This article is part of Ananke’s 10th anniversary special edition. To read the eZine, click this link.
I am tired of skin. I am tired of the way women’s skin seem to swallow up their kidneys, aortas, phalanges. For all the space taken up by skin in public discourse, it is almost as if these other bits of us had nothing to do with us being women.
Skin. The largest and most vulnerable organ in the body. It protects us with no protection of its own. At one time in history, humans began to cover up skin with more layers. Some scientists suggest it was during the first ice age, 180,000 years ago. Clothing brought us protection from cold, but also sun and rain, from insect bites and bruising gravel. Men needed it as much as women did. But ever since people began to read gendered meanings into clothing, it has begun to mess with our sense of justice. We make assumptions about how others, especially women, deserve to be treated based on what part of her skin can be espied – how low a saree hangs on her hips, how high the skirt, whether or not her ears and neck are covered – at what time of day. And while I am tired of men who look at a woman’s knees and jump to the conclusion that she desires sexual congress, I am thoroughly sick of women who look at another woman in a bikini and call her a prostitute.
Those who say such things surely know in their hearts that they’re wrong. They say those things anyway because, if a woman is neither within grasp nor concerned about how she’s viewed, they feel compelled to punish her. Some punish with rape, others by perpetuating a moral binary whereby women are split into whore/saint. And I am very, very tired of women rationing out their allyship based on skin so that some of us are cast to the wolves of harassment and bigotry.
Reader, I say, ‘we’, although I want to exclude myself from this reckoning. Still, I say ‘we’ because so many women fall prey to one form of categorical splitting or the other. If it’s not the whore/saint binary, it’s the oppressed/liberated one. Can white women in France or Denmark possibly believe that a woman who refuses to show her face does not deserve to eat? Do Indian women across the spectrum of religious affiliation (or even atheists) truly think that a woman who keeps her neck and chest covered, cannot achieve financial autonomy? Are you that brown woman who refuses to accept that there might be a kind of freedom in not showing off your legs or your cleavage in a culture that demands it of you? Do you sit around calculating how much of an education, what jobs, how much of a political voice should be allowed to a woman based on what percentage of her skin is visible? Hands and arms, elbow down, okay? Ankles, okay? Shoulders, great? Waist, mandatory reveal?
St Hild of Whitby in the Durham Cathedral
I am sick of this calculus. The expectation of majoritarian assimilation often masks a wilful blindness towards the human struggle to balance individual circumstance and choice against cultural norms, and nowhere is this blindness more insistently inscribed than upon the skins of women. Yet, the meanings we attach to women’s decisions to clothe themselves in particular ways almost always turn out to be wrong if only we would bother to look closer. An image that brought me up short recently was a representation of St Hild of Whitby in the Durham Cathedral. At first glance, I thought it was it a painting of an Iranian or South Asian woman in a chador. Indeed, but for the saint’s name written on the painting, anyone would have thought so. I found myself wondering how people might be impacted by the painting with or without the name. How does our response change, knowing that it is not a present-day Muslim woman, but a medieval Christian saint who dressed that way? Would the average white woman looking at that painting think of St Hild as oppressed or subservient to any mortal man?
Anyone who is familiar more than five contemporary Muslim women who cover their heads, is bound to know that they are not necessarily orthodox in their beliefs, nor are they easily controlled by the men in their lives. And we all also know women who dress in backless tops or shorts, who are controlled by men and by a culture that controls them to the detriment of their physical and mental health. The abortion laws in the USA are testament to this brute reality, and a similarly repressive discourse is building up in other more ‘free’ Western nations. In the UK, I often find myself marvelling at girls and women who expose their limbs in freezing weather and wondering about their compulsions. While I appreciate that their freedom to dress as they please, it seems to me to be a matter of some concern that girls go out in flimsy dresses with bare shoulders or semi-transparent stockings while their male colleagues and classmates are in suits that are entirely climate appropriate.
There is clear medical evidence that cold weather increases the risk of heart attacks and increases blood pressure. Temperatures of 10 degrees C can impact the lungs, heart and brain. When the journalist James Gallagher was invited by doctors to experience these impacts, he reported that, once temperatures fall below 18 degrees C, vasoconstrictionsets in and this happens even more quickly for women. Medical doctors also affirmed that in the cold, the blood becomes ‘a bit like treacle’ and that cold can be more deadly than heat. Women’s body temperatures are, by and large, lower than men’s. Women feel the cold more, and yet, so many women in cold climates continue to wear less. So, why do women go about in flimsy dresses in 10-degree weather? Have they swallowed whole the myth that they are their skins and that their hearts, brains, blood are not vital? Why do university students, subway workers, perhaps even those who work in medical professions go along with harmful cultural expectations? And how are women who do not subscribe to these cultural norms meant to interpret this scene? Is this progressive behaviour?
