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Explorations on Feminist Leadership | S1: Episode 4

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Episode 4: Self and Structural Care

At a time when self-care has transitioned from meaningful acts of self-preservation and rest to capitalised notions of practising a skincare routine involving exclusive products or taking an expensive vacation, it becomes imperative to examine whether self-care continues to be helpful. Lakshana, Jyotsna and Anjali discuss how structural care, through the institutions and systems that are in place, in addition to self-care and community care, could provide a more sustainable and effective solution to nurture in the way that self-care seeks to do in isolation.

About the hosts

Anjali is currently a student pursuing Master’s in Counselling Psychology at IIPR, Bengaluru. She has been a part of the juvenile justice system, curriculum development, project coordination and community-based research projects at various organisations. She identifies as an Intersectional Feminist in the making and aspires to specialise in Narrative and Feminist theories of therapeutic approach.

Lakshana is a lawyer and currently practices at the Madras High Court. She graduated from National Law University, Delhi in 2021. Lakshana is interested in minority rights, juvenile justice and the intersection between gender and education.

Jyotsna is currently a student, pursuing BSc Psychology Hons at Christ University. Her primary interest areas include neuropsychology, music and art in the form of books, mandalas and acting. She’s a mental health advocate and has also been running a non-profit called The Period Society Rajasthan to put a period to the period stigma.

Content warning: Systemic oppression, Sexism

Transcript

Welcome to “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #One FutureFellows2022”, a podcast by the 2022 cohort of the One Future Fellows, where we discussed, examine, and learn about all things feminist leadership. 

 

Jyotsna

Hello everyone, I hope this reaches you well. I’m Jyotsna here today with Anjali and Lakshana and we’re going to talk about a very important topic that you might have heard a lot on social media or even from your friends and it is self-care. And to be more precise, today we’re going to talk about self and structural care. So before we get started, I think it would be a great idea to introduce ourselves real quick.

 

Jyotsna

So hi again, I’m Jyotsna, I’m 18 and I recently graduated from high school. I’m a major psychology enthusiast and a proud mental health advocate. I absolutely love reading books and creating mandala and just experimenting with different forms of art. And I’m the kind of person who likes taking long walks in the evening and just watch the sunset.

 

Lakshana

Hi, my name is Lakshana. I’m 24 years old and I live in Chennai. I graduated from National University Delhi last year and I started working in a law firm in Bombay right out of college till I realised that that’s really not something I wanted to do. I currently work in the Madras High Court and my job brings me a lot of joy. I work in family law, juvenile justice and gender justice. I’m hoping to one day transition from the legal sphere to the social sector. I want to open a crisis prevention and rehabilitation Center for victims of domestic violence amongst the urban poor in Chennai. I’m presently trying to be a fully functional adult and try to do as many things as possible every day that bring me joy.

 

Anjali P

Hello everyone, I’m Anjali Pillai and my pronouns are she/her. I’m currently a student pursuing my masters in Counseling Psychology and I’m super excited to be here with Lakshana and Jyotsna talking about something that is very important to our everyday life. So before we move on, I was wondering if we could, you know, talk about some of the ways in which we take care of ourselves. You know, the popular bus word which is self-care routine. So if we could discuss and we could share with each other what those are for each one of us. For example, for me, self-care is just getting a good 8 or sleep or spending some time in a park just sitting, not worrying about all the assignments that I have pending or of any of the work that is left to be done. So yeah, that’s that’s self, that’s self-care for me and I was wondering how it looks like for you both.

 

Jyotsna

That’s a very interesting question, Anjali. So I do have one specific activity that I’d like to share whenever I’m stressed, I solve math questions. Yeah, so as someone who has hated math for the majority of her life, I recently discovered that it actually might be beneficial for me. So whenever I’m solving a question, it distracts me from everything else and allows me to focus on one thing, one problem at a time. So I find that very interesting. Like solving math, but other than that I feel like I can relate a lot to you. So even for me, self-care means getting a good night’s sleep or talking to my best friend, getting my favourite snack, reading my favourite book or watching my comfort movie. Or just listening to some calm music, spending some time with myself, maybe journaling, but just allowing myself to understand what I’m feeling and giving myself enough space to create.

 

Lakshana

I think for me, it took me a while to realise that the things that I was doing for self-care, for acts of self-care, it’s just that. I mean, they just used to be things that I used to do to feel better, but now it’s like they have a name and they mean something. So I’d say that, you know, like yoga for sure. Just like stretching and like feeling the tension leave my body is big for me. My slightly overpriced skin care routine is something that I do for self-care. Taking a really, really hot shower, just lighting up a candle, sitting down and like reading a book that I’ve read many, many times and forth that I know I’m going to enjoy. I’d also say that dancing is self-care for me. Talking to somebody that I care about. You know, just like listening to that talk about that day that is too and spending time with my parents.,

 

Jyotsna

Moving on, we would like to discuss the rationale or the reason why we chose this particular topic. So we’re at a time when self-care has transitioned from meaningful acts of self preservation and taking rest to just capitalised notions of practising the expensive skin care routine involving exclusive products or taking expensive vacations. And it becomes imperative to examine whether at all self-care continues to be helpful and whether it is enough. Structural care through institutions and systems that are in place in addition to self-care and community care, could provide a lot more sustainable and effective solution to nurture and protect in the way that self-care seeks to do in isolation. So the idea is to understand how self-care is being perceived right now, how helpful it is, and if it is becoming something that one feels obliged to keep up with. And then we explore how structural care comes into place and how it gets integrated with the values of feminist leadership.

 

Anjali P

Some of the themes that we’ll be exploring in this episode of the podcast is going to be how self-care looks like at the moment, not just for ourselves but also in the media around, and how it has been redefined, the problem with the present isolated idea of self-care, how structural care comes into the picture and how does feminist leadership help in bridging the gap between structural and self-care.

 

Lakshana

So before we speak about self-care, I guess that we have to first define what self-soothing is. So I’d say that self-soothing includes activities that we, you know, sort of turn to for relief when we’re stressed or worried. They’re not necessarily things that, you know, we schedule and take time out for, but more things that we sort of naturally gravitate towards for comfort in an uncomfortable or distressing situation. It may be something we do to relieve ourselves from just generalised stress or something that’s specifically caused because of the trigger. I’d say that self soothing isn’t exactly a preventative measure that you’re taking to prevent stress, but more something that you’re doing to cure the stress that you’re experiencing.

 

Lakshana

Self soothing behaviours are often developed at a very young age as soon as we start to acknowledge our mental and physical feelings and start realising that we’re experiencing discomfort. Self-soothing behaviours themselves can be sort of negative and positive in terms of the impacts they have on you and the way that they’re perceived. Journaling for instance, or going for a walk or just like holding yourself and rocking yourself, listening to music or squeezing a stress ball could all be classified as positive self-soothing behaviours, things that have a positive impact on you and for instance let’s say substance abuse or self harm, are also self-soothing behaviours for some, but they will be viewed as negative because they’re harmful and dangerous to the person who practises them. I feel like this is a good time to sort of segue into self-care and what that means Jyotsna.

