Art, Gender, and Faith

So profoundly has social media changed the ways in which we communicate and form ourselves that to declare that the world of social media has changed the manner in which we interact would be to state the obvious. Social media has given many of us the option to define ourselves in new ways, granting each of us access to resources that perhaps were scarcely imaginable even a decade ago.

Like many others, I took to these new forms of moulding my self-image like a duck to water. I was particularly fascinated by the possibilities that Facebook’s cover picture options offered. For those not yet in the know, the cover picture is what one would perhaps call the banner of the web page; it is a block of space at the top of one’s personal page that can be customised to fit in an image of one’s choice.

The release of this option to Facebook users coincided with my discovery of one of the features of the internal space of the Church of Saint Roque in Lisbon. The central panel of the retable of the main altar in this church is changed according to the liturgical season. Thus, the seasons of Lent, Easter, Advent, Christmas, and Ordinary time have their own panels. The effect on the largely illiterate faithful prior to times such as ours, when we are bombarded with so much visual material, must have been dramatic, offering an icon that was appropriate to the reflections of the season. Inspired by this feature, I have constantly changed the cover picture on my Facebook wall to suit the moment, whether it be a festival, a moment in history, an art work that strikes my fancy, or suchlike.

The Catholic Church commemorated the feast of St. Mary Magdalene on the twenty-second of this month. Almost every Christian is aware that Mary Magdalene is an important figure in the story of Christ’s life. She is identified as the woman who anointed Christ with perfume, and wiped his feet with her hair—an occasion that, according to the Gospels, caused quite a stir and called for a rebuke from Christ. Subsequently, she is depicted as present at the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ, and finally, there are representations of her as a penitent, living her life as a hermit.

The occasion of her feast day, of course, called for a commemoration of the event. I was unsure, however, as to how to capture Mary Magdalene. Should I exhibit her before the Resurrection, where she is depicted anointing the feet of Christ, or wailing at the foot of the cross, or post resurrection, where she is depicted as the penitent?

I was uncomfortable with the images of the anointing because of their patriarchal character. One image in particular, displaying a woman and her hair, and merely the feet of Christ, was quite horrifying. Focusing on a male foot, female hands and hair,  despite the best intentions of the author, so much of the context had been removed to make the image seem vaguely pornographic. This image was too far removed from the more mystical reading that Christ himself provided of the action. Rather, it seemed to suggest the servitude of women to men.

The images of Mary Magdalene as a penitent similarly displayed an often lascivious male appreciation of her figure. Further, these images seemed to stress not Mary the privileged disciple but the prostituted woman that she has been identified with. Indeed, in these images, there was too much of an obsession with the fallen woman, without any appreciation for her redemption through Christ.

Of these many representations of Mary Magdalene as the penitent, there was one image that kept suggesting itself insistently. This was a Baroque period statute of the penitent Mary carved by the seventeenth century Spanish artist Pedro de Mena. Belonging to the Spanish National Museum of Sculpture, currently housed in the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid, I had the privilege of encountering the image when it was on loan to the National Museum of Antique Art in Lisbon between 2011 and 2012. There are no words that can quite capture the sublime beauty of this image, whether in the care given to the coarse garments of the penitent Mary, or the bliss of contemplation that animates her face. Unfortunately, however, none of the images on the internet were quite able to do justice to this image. In any case, as I will subsequently elaborate, this moment of penitence was not the moment I decided on. Also, there is good reason to believe that the penitent Mary is the result of the conflation of Mary Madgalene with that of St. Mary of Egypt. This image, therefore, just would not do.

I eventually settled on the moment when Mary encounters Christ after his resurrection. This choice was determined largely because of the immense importance of this moment, captured perfectly in the words of Sr. Sandra Schneiders:

“as three of the four Gospels record, she was indeed the first witness to the Resurrection, and so then for those fateful moments, hours immediately thereafter, there’s a deep sense in which Mary Magdala was the Church. She was the only person who knew the story and could proclaim it of the Resurrection.”

There are times when one is unable to understand the full import of the words one encounters. And yet one is aware that something monumental has taken place. An entire worldview has been shifted, and a new perspective has been born. In these few words, Schneiders managed to convey the central importance of this female figure in a world that predominantly focuses on male and patriarchal actors. She repositioned Mary Magdalene, not as a fallen figure of immorality, nor as a penitent (whose value I am not disputing, though penitence can be overemphasized so as to occlude grace), but as a person who, as a result of Christ’s certain choice, was privileged to be the first to be made aware of the key moment of the Christian message and, in conveying the message of new life to the rest of the disciples, she embodied the Church in those initial moments. 

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 24 July 2015)

Love, Sex, aur Dhokha: Sexual harassment on a bus journey between Mapusa and Panjim

Given that the past week or so in Goa has been of torrid sexual drama, it seemed appropriate that this column too jump into the fray. Most sexual stories get told from the male point of view, and this story will be no exception. Where this narration will differ however, is how this particular male gets treated. In this story, the narrator is victim, rather than the victor or voyeur.