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become painfully apparent that people would rather risk death than change entrenched cultural habits. The Western world has now seen that it is possible to teach, to study, to sit exams and contribute vital services to society with faces not being visible. Perhaps it is precisely this realisation that has made them rush to undo masking rules so quickly. It appears to me that there is a bigger fear that people might lose dominant Western cultural assumptions about progressive Vs oppressive dressing, than there is about people losing their health. Could it be that people are actually willing to go through their whole lives insisting upon cultural blindness – a wilful refusal to see veiled/masked human as just people who are doing their best to stay alive?
The most exhausting thing about all of this is that we already know how to think about this stuff. We know that women and men use their skins to send out political messages. All over the world, people have shed clothes in aid of their principles, or to shame their governments. The difference is, when men strip to their underwear in protest, they are not described as prostitutes. Women in India too have stripped in protest, often as a last resort, when legal avenues for protection against rape or dowry harassment appear to have failed. On the other hand, there have been times when women are forcibly stripped to show them their ‘place’. But whether it is through resisting exposure or using exposure as a tool of shame, women have risked their bodies. Women’s collective history of scrapping and fighting defines them much better than individual choice of clothing. Still, the global discourse continues to focus on their clothes and a dominant view prevails that we ought to gauge their power or disempowerment based on their willingness to show more of their skin.
For years now, photos of Afghan women in the 1970s have circulated on social media, as if to suggest that, because those few women were photographed in mini-skirts, things were great for women in general at the time. The context of the image’s circulation is, of course, the decimation of women’s freedoms under the Taliban regime. However, an invisible undercurrent of meaning running through such photos is that freedom equals Western clothing norms. There are no photos circulated of women who had led political rallies in the 1970s and 80s, many of whom might have been wearing Eastern outfits, or they might have been in black chadors. Lately, similar images of women in Syria have been circulating and, as writer Omar Doda wryly remarked on X, ‘the best indicator if the US is going to bomb a place is when images circulate of its women in the 1970s.’
Reader, I am spectacularly tired of judging the quality of a woman’s life based on whether she wanted to pull on a pair of flared jeans in the 1970s. I really don’t care whether they wear jeans in Damascus, or whether they wear burqas to the beach in Mangalore. I do care that they don’t get sunstroke or chilblains. I care that they have plentiful food and water, clean air and medicines. I care that we control our own money and our wombs. I care that we’re failing ourselves by buying into the dominant othering impulse within our own cultures. I care about how to shut up those who want to snatch our freedoms, how to develop steely nerves to deal with the backlash. And I long for the day when our aortas and arteries, our eyes and ears will dominate the public discourse, rather than our skins.
About Annie Zaidi:
Annie Zaidi is a bilingual writer and current doctoral scholar (Creative Writing) at Durham University. Her current doctoral research is focused on the embodiment of ‘witches’ in contemporary South Asian literature. She won the international Nine Dots Prize (2019) for creative thinking that tackles contemporary societal issues. Her prize-winning essay about conceptions of home and identity was developed into Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation (CUP, 2020). She received the Tata Literature Live Award for fiction (2020) for Prelude to a Riot, which was also shortlisted for the JCB prize the same year.
Her published novellas include The comeback (forthcoming, Aleph 2025), City of Incident (Aleph) and Gulab(HarperCollins India). Gulab has also adapted into a film, directed by Sanjoy Nag (forthcoming). Other works include a collection of short stories Love Stories # 1 to 14, and a collection of essays Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales (reissued with a new introduction in 2023).
She is the editor of Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women’s Writing, and has co-authored (with Smriti Ravindra) the inter-genre collection The Good Indian Girl. She also won the The Hindu Playwright Award (2018) for her drama script Untitled 1. Her radio script Jam was named regional (South Asia) winner for the BBC’s International Playwriting Competition (2011). She has written and directed the documentary film tracing the literary history of Indian women: In her words: The journey of Indian women, and has also written multiple short films including the story for the multi-award winning short, Two Way Street (directed by Asmit Pathare).
Her body of work that spans multiple genres including non-fiction, fiction, stage and film scripts, poetry and graphic storytelling, and has appeared in several anthologies and literary journals including Wasafiri, Massachusetts Review, Portside Review, The Charles River Journal (Boston), Anti Serious, The Aleph Review, The Missing Slate, Out of Print, and Griffith Review. She trained as a journalist and has published essays and columns in several magazines and websites, including Caravan, Republica (Italy), Griffith Review (Australia), Frontline, The Hindu, Scroll.in, BBC Hindi, Outlook, Mint Lounge, First Post, DNA, Open, Elle, GQ India and Conde Nast Traveller.
New and forthcoming in 2025:
Zaidi’s forthcoming novella (title to be finalised) is a light-hearted caper that navigates friendship and the perils and pleasures of a life devoted to making theatre in small town India.
A new Marathi translation of Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation has recently been published, and a Malayalam translation is also on the anvil.
Annie’s Image: Saif Mahmood
Illustration by Aberrant Realities from Pixabay