 

Jyotsna

Okay. So what exactly does self-care mean? If I had to describe it to someone, I would probably define it as a group of practices or activities that we do to just look after ourselves, to feel better. So for example, it could include taking frequent breaks while you’re working on something, or just trying to indulge into activities that make you feel calm, such as painting, journaling, listening to music, watching your favourite childhood movie again, or just hanging out with a couple of friends. It truly could be anything that makes you feel lighter and just improves your mood. So self-care, if you think about it, has always been a part of our lives. Let’s roll back to our childhood for a second. Remember when we were kids and we would try our best not to study on the weekends and just relax and just roam around the house from one room to another without having any particular task to do?

 

Jyotsna

Or when you would just lie down after a long day of homework, especially in the summer vacation in front of the cooler as a preference. Or when you would just ask your parents or your guardian or your caretaker to buy snacks or order something at home on a Sunday or any other day simply because they didn’t seem to feel like cooking? Yeah, exactly. So all of these are different ways of self-care that we see around us. But another part of it is that in recent times the main temperament with this idea is being done by focusing more on things such as expensive skincare products or things that are, you know, told as essentials. And the idea of spending large sums of money on aesthetic products gets really enforced by trends such as that girl or ‘hot girl summer’. I know that these were very trending specifically in the summertime. So these trends would highlight or would portray this image of a girl who wakes up at like 5:00 AM and journals, meditates, does yoga, works out every day, has a very clear skin, drinks really green smoothie, eats healthy and is always productive.

 

Jyotsna

Now we all have different days, right? Not all of not all five days look the same. So this idea that you need to have your life together every single day is just not something doable because we’re humans, we feel a variety of emotions. If we are feeling the emotions of absolute euphoria one day, it’s OK if we feel like we don’t want to get out of bed the next day because that’s part of our life. So the idea of looking after yourself should not be attached to some sort of luxury or even expensive products. And these trends also set unrealistic standards when it comes to self-care. So when you see these videos or you see content on social media promoting having some sort of aesthetic or must have essentials or like fifteen step skincare routine, this just sets an idea that you need to have a certain number of products so that you need to spend a certain amount of money to be able to feel comfortable in your own skin, which isn’t actually true.

 

Jyotsna

So with the growing influence that social media has on us, the idea of self-care becomes like a bare minimum and a burden instead of something relaxing because it puts so much pressure on the individual to perform certain activities in a certain way that they kind of shift their focus on what actually makes them feel calm to what they think might make them feel calm after coming across them certain content online.

 

Jyotsna

One more aspect would be the different forms of self-care. So for example, we have seen a lot of romanticization happening. We have seen a lot of reviews which are targeted to an audience who’s trying to romanticise their life no matter what happens. So while romanticising your life may seem like a good self-care practice to some people, submitting those assignments on time so that don’t feel anxious the next day is also a part of it. Resting is a part of self-care, but so is waking up early to study for that upcoming exam to build your confidence. The best way to go about with it is to determine what matters to you. Maybe talking to a friend works better for you than a full-fledged skincare routine, or even vice versa whenever you’re feeling low. A very important and often overlooked part of self-care is the ability to become comfortable with yourself and your feelings. You may not always feel or look put together, and that is a way, that is exactly where the process of looking after yourself, also known as self-care, steps in. And that is exactly what makes us human.

 

Anjali P

So then, what is community care? Community care is when the community that we are a part of comes together to support each other in whatever capacity that they can. These can also be of different forms, ranging from sharing a bowl of sugar or tea leaves to people in the community sitting together and sharing their sorrows and victories in life and celebrating and supporting each other by holding space, sharing resources, or being there for them however they can.

 

Anjali P

Now, community care is driven by empathy, compassion and accountability. For example, if a little boy from the community finds it difficult to pass his board exams, people who can come and help him in studying effectively, make it interesting for him, give him the kind of support that he needs and also hold him accountable for his actions while also being compassionate in helping him to do and feel better.

 

Anjali P

Now structural care is the support and accommodation of the systems and structures that we are directly and indirectly a part of. For example, if the same little boy who is facing problems in passing his board exams is being supported not only by his family and teachers but also by the management of the school by say, facilitating a different method of evaluation and then that design being accommodated by the State Board of evaluation, that would be structural care. Now lack of structural care is often one of the main reasons why self-care and community care become challenging aspects to integrate into our daily lives.

 

Anjali P

So why does self-care not exist in isolation? While self-care can sound and look like something everybody can do and might help in terms of coping and sometimes thriving in one’s life, that’s not exactly how it would work. So self-care cannot exist in isolation. For example, if I have symptoms of burnout and would like to take two days off to do nothing, what happens when I come back from my work, from my break when not all of my deadlines are being met, when my colleagues and the authorities in place start being bitter with me. What happens when I come back from my leave to more work which is going to do more harm than good for any of my symptoms of burnout?

 

Anjali P

So now going back to that previous example, the little boys example, what happens? What happens when the child is not able to pass his exams because his capability mostly lies in other forms of evaluation. What happens when domestic workers don’t get enough days of leave? And even if they do, it affects their salary and then they have to choose between self-care and their earnings because the structure in place is not accommodative of the individual’s or the community’s needs. This also stems from the culture of hustle, right from the lack of awareness of how important self-care is and how it’s possible to be able to practise it only if there is structural care in the form of support and compassion. And how it is perceived as a problem only by a minority of people or how it is not faced by people in power are some of the reasons why when there is a lack of structural care, what also emerges is systemic oppression.

 

Lakshana

So I’m trying to understand why structural care is the right solution to sort of combat structural and systemic oppression. It’s important to sort of internalise that self-care and community-care are not the solution, like Anjali just pointed out. So systemic oppression can only be combated by a form of care that is also systemic, something that’s put in place within the structures and the institutions that form our community system.

 

Lakshana

So for instance, mental health leaves, let’s say mental health leaves that are offered to students and employees and various institutions can be a form of structural care. These allow not only for an individual who’s availing the leave to take care of themselves, but it is also sort of a way to inform the community. It’s a way to let this community that this individual belongs to, let’s say the student community or the community that they have with their co-workers to understand that one of their own needs care and that space needs to be made and support needs to be provided for them to sort of get better. It also allows for this institution that they form a part of to be cognizant to the needs of their members and to accordingly adjust that structure if it’s required to give them the nurturing that they need.

