Asad Alvi: For [Pakistani poet, writer, feminist and activist] Attiya Dawood, the importance of arts and culture is no grand philosophy. It is simply a mode of being. Of living, talking, writing, breathing. This experiential aspect of her feminism is key to understanding how we can build more inclusive avenues of talking about the arts and culture. Grounding herself in bodily experiences rather than abstractions allows her to challenge hegemony in intellectual spaces, by exposing the utter lack of connection between spectacles of intellectual success and the human life that they claim to represent. In retrospect, Dawood has been attempting to reconcile this separation, by breathing life back into our intellectual pursuits. This is her practice of that age-old feminist analytic, that the personal is the political, that we must practise what we preach, that any separation between the mind and the body is problematic.
[…] Dawood is able to show that for the many intellectuals who are canonised as heroes of enlightenment, the mind and the body are compartmentalised as separate categories of experiencing reality. While, in the public sphere, their minds speak, in elocutionary fervour, their desire to represent humanity; within the private sphere, their bodies contradict everything that their minds claim to represent.
[…] Feminism is known as a visceral philosophy, the philosophy of the body, precisely because it seeks to reconcile this separation between the mind and the body, the private and the public, the personal and the political. This is what feminist theorist bell hooks articulates in her acclaimed book Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom:
“One of the central tenets of feminist critical pedagogy,” writes hooks, “has been the insistence on not engaging the mind/body split… This is one of the underlying beliefs that has made Women’s Studies a subversive location in the academy… existing structures seem to uphold the idea of a mind/body split, one that promotes and supports compartmentalisation. This support reinforces the dualistic separation of public and private, encouraging people to see no connection between life practices, habits of being, and intellectual thought.”
[…] When we begin to see intellectual authorities not merely as minds, but also as bodies hurting other bodies, we begin to investigate the function of intellectual hegemony. We begin to see that hegemony functions in a twofold manner: first, by convincing us that men are the self-appointed representatives of humanity; and second, that their mind is superior to the knowledge women’s bodies witness.
[…] I have learnt most about the functions of intellectual hegemony from Attiya Dawood. Questioning these functions and reimagining the ways in which gender, sexual, racial, and class minorities reclaim their right to talk about their lives has shown me how to be a better feminist, and indeed, a better thinking individual. As intellectuals, we are here to critique institutions of power that dehumanise human life. I do not think we can achieve radical good by simultaneously existing within such institutions and laying our claim to representing human life. This simultaneity is the crux of why we, in many ways, fail to create inclusive community spaces. More here.