My story begins onboard a Kadamba shuttle service between Mapusa and Panjim. Not left with much seating choice, I moved to the back of the bus where the 5 seater held three men. There was a young man in his mid-twenties on one side, a possible 10 – 12 grader boy dressed in shorts on the other. In the centre was a rather personable young man in his late twenties to early thirties. No sooner had I settled down, than he flashed me a charming smile, asking “newspaper?” Given that I was fortuitously carrying one in my bag I handed him the newspaper. He flashed me another broad grin while asking me where I was from; “Goa?” I rolled my eyes, and responded, rather aggressively, that I was from Goa “Why? Don’t I look Goan?”

Having thus beaten him to silence, I retreated into my own personal world as we bumped our way toward Panjim. A couple of seconds later he gamely slid away from me and slapped the seat space between the two of us. Since I had managed, in the process of seating myself, to get squashed between this charmer and the twenty-something young man, I thought that the ‘charmer’ was making more space for me. A few seconds later however, I realized that the charmer had slid over merely to create space for the huge bag that the boy, on the other side of the seat, was carrying on his lap. Trying to make the best of the situation, I decided a couple of minutes later to use the bag as an arm-rest. Imagine my horror when I saw, as I turned around, the use my newspaper was being put to! Our charmer has ensured that while his hand away from me was holding the newspaper, it was also resting on the bare thigh of the young boy. The other hand was using the newspaper to screen this circumstance from the rest of the bus should they choose to look back.

‘Ok buster’, I thought to myself narrowing my eyes ‘I know what you’re up to!’ The boy though seemed oblivious to the location of the Charmer’s hand and was babbling away breathlessly. Taking this for some kind of consent from the boy, I looked away and decided (I now think wrongly) to mind my own business. A couple of minutes later, the charmer was back by my side, another winning smile, returning my newspaper and making small talk. After some perfunctory small talk about the location of where one should store cell phones on one’s person, I dove into the newspaper shutting him out of my space.

Now you have to remember that all this while we continue to bump our way towards Panjim. In the course of this ride, as I struggle to keep my eyes on the newsprint, I am convinced that the charmer’s hand is grazing my wrist rather deliberately and insistently. Since I don’t want to jump to conclusions, I decide that it’s just a result of the journey and my now hyperactive imagination. This state of mind lasts until with the next bump when the charmer’s hand is lightly, but quite surely around my wrist!

“How does one respond to this situation”, I asked myself as I pretended to focus on the paper. First the whole situation is rather and obviously embarrassing, and secondly, while I didn’t appreciate the sexual attention, I didn’t want to be the guy who initiates a session of old-fashioned gay- bashing. Fortunately for me I managed resolved the situation by quickly and deftly lifting his hand off my wrist, placing it on the bag and continuing to read the paper. The charmer mumbled ‘I’m sorry’ (not that I believed he was) and I feigned a distracted nod indicating that it was nothing as I pretended to be immersed in the newspaper. We reached Panjim without further incident and none of those winning smiles from the charmer.

While the power dimensions between two men are somewhat different as that between a woman and a man, I was nevertheless able to estimate something of the position women are placed in when they encounter such unsolicited sexual advances. For starters, one asks oneself whether one has given any indication that we are open to these attentions. I knew enough in this case to say that indeed I did not. The second issue one has to deal with is how, does one fend this person off. Invariably in the case of men propositioning women, the issue is not really a desire for sexual relation as much as it is the desire for conquest. In societies like ours, where the ideal male is seen as a hunter, it is through conquest that the male becomes in fact a Man. For the woman to indicate displeasure, and not be backed up by a crowd therefore, is to perhaps invite renewed and redoubled advances. Like I indicated earlier, between men the power equation is rather different (though this really does not hold for the charmer’s interaction with the boy), but one is still placed in the delicate, and for most men unique, situation of having to resolve the issue. When the expected social role for men is to be the hunter, rather than the hunted, such unwelcome sexual advances are invariably responded to with violence. For the gender and politically sensitive however, this is not really an option. Such a route merely re-inscribes the dominant expectation of what it is to be a man, and perpetuates homophobia. To resolve this situation through public shaming without violence, is to court becoming the butt of public ridicule. After all it isn’t particularly manly to be seen as attractive to other men, even if you have not been sending out any signals. Besides, in using shame and not violence, one is not really using one’s male prerogative of violence, and displaying in this manner, one’s lack of masculinity and therefore culpability.

As the Pacheco story develops perhaps we will realize that there are deeper and more devious political games being played. However in the interim it would be worthwhile to contemplate the manner in which the sexual practices of our society, that is the manner in which sexuality, masculinity, femininity and power interact, are as responsible for this mess, as the personal actions of those involved.

(First published in the Gomantak Times, 16 June 2010)