Keshab Roy Choudhury Week 2

In this blog, I shall be reflecting on the A Hair Piece: A Perspective on Race and Gender by Paulette M Caldwell. As we had managed to establish in our class discussions, our physical features form an intrinsic part of our identity, be it hairstyles, tattoos, beards, and so on. Attempts to regulate these features may be viewed as seemingly benign, but can actually have sinister connotations to it. In many contexts, such seemingly benign regulations of identity may actually serve a greater ideological purpose of imposing the dominant communities hegemonic cultural preferences. However, that is but one part of serving to limit identity. There is a more complicated system of oppression that is created when considered with elements of race, gender, sex and so on. These ideas of intersectionality are dealt with by Caldwell in her piece, and she argues that racism and sexism cannot be viewed in isolation of each other, but are to be viewed in conjunction with one another, rooted in the patriarchal power system. Hair is the central subject of the piece, around which she bases her arguments of intersectionality. Caldwell discusses a variety of cases in her piece to highlight how American courts have often viewed the issues of race and sex disjointly and have dispensed rulings that ignore the cumulative effect of intersectionality. She further claims that an anti discrimination law would not do much to improve the status quo, as the effects of intersectionality are ignored. There is thus, not only a need to move beyond understanding discrimination in isolation, but as a cumulative effect of various factors, specifically in the Indian context, with religion, caste and gender thrown into the mix.