No amount of token representation or rallies will change anything, unless people’s consciousness changes. Are we asking the following questions?
1. Why is there so much violence against women when there is a woman head of the State? It is because any State power is phallocentric and so the head (embodied woman) is mimicking phallocentrism.
2. Women who rally for women actually abuse women because they do not agree with them?
3. Women who are in rallies will only tolerate those who are of “their view” and not others? So, if a woman is an atheist, she will not rally for someone who is not?
4. Women (and men) in their consciousness support phallocentric thinking of binaries such as “left” “right” “atheist” “theist” and so on?
5. When women say that they will only support those who belong to their political thinking? How much patriarchal thinking is that?
6. When they cannot build solidarity with those who cannot tolerate or think differently?
7. Ultimate patriarchy is not in reality, but in consciousness, and unless consciousness changes, no woman head of the State (carrier of Phallus) or no amount of rallies will change anything.
8. The foundational thinking in feminism is “the personal is political”, and indeed to achieve that, the personal has to be intensely political.
9. Women who cannot be in solidarity with other women because of some philosophical differences, carry phallocentrism in their head and definitely will repeat the system.
10. In small slips of tongues and in dreams our aggression and our unconscious desires come to the forefront. The woman who first categorized me and then abused AND who is going to the rally, definitely is a collaborator of patriarchy, for she carries the same aggression and hatred that the abusers did…
11. If the above continues, if there is so little tolerance, if there is so much phallocentrism, then patriarchy will become stronger and it will repeat itself.. we will see a repetition of the same violence over and over again…….
So, the first step is consciousness raising, to stop seeing how patriarchy is ingrained in consciousness.
(Rinita Mazumdar)
