FEMININITY , NARRATIVE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS--Juliet Mitchell

FEMININITY, NARRATIVE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Juliet Mitchell

[ This post is an attempt to explain the essay to undergraduate students of Indian Universities. ]
Dr. S. Sreekumar

Juliet Mitchell——a brief biographical note

Juliet Mitchell was born in New Zealand in 1940. Later her family moved to London. She read English at Oxford and taught at the universities of Leeds and Reading. In the 1960s, Mitchell was actively involved in politics and was on the editorial committee of the journal, New Left Review. In 1974 she published Psychoanalysis and Feminism and subsequently trained at the institute of Psychoanalysis. At present she works as a psychoanalyst in London.

Feminism and Psychoanalysis——certain issues

The relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis is problematic. In one of his lectures on Femininity, Freud had presented women as the problem. There are many other misogynist trends evident in Freud’s oratory and writings which have made Feminists wary of his biases. Further, he is often accused of ‘curtailing and diminishing the diversity of individual women's experiences into a restricted and unvarying formula that will fit within its own theoretical parameters’. Certain important points are to be noted in this context: 

·        In classical psychoanalytic theory, female psychosexual development is only marginally and infrequently discussed. It is measured against a masculine norm and found deficient.

·       Many North American feminists believed that the concept of ‘penis envy’, developed by Freud in his account of the female version of the ‘castration complex’, represented the misogynist bias of psychoanalytic theory.

·        Feminists  considered misogyny a sufficient ground for rejecting psychoanalysis as a feminist theoretical tool.

Simone de Beauvoir’s view—— The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir was undobtedly the major feminist of the post-Freudean critical scene. Therefore her views on Freudean theory are important. Beauvoir took up the topic of psychoanalysis in The Second Sex (1949) and devoted a chapter for “The Psychoanalytic Point of View”.

·        In this chapter Beauvoir denounced Freud's idea that there is but one, masculine, libido and no feminine libido with “its own original nature”.

·        Beauvoir took Freud to task for not considering the social origins of masculine and paternal power and privilege and considered his theory inadequate to account for woman's otherness.

·        She argued that if women envied men it was because of the social power and priveleges they enjoyed and not because of anatomical superiority.

·        Beauvoir believed that psychoanalysis rendered woman as the other to a subject rather than a subject herself, and thus denied her existential freedom.

All said and done, Freud's thoughts and hypotheses concerning hysteria, the Oedipal Complex, female sexuality and femininity, and women's role in civilization, have provided the volatile grounds, the sites of contention for feminist re-articulation which was taken up by French feminists

                                                                                                                                                                 

Psychoanalytic feminism——The French view & Lacan

The French view of psychoanalytic theory is very important because of the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s work had a powerful influence on the feminist critique of psychoanalysis. His ideas have been ‘taken up, transformed and challenged’ by Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and others.

·        Lacan’s work is admired for its ‘de-biologization’ of Freud.

·        At the same time, the work is derided for its phallocentrism [focus on male point of view].

·        In fact, these two aspects [de-biologization and phallocentrism] are intertwined in Lacan’s work. Both of them depend on Lacanian concepts of language as a symbolic order that ‘precedes and makes possible human subjectivity’.

Lacan believed that his work is a return to Freud.  This return to Freud is accompanied by insights of structural linguistics  and structural anthropology. Lacan was the pioneer in introducing the ideas of Saussure and Roman Jakobson on sturctural linguistics and those of Claude Levi-Strauss on structural anthropology into the field of psychoanalysis.

Some of Lacan’s views on Freud are rennovative in nature. Freud had theorized that there is only one libido and it is masculine. In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan explicitly states that there might be two libidos——masculine as well as feminine.

French Feminism and Psychoanalysis

At the outset, it must be made explicit that the expression,  ‘French Feminism’, is a misnomer. The authors are rarely of French origin or nationality. [ However, French is the predominant language of their writing] . The prominent writers are Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Sarah Kofman, Catherine Clement, and Helene Cixous. Their ideas on the relation between the maternal and the feminine and feminine subjectivity differ considerably. They worry about Freud's lack of attention to mothers and wonder if women can be subjects or citizens without adapting to masculine norms. While deriding Lacan's phallocentrism, they suspect that access to language assimilates women into ‘neutralized brothers’.

