Amina Singh
Simone de Beauvoir had famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman. From Beauvoir’s claim Butler inferred that then, the notion of “woman” itself is a becoming in process and hence opens to intervention and resignification. Hence, I take the concept of “woman” not as a fixed category or passive construction of gender identity (like readymade clothes that we just put on whether it fits or not, or even if it makes us uncomfortable) but as a continuously ongoing process, negotiated by the physical, the cultural and material conditions of one’s existence. To be recognized as an intelligible subject one may have to adopt the signifying practices of gender, i.e. the socially and culturally prescribed notions of womanhood. But I ask then, if gender is performative, what are the possibilities of transcending signifying norms that are limiting to one’s possible existence? And what kind of knowledge informs this transcendence?
In this paper, I will explore the epistemology in becoming. The analysis is based on life stories of personal transformation collected through open conversations with 23 women participants throughout Nepal. In trying to understand what informs the process of becoming, I argue for an embodied, emergent and relational knowing that shapes the becoming. In this sense, knowledge is not stable or absolute that is acquired by the person, but knowledge itself is contextual, relational and constantly in the process. The fluidity and shifting of knowledge that dissolves the molar identity is what marks one’s becoming.