 

Lakshana

I’d say that structural care would also empower individuals to take time to care for themselves without the fear of repercussions or let’s say, you know, think about how they’re being perceived and how their community would view them. In terms of implementation of structural care, I’d say that it could be put into place in the form of policies or agreements between the members of these structures and institutions that form our society. They could be in the form of promises that are made by those that are leading these institutions to the members to sort of like assure them that they will be taken care of and that they are a priority. I’d also say that structural care was a really long way in reasserting the importance of an individual as a member of a community, which specifically in a country like ours where groups are sort of put ahead of individuals, it’s very it’s almost like a radical act to say that the individual is important and deserving of care.

 

Anjali P

Now, all that being said, how does feminist leadership help in bridging this gap? Feminist leadership aims to advocate and take action in bridging this gap by addressing and collectively working on the root causes and certain immediate actions at different levels of the system, while also effectively listening to the stakeholders and gathering resources to take necessary steps to bring about the long overdue change.

 

Jyotsna

In my opinion, feminist leadership helps understand structural self-care as well as community self-care with a holistic lens. So it helps one understand their own values and how to implement them not only in their own life, but also in the community that they’re a part of. So in simple words, feminist leadership helps you look at yourself and the people around you as humans of multifaceted identities and aids you to tailor the resources and tools accordingly.

 

Lakshana

Thank you for that. I’d say that feminist leadership seeks to sort of use the methods of self-care and mould them in such a way that they’re systematised and can be included as a part of structural care methods. I’d probably just add that when it comes to self-care and structural care and feminist leadership, it’s sort of hopeful that institutions will be created where you know these feminist leaders themselves will be able to take care of themselves within the structures that they create.

 

Jyotsna

Thank you so much for that, Lakshana. And with that we come to an end and wrap up this conversation around self and structural care. I hope that some of these ideas helped you reflect and ponder upon a few concepts or questions or even beliefs that you might have had before. And we hope to have more of these conversations to do our part and learn more as we go through. Thank you

 

(Added to transcript, not present in episode audio)

To our listeners, thank you for joining us and listening in today. We really appreciate your support. If you liked this episode, please follow us on Instagram and Facebook @OneFutureCollective and @onefuture_india on Twitter. And keep an eye out for future episodes of “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #OneFutureFellows2022”. Please leave your questions, comments or feedback for us on Anchor or in our DMs. We look forward to hearing your thoughts. Until next time, take care of yourself and we hope that we can explore more together.

 

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Mapping and negotiating power

Uncuff India Episode 10: Dimensions of conflict and peace: visioning a utopian world

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Explorations on Feminist Leadership 2022-23 | S1: Episode 3

by admin ● Posted on

Episode 3: Accountability and Correcting Harm

The occupations taken by the police-military-market-state nexus do not serve the needs of the most vulnerable, and in fact cause harm in most cases. Jasmine, Sarika and Jyotika come together to talk about accountability and correcting harm in the context of their commitment to anti-capitalist and anti-carceral politics. They explore existing abolitionist and transformative ideologies and also discuss the various structures of oppression that shape the politics around harm, danger and violence based on race, caste, class, religion, militarisation, citizenship and borders.

About the hosts

Jasmine Kaur is a punjabi, queer writer/artist. She likes to surround herself with stories and poetics in any medium, including audio, video, still images and performance. Some of her work has been published by VIBE, …ongoing…, streetcake magazine, and Tilt (by QueerAbad). She’s currently working as a Teaching Fellow at the Philosophy Department in Ashoka University.

Sarika Karnad is a Mental Health Professional and Content Head in an organisation that works towards inclusivity & reliable therapy for all. She believes she learns the most about life by talking to people around her – having meaningful conversations and understanding different experiences. Apart from talking and making an extensive list of things to research, Sarika loves spending her day reading books, baking, learning new skills and petting cats.

Jyotika Tomar is an undergraduate student of History at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi.

Content warning: Various forms of Violence, Sexual Assault, Rape, Death, Oppression, India-Pakistan Partitition, Communal Violence, Victim Blaming, Racism and Racial Oppression, Oppressive Laws, Casteism, Gang Rape Case of Priyanka Reddy, State Sanctioned Violence, Police Murder of George Floyd, Racial Oppression, Custodial Torture

Transcript

Sarika

Hello and welcome to “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #OneFuture Fellows2022”, a podcast by the 2022 cohort of the One Future Fellows where we discuss, examine, and learn about all things feminist leadership. I am Sarika, and my pronouns are she/her. I am a Psychologist and a strong advocate for mental health.

 

Jyotika

Hi, my name is Jyotika Tomar. My pronouns are she/her. I am a second year undergraduate student of History at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi.

 

Jasmine

Hi, my name is Jasmine Kaur. My pronouns are she/her and I’m currently working as a teaching fellow at Ashoka University at the Philosophy Department.

 

Sarika

And today we will be talking about accountability and correcting harm.

 

Jyotika

So before we begin with the podcast, we would like to tell you about our rationale behind the choice of this theme. We don’t think it can be divorced from our political leanings, which includes among other things, a commitment to anti-capitalist and anti-carceral politics as well as a firm opposition to the various structures of oppression that shapes the politics, that shapes narratives around harm and danger and violence based on race, caste, class, religion, militarization, citizenship and borders.

 

Jyotika

And we think it’s important to talk about it because the occupations taken by the police, military, market, state, nexus, don’t serve the needs of the most vulnerable, but in fact are enactors and causations of harm themselves in most cases. And we think that we need explanations on these issues from the perspective of feminist leadership to discover how we can build a freer world in opposition to the one that exists now and in furtherance and translation of existing abolitionist thought and transformative principles and traditions of transformative justice, which is things that we want to get into during the course of this podcast.

 

Jyotika

At this point, I think it’s important to give you some trigger warnings so we’ll be discussing issues and themes of violence, particularly sexual violence and oppression. So we request you to be mindful of that while you’re listening. I think over to you, Jasmine, for us to get started.

 

Jasmine

Hi, I wanted us to start off with something Ashon Crawley, a teacher, writer and artist, posted about, inevitability of harm on his social media in June 2021. He writes “Harm happens, we harm one another. Many think this saying harm happens and we harm one another to be a value statement and a moral judgement. So instead of thinking about this fact, we pretend we can be innocent, and so too we value innocence as a moral and ethical good. But my garden keeps teaching me my intent to grow more green beans was neither good nor bad, but it appears I have planted too many in too small a space. So though many are blooming, lots of leaves are dying off, and some of the plants too. I have to remove the felled leaves daily. It doesn’t matter that my intent was to grow more food. It actually might even be a noble desire. It certainly was not bad or mean or evil, but the impact is that the growth has still been harmful for some of the plants. What would a claim of innocence ‘I didn’t mean to do it. This isn’t my fault. Maybe I can just keep watering and whooping and wishing’ even mean for the plants. The garden shows me yet again that some concepts, some ideas are deeply insufficient for trying to contend with our world. All that matters is my attempt to repair the harm done. So instead of guilt and shame, which are the underside of and produced by desires for innocence, care, tenderness, handling things, literally putting my hands in the door, pruning, getting messy with my hands. And from this can emerge repair, from this can emerge joy, and from this can be sensed life and love.”

