have been successful in politicising women is still doubtful; the possibilities they offer, too, appear mixed. It is also important to remember that the government’s efforts to mainstream gender took place precisely in a period of accentuated confrontation between the feminist movement in Kerala and almost all sections of entrenched political society, which was certainly a major way in which feminists grabbed the attention of the mainstream media. In these struggles, the feminist movement relied heavily upon the judiciary and the media, which did bring certain gains. 1 However, the fatal flaws in this strategy were all too evident in the wake of adverse legal judgments, particularly, the recent high court judgment in the infamous Suryanelli serial rape case. Indeed, this