·        They temperamentally sympathize with the split of personality affirmed by psychoanalysis——the idea that I am not I. They believe that ‘self-division rather than self-identity’ is the primary aspect of human existence.

·        They try to disentangle femininity from maternity. They also highlight the significance of maternity for women and for childern of both sexes.

David Lodge on ‘Femininity, Narrative & Psychoanalysis

Mitchell’s essay ‘Women, the Longest Revolution’ heralded the emergence of politically radical feminism. At the height of the women’s movement, she shocked her fellow feminists by highlighting the usefulness of Freud’s works which were considered anti-feminist by many. She argued that the rejection of psychoanalysis as bourgeois and patriarchal was fatal for feminism.  She saw the usefulness of Freud’s work as re-read by Lacan and other post-structuralists.

‘Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis’ is the transcript of a lecture delivered to a conference on Narrative held in Australia in 1972. The lecture brings together English Literature, politics, psychoanalysis and feminism.

Femininity, Narrative and Psychoanalysis—critical background

Though many feminists tend to reject Freudian concepts, all the while there was a subtle change taking place in the attitude of certain feminist critics towards Freudian hypotheses. They felt it better to incorporate rather than reject Freudian concepts. Thus, during the middle to late 1970's, feminists such as Juliet Mitchell, Gayle Rubin, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Nancy Chodorow moved beyond the initial rejection of psychoanalysis to explore its feminist potential.

These efforts ‘were premised less on a denial of the misogynist character of psychoanalytic theory than on a reinterpretation of it’. Gayle Rubin, for example, argued that the feminist critique of psychoanalysis is justified to the extent that Freudian theory is a rationalization of women’s subordination. But Rubin proposed that this is not the only legitimate way to understand Freud's theory. It can also be read as a 'description of how phallic culture domesticates women, and the effects in women of their domestication. Thus Rubin concluded to the extent that Freudian theory is a description of processes that contribute to women's oppression, the feminist critique of psychoanalysis is mistaken.

FEMININITY, NARRATIVE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Detailed Critical Analysis

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is ‘talking cure’. [Freud used the term to describe the fundamental work of psychoanalysis. Mental health professionals use the term to mean any of a variety of talking therapies. ].  The analyst is male or female. The patient is male or female. If language is phallocentric ¹ [ see notes for ‘phallocentrism’ and ‘ecriture feminine’], what is a woman patient doing when she is speaking or what is a woman analyst doing when she is listening and speaking back?

At one level, psychoanalysts are telling and retelling histories. The patient comes with a story of his/her experience. ‘The analyst listens; through an association something intrudes, disrupts, offers the ‘anarchic carnival’² [see notes] back into that history, the story won’t quite do, and so the process starts again’. The patient makes a new history.

the analyst , in analysing his or her own countertransference, performs the same process on himself or herself, listens to a history, asks. ‘Why am I hearing it as that?’: something from the analyst’s own associations disrupts, erupts into that narrative – the analyst asks a question from a new perspective, and the history starts all over again.     

Mitchell says that she is thinking about the role of carnival or disruption. When history is dirupted, another history is created. We have multiple histories, though we can only live within one at a time.

Mitchell, then looks at one ‘kind of history’. It is the preeminent form of literary narrative——the novel.

·        The novel starts with autobiographies written by women in the seventeenth century. Though there were several famous men novelists, the vast majority of early novels were written by women.

·        These women were trying to create a history from a state of flux, in which they were feeling themselves in ‘the process of becoming women within a new bourgeois society’. The novels describe that process.

·        ‘The novel is that creation by the woman of the woman, or by the subject who is in the process of becoming woman, of woman under capitalism’.

·        Novel is not homogenous [of the same kind, similar]. There are points of disruption within it. There are points of autocriticism within it. Mitchell says that Wuthering Heights ‘is a high point of criticism of the novel from within the novel’.

·        The novel is the best example of the way women start to create themselves as social subjects under bourgeois capitalism.

·        The novel is a bourgeois form. Mitchell agrees that there are working class novels. But she says that the dominant form is represented by the women in the bourgeoisie.

