SOCIAL SCIENTIST
Gender representation in the media has rightly been identified by feminists as a site for interrogation with the professed aim of gaining a critical edge to resistance against such manipulative domination. This does, one must admit, involve a subtler and richer reading of the texts, bringing out the political underbelly of representation.
As Sangari and Vaid's insightful collection of essays in colonial history brings out, the colonial intervention demanded a re-moulding and re-casting of women. (Sangari and Vaid, 1989). The process, however, is not a simple, unilinear one. The multiple patriarchies within which gender was re-constructed, meant multiple ways of making female representation acceptable. The so-called 'modernity' of the Nation State that has exercised the post-modernist articulation of post-coloniality was not the only force at work. Tradition' and 'community' were equally amenable to manipulation by patriarchy duly aided and abetted by class and caste.
John Berger's analysis of 'seeing' as forms of domination (Berger, 1972) and Laura Mulvey's diagnosis of heroines in a Hollywood cinema brought into focus the standard play of the 'male gaze'.
The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
(Laura Mulvey, 1975 in Penley, 1988)
However, within the feminist movement the world over there have been attempts to subvert the male 'gaze'. The multiple perspectives thrown open by Berger's 'ways of seeing' may be allied to different forms of questioning the essentialized 'subject' position. Reading against the grain/gaze (Bonner et al., 1992, p. 5) is likely to yield a critical edge to the received notion of cultural representation. The sexual politics of gendered representation gives rise to sexual/textual politics (Millett, 1969; Moi, 1985). The cultural forms are textualized to yield such readings against the grain/gaze.
Politics of representation further demands that this process of textualizing is also contextualized. Questioning the mediation process of visual and print culture from within the women's movement does call for a closer look at the political scenario that provides a working ambience for the gender representation. Though this does not signify a one-to-one correspondence between the representation and the political scenario, a play of the 'residual' and the 'emergent' need to