Gender- GENeral DERogation

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Feminism is a new trend mushrooming in various disciplines of life; to the populist eye it looks like an endeavour to give the rightful place to the female populace, but at an ulterior level, the feminist approach is actually helping all those respective disciplines in opening up to their real potential. For e.g., philosophy has been traditionally male oriented. The entire ancient and medieval periods were dominated by male thinkers and hence it risks being one-sided in its approach. Feminine gender carries a view of life that the masculine can never approach and it’s imperative that philosophy should integrate the feminine aspect so its spectrum widens like never before.

Now, what exactly is feminism? It’s not as simple as just being the female sex. The Female and her Feminineness are not really as tightly bonded as commonly understood. There is an ontological and conceptual difference between them. The female sex is just what the body is made of. It’s a direct result of her genital organs. Biology dictates her sex and its significance is only in the tick mark she makes in the various application forms she fills up. Sex is binary; it can be either Male or Female. No human is sexless or hermaphrodite in nature (maybe only in Ripley's museum). Feminism, on the other hand, is her gender, and gender is a continuum between the two extremities of Male and Female sexualities. It’s in gender talk, we refer to transgenders, crossdressers, heterosexuals, transsexuals, etc.

In today's world, after all the rigorous researches in Psychology, Cultural Anthropology and Feminist Philosophy, it has come to light that a person's gender, though being a primary facet of his/her identity, is actually not directly pinned down to his sexuality alone. Gender inhabits a human being at various levels of his existence. We label a baby as boy or girl as soon as it is born, but in contrary for the few months of its life, the baby has no gender identity at all. It is wholly ignorant of what is male or female. It is not even aware of its own sexuality. As the years develop, it starts observing the world around it as well as changes in its own body, and learns gender based realities. The environment and culture has a lot of contribution in shaping the gender identity of a human being. Gender is the sum total of feelings, thoughts, and expressions in a human that puts the person at a point somewhere between the two extreme sexualities, and probably never at one of the extremes.

To generalize gender into either simply male or simply female is derogatory to its meaning. Gender is more of a mindset than anything material.

We all have masculine and feminine traits in us. Carl Jung had used the archetype Anima-Animus for the same (Anima is the feminine aspect in a man, while Animus is his counterpart in a woman). The degree varies from person to person, creating an infinite number of possibilities in human personality.

I belong to the male sex, but my gender is certainly far from it. My nature is on the shy side, I can't break the ice with strangers very soon, I have moody phases all the time, I am soft-spoken and extremely courteous and avoid confrontation at all costs. I have, what many of my friends call, a "girly" character. Now, in a totally frank evaluation I may be rated as belonging to the feminine gender. At the same time, I have so many lady friends who are extremely outgoing, brash, super confident and good decision takers - I classify them as more masculine than a lot of the other men. The sexualities of these people had nothing to do with their gender traits.

This is exactly where I feel feminism, as a gender, has been kept out of the mainstream. It does not mean ladies/women were sidelined. Queen Victoria ruled a major part of the world centuries ago. All South Asian countries have had a lady as their head of state by now, but these were ladies who fought with men and rose above a male dominated society. They were probably more masculine than the average men of their generation. Feminism probably didn't find a niche in their lives. It’s time we take up the case of real and true feminism and give it the fillip required to escalate it into the mainstream, where it can give the world a truly balanced line of thought, as well as, a balanced way of life.

Dialect and Dialectics

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Dialect - n. the vocabulary that is characteristic of a specific group of people.
Dialectics - n. a system of thought where truth is arrived by balancing opposing views of thought.

Two words that sound so similar, yet mean so different.. but can they actually be as close and correlated in concept as they are in spelling?

Dialect, which in other words symbolizes Language, has been a crucial element in growth and maturity of our species. Just like the origin of the universe or the creation of life on earth, there are no clear and irrefutable theories of how language developed in Humans. Man, as Homo Loquens, owes a lot to language in his philosophical growth. Language, as a spoken medium, allows interchange of ideas and elevates individual creativity to a community level intelligence, and as a written medium, enables successive generations to consistently progress in human thought. Initially, language was considered just as a medium for expression of our thoughts, but as time passed it was realized that language is a mode of our thinking and human thinking and language have complementally evolved together.

In the words of philosopher Dr. Jose Nandhikkara, "Only human beings speak. To the extent that we speak, we become fully human." Dr. Nandhikkara also goes on to talk about a Linguistic Turn that philosophy as a whole has taken in recent decades. The focus of discussions and analysis in philosophy have turned from Metaphysical and Ontological to Semantical.

We live in a pluralistic world - diverse both in culture (thought) as well as language. People of a same linguistic group normally tend to have the same baser instincts. Language tends to be a clustering factor, uniting people together, as much as common culture binds them. In India, we even took it to the point of dividing the country along linguistic lines, which put a stamp of cultural identity on people speaking the same language.

Now, this close association of language and human thought, like two faces of the same coin, makes me wonder if they have been partners-in-crime as much as they are brothers-in-arms. At an empirical level, we know some cultures foster more radical thoughts than others, some favor rationalist approach while others favor the empirical path, some cultures are more ritual driven than the rest. Can we find 'any strands of DNA' in language that are, maybe, responsible for the thoughts in the culture? Did the rubrics of language influence the hermeneutics of cultural thought?

Just as an example, can we, in any way, say that an Indian is more outspoken than a European because common Indian words are comparatively shorter in length? Or that a Tamilian mind has more complicated thoughts than a Kannada mind because Tamil has more letters in their alphabet and hence takes more effort to construct a word? Is it possible an Arab is happier than a Russian because Arabic language has more nasal tones and hence more oxygen pumps closer to the brain? Maybe an American is more scientific than an African because his language is simpler and hence gives his brain more time to think?

I wonder if anybody has analyzed the notes and tones of language in a way to interpret the cultural attitude springing from them..