 

Jasmine

I wanted to share this because this is something that really challenged my perspective on associating guilt and shame with harm, and it really forced me to understand how inevitable harm is and how useless it is to think about notions of innocence instead of notions of repairing the harm that you have done. And I wanted to ask what you both think about this.

 

Jyotika

So I think this excerpt was a very, very beautiful and advocative way to put a lot of our thoughts around this. And I think I see it as a way in which we approach relationships with each other. And these can be various kinds. These could be, these could look like friendships, these could look like romantic relationships, these could look like parent-child relationships. And even though a lot of them may be based on principles of love and respect, justice and equality, I think there’s a need to also look at, like the excerpt put it, the inevitability of harm of us enacting harm on the other person and us also experiencing harm. And sitting with the fact that it’s a very uncomfortable place to be. But that discomfort is necessary.

 

Jyotika

And I think it’s also important to look at not just the intention of the actions that we do, the things we say in the context of these relationships, but also look at the consequences of whatever it is that we did, like divorcing it from what we intended to do. And that is where I think we can practice not associating guilt and hurt with it, but looking at the consequences it had for the other person. Especially when things are as contested as the identity or, you know, invasions of privacy or just things that we didn’t mean to be hurtful but did end up being hurtful and grappling with how we deal with that. Sarika, what do you think of this?

 

Sarika

I think I really like the part where you talked about personal relationships, right? Because I think when we move away from guilt and shame that comes with harm, it also means that we realize that we do hold power in different relationships. For example, in the child-parent sort of relation that there is, punishment is something that’s very, very common and it directly sort of associates like there’s zero tolerance to any sort of violence that happens, right. So it immediately sort of creates a binary. So either wrong, you’re either a perpetrator or you are a victim. And that’s, I mean, is that helpful? There’s strict imposition of punishments, but it also comes with really less exploration, really less reflection. There are no alternatives to it.

 

Sarika

And that also means that there’s very little accountability that we give to the we hold to the perpetrator themselves, right? So how do we correct harm with alternative behaviors to ignorance? Or like, how do we find an alternative that’s not so much about ignorance, where they just say I’m sorry and how do we move more towards the actions part of it.

 

Sarika

And I think also adding on to this is that especially as leaders in different sectors, how do we really hold ourselves accountable where even if we do any sort of harm to anybody, even if we have good intentions, how do we prepare for that? When is harm more of an initial response that we work towards and move away from in a way, than something that we sort of just say sorry and move on from, right?

 

Jasmine

I think we do this by de-linking harm from innocence and guilt, by recognizing that even in our aim to do good, we will end up causing harm and to understand that not as something to feel guilty and ashamed about, but as something to repair. But I am also wondering about how we think of harm at the social level, whatever constructs that exist around it. How do social systems respond to harm? And how we have been socialized in such systems such that we also are and have been enactors and acceptors of this harm, of these systems around harm.

 

Jasmine

I want to work here with the example of sexual assault. When a woman is raped in India, it is often construed as harm against a family rather than harm against a person. And many of us have been socialized in this ideology. And not to think that a woman who has been raped has faced a fate worse than death. We often accept this narrative even if we do not believe the victim herself. How then do we contribute to the conceptions of harm when we do this? What are some of the other ways in which we do contribute to this conception of harm? How might we be able to mitigate this harm by changing our notions around sexual assault from the ones we have been socialized and to a notion where we sent to the person harmed and how they would like to deal with instead of imposing how we would like them to deal with it? In other words, how have they been chained to hold people accountable in these systems and how do we move out of that training?

 

Jyotika

Yeah, the very, very important example that you brought up right now, it makes me think of this book on partition narratives, like oral histories of partition survivors written by Urvashi Butalia. So it’s called ‘The Other Side of Silence’. And one of the ideas that she discusses while talking about particularly sexual violence enacted on women during the partition riots was how women’s bodies were used as battlegrounds for contesting groups of like contesting communities and how they were the sites of violence that, you know, these communities used to enact violence against each other, if that makes sense. Which makes us, which puts us in a position where we have to contest with the construction of narratives of harm, of danger and of safety.

 

Jyotika

And so the one recurring narrative is that of stranger danger. And that is essentially being told, like young women and girls particularly being taught from a very young age that they need to be necessary, like particularly careful of their safety when they leave the home and they go outside because of, you know, this, like this construction of the dangerous stranger which I will get into, which will, which is usually and structurally deployed against particularly men from marginalized communities.

 

Jyotika

And what also comes at this point is the construction of a binary of the home being a space of safety and comfort and the outside or the public being a space of potential harm and violence. Which is an obfuscation of facts, because statistically, every single year the National Crime Records Bureau data tells us that in over 92-93% cases, in cases of sexual violence against women, it is individuals known to the survivor who are the enactors of harm, who are the perpetrators.

 

Jyotika

So how do we grapple with this idea of stranger danger, right? And also look at how the entire energy and resources and time of the state and the military have been deployed to sort of give shape and structure to these narratives. And I think that some clarity about that will come when we talk about the disproportionate incarceration of persons from marginalized communities and I’ll take two examples to discuss that.

 

Jyotika

So in the United States it is the African American population along with of course Hispanic people and other communities which are disproportionately incarcerated and face the brunt of police and custodial violence and systematic targeting. So the African American population though it’s only 13% total population of the country, they make up 40% of the incarcerated population. And when we talk about the Indian context and look at under-trials, it is individuals from Scheduled Caste and Tribe communities and from Muslim and Sikh communities who make up 70% of the under-trial population, right, which is disproportionate to the actual population demographic that they have.

 

Jyotika

So and a very, very important way of implicating them is through directives of particularly sexual violence and of course these have legal and political basis. So if you look at say for instance legislation like the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, a colonial era legislation, it sort of designated certain communities as habitual offenders and even though in the context of post independent India, that was like the law isn’t enforced anymore, but it’s not enough to say that it’s simply because it’s not enforced anymore, it doesn’t have any consequence because it’s solidified through narratives and the way state and its institutions function.

 

Jyotika

So the way particularly in individuals from the notified tribes are, you know, targeted by the state now is because of the consequence of what this legislation did, the designation of habitual offenders. And there are organizations that we link in the resources that are working on these issues, which also makes us think about how the level to which violence has been normalized and simply because it is enacted by the state and its institutions, it’s not something that counts for a space of critique or, you know, questioning and it’s just taken as, say, the natural.

 

Jyotika

So if you look at the sexual violence enacted by the military in places where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is in is deployed, that won’t, you know, that that won’t be questioned to the extent to which other cases of sexual violence will be. And to give you another example of how even though a category of the victim is created, so there is a binary creation of the good victim and the bad victim. And the good victim is something that attracts a lot of public outcry, there is mobilization and so on. And the other kind of victim is a space where that’s not the response that we receive.