·        Thus when contemporary Feminist critics turn to women writers, resurrect the forgotten texts of these writers, they are conforming to the bourgeois tradition.

·        Mitchell says that this is useful because we can find out why women had to write the novel, the story of their domesticity, seclusion within the home and the possibilities and impossibilities provided by that.

The Discourse of the Hysteric [see notes 3]

The tradition of women writing novels [which are actually disguised autobiographies] is criticized by Julia Kristeva who calls such novels ‘the discourse of the hysteric’.

Mitchell answers this charge thus:

I believe that it has to be the discourse of the hysteric. The woman novelist must be an hysteric. Hysteria is the woman’s simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the organization of sexuality under patriarchal capitalism. It is simultaneously what a woman can do both to be feminine and to refuse femininity, within patriarchal discourse. And I think that is exactly what the novel is...

Mitchell says that (unlike Cixous) she does not believe in female writing, ‘women’s voice’, etc.

There is the hysteric’s voice which is the woman’s masculine language [ one has to speak ‘masculinely’ in a phallocentric world] talking about feminine experience. It is both simultaneously the woman novelist’s refusal of the woman’s world —— she is, after all, a novelist —— and her construction from within a masculine world of that woman’s world.

Mitchell says that when the woman novelist writes from within the masculine world, she is realizing the importance of bisexuality.                                       

Re-reading Freud

Mitchell speaks about re-reading Freud ‘in terms of the moment at which sexual division is produced within society. This moment is described by Mitchell thus: It is the ‘moment of the castration complex, the moment when the heterogeneously sexual, polymorphously perverse, carnivalesque child has imposed on it the divisions of ‘the law’; the one law, the law of patriarchy, the mark of the phallus. At that moment two sexes are psychologically created——the masculine and the not- masculine. When the phallus is seen missing in the mother, masculinity is set up as the norm. Femininity is what masculinity is not [ a negative definition]. What is not there in the mother becomes relevant here. The expression which fills that gap is, ‘perforce’, phallocentric.  

Lacan and the Symbolic

In Lacanian thinking the moment when the two sexes are psychologically created is called the moment of the symbolic. The symbolic is where sexuality is constructed as meaning. Here what was heterogeneous, what was not symbolised earlier becomes organized and created round the poles——masculine and not-masculine:feminine.

·        What has gone before this stage of the symbolic can be called pre-Oedipal, the semiotic, the carnivalesque [questioning the established authority], the disruptive. Mitchell says that we can take two positions in relation to that.

1. The pre-divided, heterogeneous, pre-Oedipal child has its own organisation of polyvalence and polyphony. [the child has an inborn capacity to recognize itself as different from the mother].

Or

2. The very notion of heterogeneity, of bisexuality, of pre-Oedipality arise  because of the dyadic [of two parts or elements] possibility of child with mother. It is an image of oneness and heterogeniety as two sides of the same coin.  [what Mitchell means is that the child and the mother are one and at the same time different]. This is infact the symbolic law itself.  

Political dimension of the problem

Mitchell argues that there is a political dimension to the issue discussed above.

“If you think that the heterogeneous pre-Oedipal polyvalent world is a separate structure in its own right, then the law is disruptable, the carnival can be held on the church steps”. 

What Mitchell means by this statement has to be explained. In alternative (1) it was stated that the ‘pre-divided, heterogeneous, pre-Oedipal child has its own organisation of polyvalence and polyphony’. If it is so it means that the ‘heterogeneous pre-Oedipal polyvalent world’ is a separate one. In such a case the Lacanian moment of the symbolic is questionable.[ in the symbolic moment, according to Lacan, what was heterogeneous becomes organized and bi-polar——masculine and feminine.] ‘The carnival can be held on the church steps’. Here ‘carnival’ stands for disregard/challenge to the authority which the ‘church’ represents. If the pre-Oedipal world of the child is separate, then the carnival and the church will have no difference. The carnival can be held on the steps of the church itself.

Mitchell continues: “But if this is not the case, if the carnival and the church do not exist independently of each other, the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal are not separate, discrete states...”

[If the carnival (disorder) and the church (order) are not separate, then the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal stages are also not separate or discrete (disconnected).]

