Gendering Democracy: Recasting the ‘Multitude’

This article attempts to look at notions of gendered resistance in general and in particular India’s northeast, using Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri notion of ‘multitude’. Their radical and anarchist approach to democracy can be critiqued and deployed through a conceptualisation of ‘multitude’ as ‘political subject’ within an operational frame of democracy, by projecting gendered individual or collective action as a counter-discourse to patriarchy. Such an alternative of women’s singular and collective action attempts to concretise an ‘inclusive democracy’ that performatively works out the conceptual bases on which a new language of democracy can be articulated. The question is: Whether the idea of democracy as conceptualised by these movements is distinct from what is currently available under the structure of institutional democracy. Gendered selves and collectives, as theorised by Hardt and Negri, are an extensionally determined form of subjectivity that assumes ‘living flesh’ as a necessary precondition for singularity of its lived body of difference. Reordering of the feminine subjectivity as mentioned previously happens through resistance to bio-political organisation of relations of production that creates altered and transformed spaces of gendered identities. Contemporary resistance movements in general and women’s movements in particular unfold different modes of constructions of resistant subjectivities. Women as a socially and politically excluded group must rethink and reorder the patriarchal notion of femininity which justifies their exclusion and represent it in their own terms