 

Jyotika

And say for instance though Priyanka Reddy gang rape case that happened in Hyderabad in 2019, it was followed by what is referred to as an encounter, right. It’s an extra-judicial killing of the accused. And I remember being in a legal studies class and my teacher who was teaching me legal studies and ideas of political science, tell us very jubilantly that, you know, an encounter happened and they were killed. And I did not have the vocabulary to really pinpoint why I felt uncomfortable about that. But it points to the same thing that I’ve been talking about, about the normalization of violence and how extremely punitive carceral systems of punishment, is the only thing people rally around right in when a case of sexual violence happens. And not only does that structurally not solve anything, but it also takes away the agency of the individuals who have gone through the harm, right? Yeah I think I’ve been going on quite a bit. So if there’s anything that you want to say at this point or come in, please feel free to do that.

 

Sarika

Thank you so much for that, Jyotika. I think that gives us a lot of context, right, of how this is sort of enacted on a larger ground, like the large perspective of it. And what I also understood is, it is that the power remains with the majority and is and the definition of justice also comes through this majority and is sort of used against the minority a lot more. And I think the main thing that we’re also coming to is that the carceral systems really don’t negate harm caused.

 

Sarika

And it’s not like the amount of harm caused in society is decreasing. Violence remains, theft remains, everything remains. So it’s not particularly negating the harm. Then we also come to the next question, which is then, how do we transform the society? And right now, what factors in society take us away from accountability and what factors actually lead to justice at the grassroots?

 

Sarika

I think Jasmine also mentioned sort of giving the victim the power to decide how they’d like justice or how they’d like the harm to be corrected. That would also be something that’s very important here, right? How do we move away then from that punishment and sort of isolating the bad actions of one person to that one person only? Because what we’re also understanding is that the end of the day is something that’s been taught to us from the very beginning, like we talked about personal relationships. Punishment has been a part of our personal relationships in school, in college, probably also, in a parent-child relationship. I think that’s what I’ve also understood from everything that Jyotika talked about. Jasmine, do you want to add to this?

 

Jasmine

Yes. Thank you again Jyotika for giving us so much context. I also want to add to this through. So something that has really influenced my thought on this is this video that is called “What Should Happen To Abusers If You Do Not Lock Them Up?” And it is by Kimberly Foster on her channel ‘For Harriet’ and features Professor Leigh Goodmark. And it is all about decriminalizing domestic violence and goes into the history of domestic violence and criminalizing it in the US.

 

Jasmine

But I think a lot of thought also applies elsewhere and in our context also, because they are discussing this question of if we cannot lock the abusers up, what should we do? Because I think we can all agree that domestic abuse is this incredibly important issue against mostly women, but also against people of other genders. And it is heinous to have to be abused for any length of time. And also especially in cases of domestic abuse, the abuse lasts for a long time, even a lifetime. And we also know that not a lot of people even come forward with abuse cases.

 

Jasmine

So it is a very unaddressed problem. But what really affected me in this conversation was the concept that a lot of times when we criminalize domestic abuse, we are not addressing what is causing the abuse in the first place. We are just saying, ‘Oh, you did this bad thing, now you’re going to going to go to jail forever and the person that you were in this relationship with is maybe partly responsible for that’ and also from the victim we’re asking that ‘This person that you love and have other positive feelings about also is the one you have to put behind bars’. And that is a lot to ask from someone.

 

Jasmine

And it also talks about how there is correlation between things like unemployment and poverty to domestic abuse. That it is that there is no point if we just put people who are already hurting and people who might have been abused themselves as younger people, to put them behind bars and to hold them further instead of addressing a lot of material realities that are kind of pushing them towards hurting other people around them. And I think trying to focus on this is something that really made a difference in how I think about this.

 

Jasmine

And also centering victims, because a lot of victims do not exactly want the abuser to go to jail, they want them to stop abusing. That is the main thing. And if not, then maybe to get out of that relationship. But that is also limited and what the understanding of Professor Leigh Goodmark’s has been is that a lot of victims when they have this option that their abusers can be rehabilitated, will choose the rehabilitation over getting this carceral revenge or justice that we have been taught is the only thing we can be getting.

 

Jasmine

So that is something that has that’s what I think about this and trying to move to restorative justice instead of this very carceral and very punitive justice.

 

Jyotika

Right. So over here I just want to talk about one thing about to mention on the which is about the reasons abolitionists brought and what and those reasons are foremost and what is an abolitionist and what they think of the issues that we’re talking about. So these are people who call for the complete dismantling of structures such as the prison, the police, the military and so on.

 

Jyotika

And they locate that political position that they take in a politics based on anti-capitalist and anti-carceral ideas. And they see these structures as violent entities, inherently violent entities, constructed by oppression based on race, caste, class, religion, gender, sexuality, citizenship, militarization, and so on. And I got interested in these ideas during the 2020 protests against police brutality in the aftermath of the institutional murder by the police of George Floyd.

 

00:25:43 Jyotika

So the prominent abolitionist thinkers are people like Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. And what they say is that these institutions don’t serve the needs of the most vulnerable, but what they do is they deploy their coercive posts against them. And this takes several forms that we’ve discussed. So it looks like systematic targeting, surveillance, custodial torture and violence, creation of the narratives of criminality, of sexual violence or dismissal, of tool of law in the way in which the process takes shape.

 

Jyotika

And because of these reasons and their analysis of it and the looking of course this is a situation in the American context. So they do a lot of work on how the African American community is targeted by these issues and they say that these institutions will not help us solve crime and must be done away with.

 

Jyotika

And the alternative they offer is things that look like material and structural changes and that comes from a socialist perspective. So they talk about building communities of care and support, They talk about the state funding, of education, of healthcare, better working conditions. And they say that crime is caused in the absence of all of these things. And that is where we should divert our attention, resources and time instead of, you know, furthering the punitive and carceral response.

 

Jyotika

And they also talk a lot about restorative and transformative justice, which over to you, Sarika, for introducing us to that.

 

Sarika

Thank you for that, Jyotika. So I think in terms of restorative justice, right, as a psychologist, I am very used to sort of looking up different researchers and different studies that have been done. And this is something I was honestly really interested in because I really wanted to know how do we implement it right? Because I’m going to say it’s easier said than done when it comes to this because it’s something that has to change at the very grassroots of society.

 

Sarika

So I’ve actually looked up this study that was done in Florida in 2020, where they implemented restorative justice in a middle school and I think that gave me a really good idea of how it could be something that is put forward and acted on and from there on, right. So it was basically sixth to eighth grade students who were, they sort of changed their model of justice. There were no punishment. If there was any sort of problem that came up, any sort of conflict that came up, they were asked to write letters to each other.