‘...if, instead, the Oedipal with the castration complex is what defines the pre-Oedipal, then the only way you can challenge the church, challenge both the Oedipal and its pre-Oedipal, is from within an alternative symbolic universe’.

[Mitchell says that if the pre-Oedipal is defined by the Oedipal stage, then the only way to challenge them both is from an alternative symbolic universe. Here Lacanian symbolic universe ceases to exist. In Lacan the crucial difference between the Oedipal and the pre-Oedipal is what defines the symbolic universe. In the absence of this difference, Lacanian symbolic universe has no existence]. 

The imaginary, the semiotic, the carnival is not an alternative to the symbolic. It is set up by the law as its own ludic space [ ludic = playful]. It is an imaginary alternative, not a symbolic alternative.  [the carnival is not an alternative to the law or the symbolic universe. The carnival is disruptive only within the terms of the law. It is within the symbolic universe. The carnival is not a regular feature of any society. It is just an escape mechanism to get relief from the rigours of daily existence.]

Mitchell concludes that a new symbolism, a new law is required to challenge the dominant law. This is the political dimension of the problem.

Mitchell disagrees with the suggestion that the carnival is the area of the feminine. Mitchell says that it (the carnival) is only what the patriarchal universe defines as the feminine. The intuitive, the religious, the mystical, the playful-- all those things have been assigned to women. Woman is heterogeneous. There is the notion that ‘women’s sexuality is much more one of a whole body, not so genital, not so phallic’. [Mitchell might have borrowed this concept from Cixous]

The carnival is disruptive of the law, but it disrupts only within the terms of that law. [ In the carnival, disrespect is shown to the authority (church/king). But this disrespect is always within certain parameters. The disrespect is only for a short duration and every participant is careful that carnival does not degenerate into anarchy or violence].

 Mitchell says that the limitations imposed on Carnival is suggestive of the French school of feminism associated with Kristeva. The disruption intended by Kristeva is contained within the patriarchal symbolic [just like the carnival within the rules of the established order].  That is why Kristeva and her associates chose ‘exclusively masculine texts’ and even ‘proto-fascist’ writings for expounding their ideas. Hence, according to Mitchell, Kristeva and her school were operating within the patriarchal narrative while illustrating feminist ideas.

Psychoanalytic Reading of Wuthering Heights

·        Emily Bronte is not writing a ‘carnivalesque query’to the patriarchal order. 

·        She is writing with the terms of a language which has been defined as phallocentric.

·        Yet she is posing questions about patriarchal organisation through ‘a kind of irony’.

The questions

1. Who tells the story?

[Bronte’s manuscript was stolen from her and presented to a publisher by her sister, Charlotte.It was eventually published under a male pseudonym:Ellis Bell].

2. The author is a woman, writing a private novel; she is published as a man, and ‘acquires some fame and notoriety’.

3. She uses two narratives——a man, Lockwood, and a woman, the nurse, Nelly Dean.  The whole novel is structured through these two narrators. 

4. Lockwood is a parody of the romantic male lover. He is set up as a foppish [dandy, very much concerned with appearances] gentleman from the town. He is supposed to be in love with all the things the romantic gentleman is ‘supposed’ to love—soliture, ‘heart of gold beneath a fierce exterior’ etc.

5. Lockwood’s romantic pretensions are criticized from within the novel, particularly through the character of Isabella. Isabella thinks that Heathcliff is a dark, romantic Gothic hero, who will prove to be a gentleman beneath all his cruelty.

The story of Bisexuality

The story of Catherine and Heathcliff is a story of bisexuality. It is the story of the ‘hysteric’. Catherine’s father had promised that he would bring her a whip. Instead he brought a fatherless gypsy child. The child is given the name Heathcliff, the name of the brother of Catherine who had died in infancy. Catherine looks in her father’s pocket. Instead of getting the whip she gets a brother/lover, Heathcliff.  

For the rest of her life, Catherine wants nothing but Heathcliff. She makes a conventional feminine choice and marries Edgar Linton with whom she can never feel united. They have a child, the birth of which marks the death of Catherine.

