Let us begin with a wall. Not a metaphorical wall, an actual one. In many of our
places of worship, in our schools, in the architecture of our trains and buses and
waiting rooms, there is a wall, a curtain, a partition, a line drawn in chalk or
concrete, or have a custom that says: this side and that side. The wall does not
always announce itself as discrimination: sometimes it calls itself protection;
sometimes it calls itself tradition, sometimes it is so old that it calls itself nature;
as if the need to separate was written into the universe rather than into the
minds of those who had the power and control to build. A wall is a wall; and
when the wall is built not to protect everyone but to contain some and liberate
others -that is apartheid.
Apartheid is a word that belongs, in our common imagination, to South Africa, to
a specific and documented regime of racial segregation that the world eventually
named, shamed, and dismantled. But the word, in its original Afrikaans, means
simply separateness. The enforced separation of people based on a category
assigned at birth, for the maintenance of a hierarchy that benefits those at the
top of it. By that definition, we have lived inside a gender apartheid for most of
recorded human history. And we live inside versions of it still. It feels like an
exaggeration, an insult to those who suffered the specific horror of racial
apartheid in South Africa or caste apartheid in India.
Gender apartheid builds a separation that decides what certain bodies may wear,
which rooms belong to whom: kitchen, street, the boardroom, the pulpit, the
parliament, who speaks and who is spoken for, and whose silence is read as
consent. The apartheid has been so thoroughly internalised as the things ought
to be that it no longer needs a wall. The wall has been built inside.
In Afghanistan today, women are banned from universities, from parks, from
raising their voices in public. That is gender apartheid in its most naked,
legislated form. But let us not use Afghanistan as a mirror that flatters us. In
India, women are killed for marrying across caste lines, which means they are
killed for claiming sovereignty over their own lives. Transgender persons are
still, in vast parts of this country, pushed into begging and sex work as their only
options for survival, not because of their own choices but because every other
door has been closed. Dalit women are raped with a particular impunity that
reflects the intersection of gender and caste apartheid in its most violent form.
The Third Space
There is a moment in certain conversations when something shifts. You are
talking with someone who is, by every conventional measure, the other: different
gender, different caste, different religion, different experience of the world. And
somewhere in the conversation, the categories loosen; not disappear, difference
does not dissolve and we should not ask it to, but loosen. You stop speaking from
your position and begin speaking toward theirs. They do the same. And for a
moment, the conversation is held in a place that neither of you owns - a third
place that exists between you, created by the quality of your mutual engagement
and respect.
The concept of the third space has roots in several traditions of thought. The
urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about it as the informal public space: the
café, the barbershop, the village square, that exists outside the home and the
workplace and allows a different kind of human encounter. Homi Bhabha, the
postcolonial theorist, used it to describe the space of cultural encounter where
neither identity is fixed, where something new and unscripted can emerge,
which he called cultural hybridity. In queer theory, it has been explored as the
space that refuses the binary; that insists on existing between or beyond the
categories we have inherited. It is the space where gender is not the architecture.
It does not mean the erasure of gender. Gender is part of who we are - shaped by
biology, culture, and experience. The third space does not ask you to stop being
who you are. It asks the space itself to stop being organised around the
supremacy of any one way of being.
Third space does exist, at least in fragments in many spheres, for instance, it
exists in certain families, perhaps not in those ‘perfect’ families, but families that
have done the work of questioning their own inherited structure. Where
domestic labour is not assigned by gender but negotiated by capacity and
willingness. Where children see their fathers uncertain and their mothers
decisive and do not find this strange. Where vulnerability is not a gendered
weakness but a human state.
Conduct a gender audit of our spaces: ask the question, around whose comfort
and for whose ease is this space organised the way it is? If the answer is always
the same, if every institution, from the family to the parliament, is organized
around the ease of men of a particular caste and class, then there is work to be
done. It requires redistribution of money and authority - which is perhaps the
most difficult, because those who have money and authority rarely experience
the injustice happening. It requires a new kind of listening; not the listening that
is already formulating its response, not even the listening that waits for its turn
to speak, but the listening that is genuinely willing to be changed by what it
hears. This is, in practice, one of the rarest human capacities; and one most
necessary for the third space to exist.
Every issue of this magazine is, in some sense, an act of imagination; this one
more than most. I don’t believe that the third space is around the corner, but
suggesting that it is worth building. There was a time when the distance between
racial apartheid and a free South Africa seemed infinite. There was a time when
the distance between untouchability as law and untouchability as constitutional
crime seemed impossible to cross. It was crossed, not perfectly, not completely,
and without reversals and violence, pain, and discomfort -but crossed. The
crossing did not happen because the powerful became generous; rather enough
people, at great personal cost, refused to live with the walls that had been built
for them.