 

Sarika

And I think Jyotika, what you talked about in terms of community-building in order to get justice, in order to correct harm was something that they used a lot over here. And I think that was something that really changed my mind on how it is something that can be implemented, right?

 

Sarika

So that’s one. But again, I’m gonna see at the roots of it, restorative justice also comes down to why education is important, why economic stability is important. Having a community around that’s supportive becomes very, very important in this case, because when we see the principles of restorative justice, there’s a lot of what, like a feeling of safety, is something that’s very important. Having stuff that’s accessible is very important. Respect is important and these are things that we also learn when we are children to sort of avoid any bias, to be more neutral and also just having that accessibility of people around who would understand and support you in that space, right, and also hold you accountable more than anything else. I think that is something that is very important.

 

Jasmine

I think we can wrap this up and we can do that by maybe sharing one thing we have learned in this podcast episode. I can begin. I learned that to reduce people to good and evil is very reductive and harmful. That it does very little to repair the harm caused, if it does anything at all. And rather I think it tends to increase the harm in the world. That our focus has to be step out, stepping out of a preoccupation with being innocent and working on repair and to centering people who have been harmed, rather than punishing people who have done the harm who might have been harmed themselves in the past or even in the present. And to just send over repair and care instead of punishing.

 

Jyotika

So thank you so much for this very, very reflective conversation. And even though we had some pointers prepared earlier for what we wanted to discuss, all of the pauses and reflections we took in while we were talking is testament to how much we really learned from activity. And I think my take away from this would be how important it is for us to value complexity and nuance when we approach these conversations, be it at the personal level, when we sit in a position where we confront the reality that we might just be, you know, enactors of harm ourselves and it is important to be held accountable for that and sit with that discomfort and also at the public level where we must create spaces where we approach these conversations with a lot more nuance than we do as of now because the position we are right now because it doesn’t approach these conversations in that way. All it does., like you said, Jasmine, is further the kind of violence that we already have prevailing and it’s important for us to have re-imaginations of our responses. So that would be what I took away from this.

 

Sarika

Thank you so much, Jyotika and Jasmine. I think this was actually a very reflective discussion. And like you said, Jyotika, I’ve also been reflecting a lot more personally on this topic right? And even in the context of feminist leadership. I mean, it’s something that we have to sort of constantly strengthen and work towards in order to be accountable, in order to be kind and empathetic and build that community for people and for each other.

 

Sarika

It’s almost like a muscle that we have to keep sort of strengthening over time, right? To be kind, to be empathetic. And it’s not something that comes easily. There’s a lot of unlearning that sort of goes into it. But yeah, I think that’s what I’m taking with me. There are still a lot of questions that would need more objective sort of answers, but this is a start and I really like this start. So yeah.

 

Jyotika

Yeah, you put that really well. It’s a starting point for questions and we don’t have all the answers, but I think that’s the point.

 

Jasmine

I think so too. I also really like the start, and thank you both for giving such a good reflective conversation, and I think it’s a good place to begin.

 

Jyotika

To our listeners, thank you so much for joining us and listening in. We really, really appreciate your support. If you like this episode, please follow us on Instagram and Facebook @OneFutureCollective and One Future_India on Twitter and keep an eye out for future episodes of “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #OneFutureFellows2022”. Please leave in your questions, comments or feedback for us on Anchor or in our dms. We really look forward to hearing your thoughts and until next time, take care of yourself and we hope that we can explore more together. Have a good day.

 

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End of the transcript

Resources mentioned by the hosts

  1. Ashon Crawley: https://ashoncrawley.com/
  2. The Other Side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49988813
  3. What Should Happen To Abusers If You Do Not Lock Them Up?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmZqyYFudVg
  4. A Case Study of the Implementation of Restorative Justice in a Middle School: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19404476.2020.1733912

Mapping and negotiating power

Uncuff India Episode 10: Dimensions of conflict and peace: visioning a utopian world

Uncuff India Episode 9: Civic space and dissent: A pathway to social justice

Explorations on Feminist Leadership 2022-23 | S1: Episode 2

by admin ● Posted on

Episode 2: Love and Care in Relationships

Love & care are the most integral and indispensable parts across all forms of life. Love is a simple yet complex emotion, felt, studied, dissected and theorised by many minds across different generations. While love and its definition is ever-evolving, Noor, Pallack and Gaytri attempt to understand these nuances through their personal and unique lived experiences. They hope to create a candid dialogue around what it means to each of them from where they stand in different junctures of life, through intimate lenses and further contextualised by their feminist journey.

About the hosts

Pallack is a curious thinker and a tired extrovert. She works as a Mental Health Professional and spends most of her time deciphering the world that resides both outside and inside her. Passionate to learn, she wishes to educate and sensitise herself to the workings of the systems she finds herself embedded in. An amateur visual artist, she loves photographing and documenting her days through some form of art and music.

Noor is a multidisciplinary artist. She graduated as an Animation film designer from MIT institute of design, and is currently pursuing a PG Diploma in Expressive Arts Therapy from St. Xavier’s College. They created “”Ocean””, a judgement-free art community space, that fosters connection and explores themes of belonging, togetherness and freedom. They are also trained as a Menstrual Health educator, and facilitate menstrual awareness in marginalised communities.

Gaytri is currently a Communications Associate at Swasti, The Health Catalyst. She loves to bake, watch movies, crochet and hang out with her cats while drinking coffee. She is extremely passionate about social justice, rights, and social norms, especially from a gendered perspective. Occasionally, she loves to theorise about love and other emotions and how they are affected by wider social discourses and factors.

Transcript

Gaytri

Hello and welcome to “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #One FutureFellows2022”,  a podcast by the 2022 cohort of the One Future Fellows, where we discussed, examine, and learn about all things feminist leadership. I’m Gaytri and my pronouns are she/they.

 

Noor

I’m Noor, and my pronouns are she/they.

 

Pallack

I am Pallack and my pronouns are she/her.

 

Gaytri

And today we will be talking about love and care in relationships. We will be exploring multiple themes like what love means to us, how we form these perceptions, the role of media and the formation of these perceptions, various ways we express love in different cultures, and how we can create love and harmony in consensual relationships.

 

Pallack

The rationale behind choosing this is that we feel emotions, bind and unite all human experiences. Love and care are integral and indispensable parts across all forms of life. And so while love can be experienced or understood as a complex emotion dissected and theorized by many minds across different generations, our attempt together is to understand what it means from our lived experiences, but also contextualized by our feminist journey. With its due twists and turns, we present you today, love and care in relationships. So maybe we start with understanding what it means to each of us. What do you think love means to each of you?

 

Noor

For me, love is like a home. It is held and contained like four walls of safety and protection. And what home means to me is a space to be vulnerable and accepted and nurtured from deep within.