Catherine wants to be ‘one’ with Heathcliff. She breaks the incest taboo: ‘I am Heathcliff, he’s more myself than I am’. Heathcliff says the same about Catherine. This ‘oneness’ is the opposite of ‘heterogeneity’. ‘This oneness comes only with death. Catherine dies and haunts Heathcliff for twenty years. Heathcliff goes on living with the hope of becoming one with Catherine. He dies getting back to her. ‘Oneness’ is the symbolic notion of what happens before the symbolic. It is ‘death and has to be death’.

The choices for the women within the novel, within fiction, are either to survive by making the hysteric’s ambiguous choice into femininity which doesn’t work (marriage with Linton) or to go for oneness and unity, by suffering death (walking the moors as a ghost with Heathcliff)

Conclusion

·        The novel arose as the form in which ‘women had to construct themselves as women within new social structures’.  

·        The woman novelist is ‘necessarily the hysteric ³ wanting to repudiate the symbolic definition of sexual difference under patriarchal law’. She is ‘unable to do so because without madness we are all unable to do so’.

[ see notes ³ for hysteria and women].

[The woman novelist is trying to reject the sexual differences imposed by patriarchy. Both Freud and Lacan identified an Oedipal stage in the development of a child when it becomes aware of the difference between masculine and not masculine (feminine). Here the point to be noted is that women throughout history is defined in relation to man and not as an independent entity. She is always the negative (what man is not). The woman novelist cannot break the shackles of patriarchy because she is a woman living in a patriarchal society which thinks of women as hysterical. [irrational, bound to fluctuating moods and temperament, etc.] The novelist has to cater to the needs of the public which is mainly patriarchal. In writing about her experiences a woman novelist has to fit into the straight jacket which Society had designed for her].

·        Writing from within the position of a woman (assigned by patriarchy) a woman novelist can be conformist ( for example: Mills and Boons romantic novels). Else she can be critical (as in Wuthering Heights)

·        The novel starts at a point where society is in a state of flux. The subject is in the process of becoming a woman or man, as we understand those identities today.

[ In the 17^th and 18^th centuries when the novel form began to crystallise, western society was in a state of unrest. The progress of science was gradually undermining established notions about Man/Woman. The Age of Enlightenment was at hand and the modern Man/Woman was evolving slowly from the shadows of superstion and blind beliefs. Along with this monarchy was losing its hold on the people and democratic principles were gaining ground. Thus the novel form reflected the aspirations of the rising middle classes who were in the process of becoming.]

Now Mitchell is asking a puzzling question:

·        ‘If we are today again talking about a type of literary criticism, about a type of text where the subject is not formed under a symbolic law, but within what is seen as a heterogeneous area of the subject-in-process, I would like to end with asking a question: in the process of becoming what?

[ Novel in the 18^th century indicated a process of becoming. Mitchell is asking about the process of becoming that is taking place in modern literary criticism. Does the heterogeneous area  which  modern feminism celebrate indicate a ‘subject-in progress’? If it is a process as is claimed by some feminists, then ‘of becoming what’? The answer to these questions are highly subjective as well as ambigous and Mitchell leaves them as such.

·        It is not possible to live as human subjects without ‘taking on a history’. [Man/Woman needs a historical background to survive. Human beings are rational creations who can think about their past or future. Aritotelianism viewed man as rational animal (animal rationale) capable of historical sense whereas plants have only nutitive lives and anmilas instinctual lives. Deliberative imagination is man’s defining feature. ]

·        Man’s history is mainly the history of being men or women under ‘bourgeois capitalism’.

·        If we deconstruct that history, we have to create other histories. When we do that ‘What are we in the process of becoming?’

Thus Mitchell ends this speech with a question for which no rational answer is available.

Critical comments

Mitchell is a feminist as well as a psychoanalyst.

The psychoanalytic theory, from Freud’s original ideas through Jacques Lacan and the ‘French feminists’ like Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva was a stimulating intellecutal influence on Feminist ideology. However in the mid-20^th century several feminists were skeptical about the use of psychoanalysis to advance their cause. The main reason for this skepticism was the perception that Freud was a misogynist whose concept of ‘penis envy’ was designed to keep women under eternal subservience. But critics like Mitchell saw in Freud new opportunities for grasping the depth of gender and sexual identities (questions like ‘What it means to be a woman’? became relevant).

