From Embodied Threat to Symbolic Authority: Ageing, Gender, and Voice in Kerala

This blog reflects on the curious comfort society finds in older women’s voices in Kerala—a comfort often misread as feminist progress. I argue instead that this late-life acceptance betrays a deeper patriarchal anxiety. Drawing on feminist theory, I suggest that menopause operates as a socio-political threshold: women become audible only after their bodies are stripped of sexual threat and social unease.

Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital, this blog tried to negotiate with how legitimacy is unevenly distributed among women based on caste, marital status, and compliance with normative femininity. Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective regulation explains why youthful women are marked as disruptive, while Judith Butler’s performativity helps frame menopause as a reconfiguration of gendered intelligibility.

Dalit feminist critiques further expose the caste limits of this acceptance, revealing respectability as an exclusionary economy rather than a universal reward.

Women are not heard because they grow wiser with age, but because patriarchy assumes they have grown safer.

When Age Becomes Permission: Menopause, Respectability, and the Delayed Voice of Women

I want to begin with a conjecture—one that emerged not from theory alone, but from repeated social encounters. In the circles I inhabit, I have noticed a peculiar shift: women, particularly from their mid-fifties onward, appear to gain a form of social legitimacy that eludes them through much of their earlier lives. It is as though acceptance arrives late—after decades of negotiation, endurance, and careful self-regulation.

This phase often coincides with a socially sanctioned transition: when married women with children begin planning the marriages of the next generation. Suddenly, voices that were once sidelined become audible. Women who spent their twenties and thirties navigating restrictions now speak confidently in family forums, offering advice, opinions, even moral authority—often accompanied by retrospective reflections on the freedoms they were denied in their youth.

Yet this legitimacy is not innocent. It is deeply structured by caste, class, and gender norms. What appears as age-earned wisdom is, in fact, a reward distributed unevenly—largely to women who have complied with the dominant scripts of patriarchal respectability: heterosexual marriage, reproductive labour, emotional caretaking, and social conformity. Women who are single, queer, divorced, or childfree remain marginal to this recognition, regardless of age. Their voices continue to be read as excessive, inappropriate, or socially unintelligible.

Here, Bourdieu’s idea of symbolic capital becomes instructive. The authority older women are granted is not simply a function of age; it is the cumulative outcome of having “played the game” well. Years of sacrifice, compliance, and strategic accommodation convert into legitimacy only when they align with dominant cultural values. Not all married women receive this authority—only those whose lives can be read as successful performances of normative femininity. Voice, in this sense, is not a right but a return on long-term investment in respectability.

In Kerala, this economy of legitimacy intersects sharply with bodily regulation. Despite the state’s self-image as progressive and developed, menstruating bodies continue to be imagined as sites of danger and desire—bodies that must be monitored, disciplined, and contained. Youthful femininity is read as volatile and disruptive, requiring surveillance. The speaking young woman becomes a problem to be managed.

Menopause marks a decisive shift. Once the reproductive body is perceived as dormant, a woman is allowed to speak. What was once threatening becomes tolerable; what was once disruptive becomes advisory. Menopause thus functions as a political threshold rather than merely a biological one—a passport that grants women conditional access to voice, agency, and public presence previously denied to them.

This is where Sara Ahmed's work on affect and the feminist killjoy offers a powerful lens. Younger women who speak forcefully are often experienced as killjoys—figures who disturb family harmony, caste comfort, and social happiness. Their anger is read as excess; their dissent as a threat. Older women, however, are no longer expected to disrupt. Their speech is affectively neutralised—received as wisdom rather than resistance, reflection rather than refusal. Society listens not because it has become more just, but because it feels less disturbed.

But even this conditional listening has limits. As Sharmila Rege reminds us through her insistence on Dalit feminist standpoint, respectability itself is caste-coded. Savarna women may be rewarded for obedience with late-life authority; Dalit women are rarely granted the luxury of being heard as wise at any stage. Their speech—whether young or old—is frequently marked as anger, impropriety, or excess, never as experience. Age does not flatten hierarchies; it often reproduces them.

This reveals a deeper truth about how women are permitted to exist in social space. Families and institutions are sustained through women’s quiet compliance—their willingness to absorb erasure, soften dissent, and translate anger into endurance. A woman who speaks forcefully in her youth is branded unruly, dangerous, even destructive to social order. Her confidence is read as arrogance; her refusal to be intimidated is pathologised as rebellion.

Age, however, performs a curious alchemy. Society assumes that time will mellow women—that rage will soften into wisdom, resistance into reflection. When women speak later in life, their words are received as less threatening precisely because they are presumed to have lost their capacity to unsettle. Their ideas are framed as retrospection, not intervention; as commentary, not confrontation.

Thus, the older woman’s voice becomes acceptable only when it is imagined as a farewell song—rich in experience, but stripped of urgency. The tragedy is not that women speak late. It is that society listens only when it believes their speech no longer carries the power to disrupt.

What this delayed recognition ultimately exposes is not women’s transformation, but the enduring anxiety of patriarchy. It fears women most when their bodies, voices, and desires refuse containment. Acceptance, then, is not a reward for wisdom—it is a concession offered only when the system feels safe.