Beginnings of Gender Discourses in Modern Keralam: Revisiting Early Women's Magazines

Abstract

Gender has been a buzzword of the 21st century. Gender, another word for sexual difference, a column that asked one to spell out if you are a male or female, has become a term loaded with meanings in the contemporary world. Despite differing opinions on how gender is understood, contemporary critical theory has identified gender as one of the fundamental organizing principles around which social life is shaped. Biology as the final destination in connection with gender identity was questioned in the 1980s by Judith Butler, who took cues from earlier feminists like Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig and suggested that women are an imagined group. Concepts like femininity and masculinity, which were until then considered as decided only by biology, were interrogated and found as contingent categories. The performative and socio-cultural aspects of gender proposed by Butler changed the way we look at the category gender and issues pertaining to it (Butler, Gender Trouble). However, old norms and prejudices too exist along with these new propositions, asserting themselves and finding newer ways to sell older essences in new bottles. Therefore, the contemporary world witnesses and bears the anxieties of a gendered society while also producing discourses on gender neutrality and postgenderism. Nivedita Menon explains the paradoxical ways in which gender is used in India. She looks at how on the one hand, it has challenged the notion of woman as a category and how it gets more regressively used as a synonym for woman in state developmental projects on the other hand (Menon 94).