WOMEN IN PARLIAMENT

Interview with Professor Shirin Rai, Politics and International Studies

The Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament Programme differentiates between ceremony and ritual as part of an analyisis of three parliaments based on the Westminster model.

Britain’s parliament, like any other institution, has its own way of doing things. We get an insight into the culture of the place by tuning into debates in the House of Commons and witnessing ceremonial occasions, such as the State Opening of Parliament, once a year but we don’t often think critically about how these norms affect the way that the country is run. It is not impossible for these norms to alter - when the expenses scandal gathered steam, rapid changes to the working arrangements of MPs were forced through, as a call for transparency highlighted a disjunct between what the public felt was reasonable renumeration for their representatives and what had become accepted as standard claims to supplement annual salaries.

The Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament Programme, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, compares the institutional rituals, rules and norms of the UK with India and South Africa, who both have adopted modified Westminster legislative models. It seeks to challenge the popular view that ceremony and ritual can be overlooked in political analysis as mere ‘trappings’ of power. The continued relevance of ceremony and ritual is emphasised by analysing the differences between the two and how they can be mapped onto the reproduction of power relations. This study of what different ceremonial practices represent offers up an excellent opportunity to investigate the impact of the working culture on political processes in more detail. However, there are a lot of factors to consider.

There are examples of women going into the members lift in Parliament and being asked if they are lost...

This complex and intricate project was initiated by Prof Shirin Rai who has spent many years researching Indian parliamentary practices: “I had been reflecting upon why certain norms had bled through from Westminster and why others had dropped off either formally or informally,” explained Prof Rai. “Westminster is so rich in terms of ritual and ceremonial aspects that it made the right starting point.” South Africa provides the third country for investigation, a modified Westminster model but intriguing in its own right: "After the fall of the apartheid government, it tried hard to Africanize its institutions, asking ‘How do we embody the rainbow nation in our representative institutions?’”.

In order to systematize this research the programme worked on clarifying the concepts of ceremony and ritual. It differentiates between the two by defining ceremony as a form of staged performance that is hyper-visible, such as the State Opening of Parliament. In contrast, ritual is defined as every-day rule-governed practice which is symbolically interpretative: How do you address members in the chamber? How do you address them outside the chamber?

Both processes can be thought of as gendered. The aggressive way in which laws are debated in the Commons is not a necessary feature of the law-making process but a result of the historical dominance of male MPs from the upper classes with public school, Oxbridge education: “Women get very put off by shouting matches but if they end up participating they are constructed negatively as if they are shrieking instead of being assertive.” Such gender issues cannot be understood without considering the interactions of class, race and religion also: Anthony Giddens, one of Britain’s leading sociologists,spoke at the inaugural event of the Programme and pointed out that "people entering parliament without a privileged background often didn’t know how to respond to this adversarial style of politics and felt like outsiders.” Nirmal Puwar, one of Associates of the Programme, has written about the marginalized within parliamentary institutions as ‘space invaders’ in her book ‘Space Invaders, Race, Gender and bodies out of place’ (2004) to describe this feeling of alienation when you enter an environment that is used to hosting only one type of person: “There are examples of women going into the members lift in Parliament and being asked if they are lost, under the assumption that they are visitors or secretaries but not MPs.”

They are not victims, they do not need rest but they want to be where the action is...

The Programme is also examining the modes of resistance within parliaments. So, for example, one strand of its research focuses on disruptive behaviour, which in different contexts can suggest different trajectories of politics. In India, for example, the latest furore has been about disruptions in the chamber. When the bill setting out a 33 percent quota for women MPs was going through the Indian parliament the general public, along with the national media, were appalled by the behaviour during the debate: “MPs from the grass roots are entering parliament that are not the earlier elite - a class who spoke beautifully and had excellent English. These new entrants are using their own way of expressing themselves. How do we analyse this? Is this simply ‘bad behaviour’, masculinist forms of aggression or can we view this as playing out of grassroots performative modes in representative institutions – something that the elites are not comfortable with but which might be viewed as vernacularisation of politics?”

Progress has been made however, in democratizing parliaments in different ways. Prof Rai chanced upon archive footage of the Ladies Room in Indian parliament when it was established in 1927, under British rule. The room was there to allow women to rest between debates: there were tea making facilities and loungers to lie down upon, clearly casting women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing rest and comfort in the middle of a working day. After independence, as more women entered parliament, this space inadvertently provided an opportunity for cross-party talk and attempt to develop consensus about important issues such as violence against women.

However, more recently, the room has fallen out of favour as a new generation of women have come through: “They have moved the Ladies room to a portioned off part of a corridor. It is so obvious no one uses it - there is dust on the furniture. You can now see the young confident women in the central hall networking. They are not victims, they do not need rest but they want to be where the action is. It is a clear example of the role of space in transforming the way MPs represent themselves.”