 

Gaytri

What love means to me is, I guess it is about the gestures and the emotions that we feel and words, I guess. Maybe all that is a love language thing, but that’s how I define it. It feels like the end goal of things, the bedrock, the foundation of all my relationships, either romantic or platonic, and I feel like it’s one of the most important, most talked about, yet unexplored concepts out there. My perception of love was mainly romantic in the beginning, like as a child I used to think of love only in a romantic sense, but as I have explored it a little bit more, I’ve realized the importance of platonic love and obviously, like media has played a big role in my perception of love. So maybe we can discuss more on that later, but what are your thoughts on love Pallack?

 

Pallack

So, love for me has meant safety. I think for the longest time, safety and love, these two feelings would have no real distinction in its meaning. Feeling unwavered, feeling unapologetic, feeling unadulterated – all of this has felt very synonymous with love and close to what Noor defines or understands as home so homely. However, with the ever evolving experience of all emotions as we grow old, I think love has also brought me so much joy that it brings me this really, really unique feeling of invincibility. I think love makes me feel invincible, so it could be immunity from my fears, my insecurities, from the everyday intrusive thoughts. And in many ways, if safety is embedded in the heart of love, I think invincibility becomes somewhat of an antidote to all psychological warfare. I feel love can fully hold you and it can consume you. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why it’s so powerful.

 

Gaytri

I think that’s beautiful.

 

Pallack

Yeah, thank you.

 

Gaytri

I feel like I want to build a little on what both of you said about love feeling like home and safety. Like in my perception of love, right, I also have that feeling of like, oh, I want this one person to be my home. But like, like I said, I was quite obsessed with romantic love being the only form of love, because that was the one kind of love that I sort of craved because I did not find it readily available or like, seen around me. So that was something that I used to crave a lot. And like, that’s the whole point of like just like me trying to make the person feel like home, except I never really knew what home felt like. So that like lead to some really skewed perceptions of love. But obviously rom-coms and all these romance books that I read did not help at all. They really just skewed it even more. But I feel like feminism has really sort of helped me develop and understand it so much better.

 

Noor

Yeah, adding to what Gaytri was saying, I think the way love has been defined for us is very ambiguous and abstract and it is always something to long for and yearn for and like Pallack mentioned, it makes us feel invincible. And you know, they tell us that everybody wants love, but we remain totally confused about how to actually practice love in our everyday life and how to express love. Yeah.

 

Gaytri

So where did your idea of love originate from, Noor?

 

Noor

I think it’s definitely movies and rom-coms. Also, Disney movies, a lot. I constantly yearn for like a perfect person who was just good at everything – like looks the most amazing, dresses up amazing, does photography, plays the guitar. Just is some invincible person like Superman basically.

 

Pallack

Right out of all our fantasies together as one human being?

 

Noor

Yeah.

 

Gaytri

Yeah. Movies and books really do that to you, right? Like media plays such a big influencing role in our lives, especially in our perceptions of things. And something like love, which is so deeply conditioned in us, ingrained in us, we are told to sort of crave it, want it, need it. It’s like the end goal, right? Like, especially in the Indian context, if you look at it, love is something that is the end goal. Love and marriage. Like they are taken interconnectedly even though they are not. But that’s always the end goal. Like you are fulfilled only if you have a husband or a wife. Like or if you have a family, as they say.

 

Pallack

Right. I think what we’re trying to also maybe understand is that when we say love, we actually mean relationships here, which is that you know, the idea of our entire purpose or existence boiling down to maybe having a very, very fantastic, dream-like relationship? That is full of love and care. However, just however I feel I’ve had the good fortune of understanding and observing and feeling love by perhaps my mother’s affection, which remains currently also the template, the archetype, the entire yardstick against which love is measured, understood or held closely. But just like any young mind, growing up, I think one would always find me sitting right below the television for hours inhaling these movies and TV shows that taught me that maybe not love, but the expression of love looked a certain way. And a very interesting entry point of maybe romantic love was maybe introduced to us through media, beyond the parental affection, into a child’s mind. So maybe try to understand and trace back where it all really started from. What do you think you originally saw or were exposed to that made you understand what relationships could look like?

 

Noor

I was just thinking in terms of, you know, the movies, shows, books, the narratives, we hear about love, I feel like all of those narratives have been written by men. And all my life I’ve thought that, you know, love is primarily a topic that women contemplate about with more intensity and vigor than anybody else. But even then, the theories of love have been written by men, and I would like to quote bell hooks. She says that “men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners” (snap, snap, snap snap).

 

Gaytri

I love bell hooks. Yeah, I feel like she’s one of the greatest writers ever. Yeah, for me, I guess if I have to like, really go back and like see where it all began, I guess maybe this is just my perception. But I feel like for all of us, we are types of love. They all formulate at the very beginning, you know, in our families. It’s the way we see it, the way we experience it in our homes that we find out what we miss or what we want and we make that our love language, sort of. So for me in my family, like there was not a lot of affection or love between my parents. And I was an only child for a very long time till I was about nine. So for those formative years, that was just a lack of affection, right? And that kind of translated into me having my love language as words of affirmation and touch, you know, that is something that I developed because that is the way I wanted affection. That was something that was missing in me. But also I find myself performing a lot of acts of service because that’s how I saw love being shown to me by my parents. That’s how I ended up doing it. Like if you look at things in a cultural perspective, say in the South Asian context, right? You see so many posts and so many people talking about how Asian parents always just cut up fruit and give them to you, which is something that I have experienced, like when my dad came back to live with us, I would be studying and he would just come and bring me fruit. I would not talk to him at all, the entire day. Like we would not have conversations at all, but he would try and show his love to me by just making me food.

 

Pallack

Right… Don’t you think that in a lot of ways that’s how we’ve come to imbibe these practices? It’s interesting that you said that this is how you’ve experienced it in your formative years and it makes me curious how our parents, our respective parents have come to understand and practice the expression of love through their experiences, perhaps their formative years. How perhaps even their parents offered love in the form of acts of service. Having to check with you for having to call you. These are all forms of communication, but with the hint of love in the name of protection, in the name of care, in the name of support. These expressions are very, very misunderstood or misrepresented. So perhaps you all try to understand what it is that makes us express the way that we do. Because when I like to think of what it is that could be my love language, I completely align with words of affirmation and touch. But very interestingly it’s also because that’s the only form of love I’ve witnessed, not the form of love if you understand. So it’s interesting that means that we could have that same alignment even though we’ve experienced it by growing up. So maybe Noor could help us understand what it is that she is expressed when it comes to love language.

 

Noor

I think for me, I’ve always thought of love language as spending quality time together. Not not even quality time, just spending time together, being physically present together and listening to each other talk. Yeah, I do not expect them to do anything for me or nor do I do anything for them. But what I would do is make the person feel held and as I said before, just be present.

 

Gaytri

I think that’s a great way to build a lot of love and harmony in your relationships. I think it brings a lot of comfort to just be sitting with somebody for a while. (Yeah) Like at times I don’t want to talk. I just want to be held. And I think that’s not the first.

