by Liberation Movement

How do we raise the question of women’s liberation within left political spaces? And why do we as members of the Liberation Movement raise this question at this point in time? Recent experiences of sexual violence have triggered a debate once again about women’s liberation within the left and beyond. These experiences have shown us that supposedly ‘progressive men’ elect to maintain silence against known offenders of sexual abuse and harassment. For the longest time we too have maintained a collective silence over issues of abuse and harassment, save for a few exceptional women who were brave enough to challenge such male dominance in left politics.

Our collective silence has enabled men not only to occupy radical political spaces, but to continue to abuse and harass women. It certainly gave us a wake-up call when behaviour towards women, by a visiting lecturer who claims to follow Gramscian politics and radical thought, is questionable. Another example is a man who preaches about racial justice, while being accused of incidents of harassing women. Conversations amongst ourselves before and after these incidents made us realize that the time has come to break the culture of silence we ourselves have been complicit in maintaining, and to build a solidarity politics among women to counter the prevalence of sexual harassment against women.

Although sexual violence is one part of the structural oppression of women, it terrorizes and marginalizes them. Most people admit on a surface level that women’s participation in economic, social, political, and cultural spaces are not satisfactory. However, refusal to discuss sexual violence openly indicates an insensitivity or lack of political awareness about the threat these direct and indecent acts pose to women’s existence, particularly for women from oppressed class and caste groups. Women voluntarily leave political activism when they encounter the same violence they face at home, at workplace, and on the road.

It is not alarming that violence against women is marginalized in the mainstream political thinking. However, when men who enter into radical politics, challenging dominant structures of class, race, and other forms of oppressions, inflict abuse on women within the same radical political space, women are violently distanced from politics. It is not easy to come to terms with the marginalization of women’s liberation discourse within left political and social space. However, we are of the view that such dismissal of women’s issues is due to conscious and politically calculated choices our left movements have made in the past.A look back at the left’s own history with sexual violence and harassment against women shows that the modus operandi has been to manage these incidents in favor of the men involved, protecting their interests.

The low participation of women in politics, in spite of them forming half of the population in the country and globally, is often identified as a ‘Woman’s Problem.’ On the contrary, we believe that women’s participation has to do with male dominated social institutions and their inability to recognize women as human subjects. For example, when a man engaged in an academic space, a trade union or a political social space asks a woman within the same space, to show her derriere, or when he sends her photographs of his penis, when he asks what her measurements are, he is no longer speaking to a human subject. For him, she can be broken into butts and boobs and consumed as a sexual object. For him, she is not a ‘being’ but a ‘thing.’ In other words, in his male imagination, he thinks he is able to violate her existence as a human subject. Therefore, for us the ‘woman’s problem,’ of the lack of participation in politics, is in fact a ‘man’s problem.’

Women in fact have been in the forefront of political and social transformation. They have actively participated in the struggles to reclaim land and other resources, in protests against privatisation and damaging development projects and to fight for better working conditions. While remaining in the most oppressive working conditions, women play an active part in the economy, family and social life of the communities. Yet, they are held back from making progress in politics and political leadership. Our intervention on women’s liberation, therefore, is not limited to sexual violence. Nor do we see it as a problem specific to left politics. We recognize the emancipatory potential in anti-capitalist politics and the need for transforming social relations. Thus, we choose the same space to raise our concerns.

Our challenge to the left is to oppose violence against women within the political space that all of us collectively share. Moving beyond a theoretical allegiance to an ‘idea’ of women’s liberation, the left must now prove it in their practice. The idea of liberation for women is not new to radical movements. However, rarely do we see that idea transformed into a practice. Practices within the students’ movement, which is viewed as a most active emancipatory political movement today, is male dominated. Even within university communities where females are in the majority, leadership positions are predominantly held by male students. While we extend our solidarity towards the students’ movement, we raise this issue, as students have to take the lead in reforming the intellectual and cultural spaces where emancipatory political possibilities can be forged.

We believe we are at crossroads as a society. We are passing through a politically turbulent time when democratic state reforms are tied to a neoliberal economic vision. The slogan of sexual freedom is appropriated by liberal trends. And the advocates for sexual emancipation in Sri Lanka are deeply neoliberal in their economic outlook. Their pretense of modernism hides ultra – traditional patriarchal practices which pervades their day to day lives. Because the neoliberal political machine insist we fight oppression by separating its various dimensions, we insist that left political movements, to be meaningful, must engage in a multi-dimensional emancipatory struggle.

Our political project for women’s liberation is a political project against all forms of oppression. We see dishonesty in fighting against one form of oppression while staying silent in the face of another. Left politics means to stand up against all forms of oppression. Therefore, instead of fighting against chosen dimensions of oppression, be it class oppression, national oppression or caste oppression, we propose a Liberation Movement that envisages the oppressed as the primary category. This will no doubt include a struggle against sexual violence against women.

We invite all our comrades to engage in a struggle for emancipation against all forms of oppression and to stop compromising the struggle for women’s liberation. We also have a message to the pseudo radical men who occupy leftist progressive spaces while inflicting pain and violence on women: we will no longer stay silent!

On behalf of the Liberation Movement

Lakmali Hemachandra Co-convenor
Swasthika Arulingam Co-convenor

(Republished originally published by the Liberation Movement here)