Mitchell believed that abandoning Freud is disadvantageous for women since Freud’s work was a critical analysis of patriarchism.

Mitchell believed that the cultural practice of ancient societies (such as the exchange of women in marriage) commodified women. But at the same time enhanced their value as ‘exchange objects’.

The female is suffering from ‘penis envy’—the anxiety about her ‘lack’. The male is anxious about losing it through castration. Mitchell argues that the castration never actually takes place in any societies. It is only imaginary or symbolic. The definitions of musculinity and femininity are constructed through the symbolic. Here man is the autonomous agent and woman is the lacking other. Gender is thus a cultural construct.

The gender divide is created as a fantasy to explain the discovery of genital difference. It is a socially conditioned fantasy. Man sees and believes himself as a unified whole because the feminine is always a lack which is knowable. Thus the feminine is a guarantor of male fantasy.

Late capitalism glorifed male-centred family life. Thus the gender divide and consequent subjugation of women are related to the compulsions of capitalist enterprise.

NOTES

1. Phallocentric = phallocentrism was first used by the Freudian psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. Jones disagreed with the Freudian hypothesis that female sexual identity is marked by the lack of the phallus (a sense of their castration). This theory takes away any positive sense of female identiy  based on female sexual organs. This was seen by Jones as an unconscious projection by male psychoanalysts of their own neurotic fears about the female body. Lacanian analysis repeats with variations Freud’s obsession with the phallus and its lack, and was charged with phallocentrism by feminist critics. French feminists like Cixous, Luce Irigaray thought that women must use ‘ecriture feminine’ to counter the influence of phallocentric language. In her essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1975), Cixous asserts "woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies" because their sexual pleasure has been repressed and denied expression. American feminist critic and writer Elaine Showalter defines this movement as "the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text." Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclical writing that evades "the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system." Because language is not a neutral medium, it can be said to function as an instrument of patriarchal expression. As Peter Barry writes, “the female writer is seen as suffering the handicap of having to use a medium (prose writing) which is essentially a male instrument fashioned for male purposes”. Ecriture féminine thus exists as an antithesis of masculine writing or as a means of escape for women. In the words of Rosemarie Tong, “Cixous challenged women to write themselves out of the world men constructed for women. She urged women to put themselves-the unthinkable/unthought-into words.

2. Carnival

The concept of the carnival has influence in literary criticism of the 1980s and 90s. This concept is seen as a method of subversion by the black and feminist critics, in fact by all those who feel themselves existing on the borders of the dominant culture. Carnival offers them a means to get equal with the oppressing and dominant culture. Bakhtin points out the example of a Russian peasant urinating from the steeple of a church during the carnival season. Bakhtin says that there is an element of the carnival even in Christianity. In the beginning of Christianity, it was not a totalizing monologic ideology. Actually it existed at the periphery of the Roman Empire. Bakhtin says that the New Testament is essentially dialogic. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on as ass and the crowning with thorns are distinctly carnivalesque. Carnival offers the common man a chance to protest and a chance to show irreverence to the holy and the mighty.

3. Women and hysteria

Hysteria is the first mental disorder associated with women. Freud considered it an entirely female disease. Hippocrates (5th century BC) is the first to use the term ‘hysteria’. He believed that the cause of this disease lies in the movement of the uterus (“hysteron”) causing various kinds of disorders such as anxiety, sense of suffocation, tremors, sometimes even convulsions and paralysis. In the 18th century, hysteria began to be associated with the brain rather than the uterus. Slowly the awareness dawned in that if hysteria is connected to the brain, then perhaps it is not a female disease and can affect both sexes.

Disclaimer

The writer does not claim any originality in the materials posted here. The materials are assorted from different sources. They have to be utilized as lecture notes for class-room purposes only.  These materials are primarily meant for students and teachers (of tier II cities and provincial towns of India) who do not have adequate library facilities in their institutions / locations. The notes are purely meant for scholarly purposes and should not be used for any commercial purposes whatsoever.  

Dr. S.Sreekumar