 

Pallack

How can you feel loved and held at the same time? What kind of experiences make you feel loved and held at the same time?

 

Gaytri

I think it’s when, if I’m feeling down, I think just somebody just being there telling me it’s going to be okay and they have my back. I think that really makes me feel very comforted and very loved because it’s just really nice when somebody is just there, you know?

 

Noor

What about you, Pallack?

 

Pallack

So I would like to think that a large portion of how I understand love would be these borrowed ideas from these very, very skewed narratives like we were discussing, that love needs to be grand and love needs to be very quantifiable. On the outside, it should be seen, it should be visible. But I’ve also come to that when it’s time to maintain and nurture relationships, whether they’re romantic, platonic, even as dynamic with our caregivers or somebody that we are providing care to, that love can be very, very. It can be as simple as a “How are you?’ And it can be as simple as just here to let you know that if you need anything, I’m going to be present through it. I think sometimes the idea of love or how we feel about it can make us feel very strict about how we experience it with ourselves as well. So if we’re trying to offer our support, love and a lot of unconditionality, even by our own bodies or by our own selves, if it is not something that we can be, that we can measure and quantify, it may not often feel enough and so a lot of our talk about love, about “self-love” is also extremely, extremely nuanced because we don’t know how to hold enough space for our own bodies, for our own mind, because we’ve never really understood how to explore it with those around us. So I think the first part that I really do, what I think of love and care is, even with this, is to be gentle. I think it’s a beautiful step in the rule. Understanding the case that is what the outcome is, the approach will uniformly be gentle and that is a rather bigger implication of support than what the words actually mean, thank you. The other smaller element, but a very integral one, is to simply understand that when I think of communication so communicating the right gestures I feel so often if all of you agree, we used to learn this a lot which is you know, “It was not my intention to say this” or “It was not my intention to deliver this”. I think it’s very integral to understand that we all come from different walks of life and so we carry a different size of baggage and we feel the weight of this baggage very differently. And have spent 100% of our life relying on our core beliefs to sustain us. So when we think of partnership, whether it’s in any form of dynamic to blend into someone else’s way of being can be very complex and critical. The only thing that I think we may want to reflect on is the biases that we carry before we hold others accountable for their role. And so we may want to constantly offer curiosity. I think curiosity is the only form of love that I’m trying to explore currently. Curiosity before consensus, and I think when we think of healthy love as well, healthy relationships, supportive love, it could look very different to each of us. And so maybe we just start by developing the practice, maybe the language to value our needs and then revise the needs of the relationship. Any thoughts?

 

Noor

I really resonate with the idea of curiosity. I think for me also, I expect that in the space of a loving relationship, there should be space for experimentation and exploration and discovery. Like to reach outwards and to reach inwards as well to explore who you are and who the other person is. I think that’s the way I look at curiosity.

 

Gaytri

Adding to that, so Pallack mentioned two points – one about self-love and one about the curiosity. So I’ll talk about curiosity first. I think it is so important to continue to stay invested and interested in somebody’s life. I think that that is what keeps a relationship alive and healthy. And I mean it in the sense of all relationships, even in friendships. I feel like through books and movies, everybody tries to make love seem so effortless. But it is not. (Yeah, absolutely). It is not. It is a lot of work that you are constantly putting in. You are constantly choosing to be there for somebody you know. In your friendships, in your romantic relationships, in your professional relationships, in all sorts of relationships, every day you are choosing to be there for a particular person. And it takes a lot of effort, time, and energy to care for somebody (Right). And staying curious is extremely important. Now coming back to the self love point. So while you were talking about self love, I was just thinking about how when we talk about love and care, the first thought that comes to us is always about others. It is never internal. It is never ‘I love myself or I love taking care of myself. (I wish to build a relationship with myself.) Yeah, there. We oftentimes forget the most important person in our life, which is our own selves, especially when people are in love or they care about people. We oftentimes tend to forget about ourselves or we lose ourselves in our relationships. We get so consumed by the different forms of love and affection. And because it takes so much time and effort, right, we forget to put that sort of time and effort into building a relationship with our own selves as well. It is really important to connect with our own selves, to know what we want, to know what we like, to spend some time with ourselves as well. I think if we are not in sync with ourselves, it’s really difficult to have a healthy, loving relationship with others. So what do you guys think? What makes a relationship full of comfort or harmony?

 

Pallack

I completely agree. I think the word that I often use to explain is ‘effort’ because there are certain words that because we are down sometimes and maybe effort comes with a little bit of that weight, which is I think relationships and nurturing relationships as a result of a lot of skill and labour. Often people around me, just as I was mentioning before, would want to garner trust in communication by saying “My intention is to communicate this”, “My intention is to help you understand something”, but it is never followed enough or followed up with some language. And while I deeply agree, I do feel your intention is integral to what it is that you’re trying to achieve. It is also just as integral to develop a skill where our communication or communication style and our intent are also aligned. So I feel one cannot trump the existence of the other. It’s also important to consider that when I say skill based relationships, I don’t mean that in order to be in a relationship, in order to offer nurturing a relationship, one has to develop a certain amount of skill as a prerequisite. It comes with experiential learning. It comes with the diversity and the richness of many, many different relationships of our life. However, it is the consistency and the perseverance that helps me understand what can allow me to be more present for myself and those around me.

 

Noor

So for me, a relationship which has comfort and harmony… I think the first thing that should be there is honesty and authenticity from all the parties present in the relationship. Like just being true to each other I think really makes a difference. Another thing that I would think of could be empathy, really understanding each other because it’s really, really beautiful to be understood by somebody else and to understand somebody else. Another thing is respect. Definitely. I think no matter what their beliefs, actions or ideas are, it is important to always respect them.

 

Pallack

Thank you Noor, for that really insightful conversation. In therapy, this is something we often say, which is, relationships can break us, but relationships can also heal us. This is how we come to our conclusion today. With our ever-evolving relationships with relationships, it’s through this vicarious learning, some painful and some joyous experiences that we attempt to theorize our understanding of love and care. Where is it you get your ideas of love? Is it the same as it was growing up? What is or what can be your love language? How do you find a way to express them not just to those around you, but also yourself? These questions stay with us through the morning chai and the evening coffee.

 

Noor

To our listeners, thank you for joining us and listening in today. We really appreciate your support. If you liked this episode, please follow us on Instagram and Facebook @OneFutureCollective and @onefuture_india on Twitter. And keep an eye out for future episodes of “Explorations on Feminist Leadership by #OneFutureFellows2022”. Please leave your questions, comments or feedback for us on Anchor or in our DMs. We look forward to hearing your thoughts. Until next time, take care of yourself and we hope that we can explore more together.

 

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End of transcript

Resources mentioned by the hosts

  1. All about Love by bell hooks: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17607

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