Psychosexual Liberation and Equality: Masculinity and Gendered Reading of Self-respect Movement Through Periyar

The Self-Respect Movement that took over most of South India during the 20th century is a culmination of many historical events leading to a watershed movement that would last the entire century. Stemming predominantly from Periyar’s various discourses, self-respect from his perspective has been covered in numerous ways, mostly on a political angle and how it admonished the laws back then, but the movement was much more than that. The movement evolved into a significant social transformation into a massive revolution questioning notions of patriarchy, challenging the prevailing notions of control and femininity, ushering in a modern era for the state of Tamil Nadu, and dragging along the culture that prevailed then. Periyar argued that the caste order was fundamentally constructed upon and reinforced through the regulation of female sexuality. This article is a representation of these very perspectives of Periyar, from his viewpoint of women’s liberation, his ease into the Self-Respect Movement, the consequences, and pushback of patriarchal oppression and ultimately Periyar’s impact, the call for women to free themselves from expired notions of purity and chastity, caste pride tied to virginity, the right to birth control, contraception and according to his own words, “let masculinity die.” This article also attempts to show that not all of the factions of Self-Respect Movement worked parallelly for the same cause; at times, there were myriad factions, operating under a framework, some of them involving ethnic identity, fractioned parochialism, parochialism, cultural shifts and co-opted patriarchy.