Notes Towards Day 8 (Thurs, Feb. 9): "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Can We?

 

IV. What does Devi herself say?
From The Telegraph, Calcutta India (March 2007):
What has it been like to inhabit a woman’s body?
I find such a question neither intelligent nor of much use to
the way I write or work. I feel, quite strongly, that these gendered
notions of the body have been thought up largely by the middle
classes who are seldom in touch with the people. One is born
either a woman or a man, and it is positively idiotic to make
a fuss about this. Perhaps if such questions were put to
women like Tapasi Mallik, raped and burned in Singur, then the
senselessness of these queries would be made even plainer.
When I started writing, it was my only means of earning a living.
The Bengali literary establishment was then entirely male, but
even so, I did not feel either constrained or empowered by
my body. Nor was this ever an issue in my activist life. I
have travelled to remote villages and towns all over the country,
often on my own or with unfamiliar men. I was born with a
female body, and now that I have grown old, no new little bits
seem to have sprouted anywhere (aar notun kichhu to gojay-tojay ni)!
So I must be a woman still.

V. Implications of this work for our understandings--
of the world we don't know? Of the world we think we do?

* critical challenge to adequacy of author's intent/
self-knowledge/knowledge of her text

* "knowledge is never adequate to its object":
impossibility of ideal knower, identical with her predicament

Or: how well do you know yourself?

Are you the *most* adequate representer of your own life?

Might a "disinterested" party "read" you better than yourself?

How might this be related to the possibility of "accidental feminism"?