New Feminisms in South Asian Social Media, Film, and Literature

Disrupting the Discourse

Sonora Jha, Alka Kurian, Sonora Jha, Alka Kurian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367878412
• eBook ISBN: 9781317210771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is a study of the resurgence and re-imagination of feminist discourse on gender and sexuality in South Asia as told through its cinematic, literary, and social media narratives. It brings incisive and expert analyses of emerging disruptive articulations that represent an unprecedented surge of feminist response to the culture of sexual violence in South Asia. Here scholars across disciplines and international borders chronicle the expressions of a disruptive feminist solidarity in contemporary South Asia. They offer critical investigations of these newly complicated discourses across narrative forms – hashtag activism on Facebook and Twitter, the writings of diasporic writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Bollywood films like Mardaani, feminist Dalit narratives in the fiction of Bama Faustina, social media activism against rape culture, journalistic and cinematic articulations on queer rights, state censorship of "India's Daughter", and feminist film activism in Bangladesh, Kashmir, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

Part I
Theoretical Imaginings

1 Decolonizing the Body

Theoretical Imaginings on the Fourth Wave Feminism in India

Alka Kurian

Introduction

This chapter argues that the 2012 anti-rape movement in India launched a new feminist politics that embodied a rights-based discourse of gender - in particular, against everyday, generalized misogyny, and sexual harassment and violence—in a way that had not been seriously taken up by the mainstream Indian Women’s Movement. Asserting their right to be treated as equal fellow citizens, the movement saw young women challenging the subordination of their political identity to moral identity, and demanding that the state criminalize sexual harassment, something that it had ignored to do in the sixty-five years of the country’s independence. Second, I claim that this feminist discourse was connected to a global vocabulary of rights facilitated, to a large extent, by means of the Internet. Third, this movement—often referred to as India’s “Spring”—resonated with other forms of agitations for plurality and inclusivity within the Dalit and Muslim minority communities, educational institutions, and the country’s militarized zones. It is my intention here to argue that this rights-based intersectional feminist movement, led by India’s youth, created a ripple effect for other struggles to break out. Providing them with the “form, idiom, and languages of protest” (Anurima, 2017 fb post), it inspired a large number of public intellectuals and members of the civic society to lay claim to their “political citizenship” (Rahul Roy, 2017) and assert their constitutional right to shape the future of the country’s secularism that they fear is currently under threat by the Hindutva forces of regressive nationalism. The promise of the 2012 feminist movement, therefore, is in this connection, and is a critical breakthrough that has the potential to lay the groundwork for, what I claim, an Indian fourth wave feminism and for wider class-based struggles.

Central to this rights-bearing discourse of gender is a focus on the issues of freedom, choice, and desire i.e. elements, which in the past, were viewed with suspicion by those who were committed to the idea of developmental nationalism. The developmental state was too quick to dismiss these elements that came out of modernity because of its own postcolonial legacies marked by conservative gender binaries. The Indian Women’s Movement, in its turn too, had a narrower set of restrictive and protectionist concerns by placing a limit on what women could ask for or do. Moreover, gender in the public sphere was seen by the IWM only through the lens of the developmental state, focusing on employment, wages, education, housing, health, food, etc. It’s examination of gender in the private sphere, on the other hand, concerned itself with issues of maternal health, reproduction, female feticide or infanticide, the girl child, child marriage, dowry, domestic abuse, etc. Sexuality was strictly a private matter for the developmental state; it saw its public manifestation only in terms of sexual violence against which women needed to be protected through controlling and disciplining their sexual behavior and policing their access to public places.

The access by means of the Internet to a global vocabulary of rights enabled India’s youth to bring gender out of the shadows of this developmental framework. It also challenged the regressive nationalistic register by turning the tide from protection to women’s autonomy at home and in public spaces. One can scorn at these changes as an upper-class, elitist, and Western phenomenon, or leave it fragmented. But to do that would amount to saying that the developmental logic is not part of the global conversation. The protectionist zeal of the state and the IWM had failed in eliminating women’s sexual vulnerability in public places, especially since the watershed decade of 1990s, that had brought more and more women out into the public space, unleashing a massive backlash from the conservative sections of the society. Feeling betrayed by the state and spurned by the society, young women didn’t wait to be rescued by the mainstream IWM and used what resources they had at their disposal. Online campaigns such as “Occupy the Night,” “Why Loiter,” “Blank Noise,” etc., were some of the earliest manifestations of this collective spirit against everyday sexism. The 2012 anti-rape movement became the tipping point that initiated a conversation on the need for a shift from developmental to a new rights-based state where women had absolute right to their sexual bodies and to public spaces. By bringing the discourse of freedom and sexuality into the public realm—in the streets and through social media—and by insisting on the autonomy of women’s political identity, this discourse helped the Indian feminist movement to emerge into modernity.

These new rights vocabularies of the feminist movement challenged not only the culture of sexism but also classism, casteism, and communalism. Alongside slogans against sexual violence, during the 2012 movement, could be heard voices against oppression of Muslims, Dalits, and of people in Kashmir and Manipur. This rights-based anti-rape movement gave an occasion, therefore, to people from a diversity of interest groups to express their rage against the neo-colonial repressive state. It brought together those who were not on the same page, had different goals for human rights and social justice, and differed on what they wanted from the movement. By trying to advance the interest of civil society and by working on bringing about social justice, these leaders fulfilled, therefore, the role of social “meddlers” (Brittney Cooper 2017: 62) or of public intellectuals, that Romila Thapar fears, have become an “endangered species” (2015).

Fired by the spirit to bring about a democratic culture by dismantling the existing power structure within the repressive neoliberal state, many of the trailblazers of this 2012 intersectional movement provided leadership for other movements that followed, such as “Justice for Vemula,” “Stand with JNU,” “#Pinjra Tod,” “Chalo Una,” “#DalitWomenFight,” and “#NotInMyName,” and a further intensified movement against AFSPA in Kashmir and Manipur. Making this link offers a chance of really pushing forward a different agenda that replaces the developmental state with a progressive alliance. The vocabulary of women who are laying claim to these rights – to the city, to freedom of movement, to their bodies, and to pleasure (and not just civil rights) – needs to be understood as an opportunity for a larger fourth wave feminist movement.

2012 Anti-Rape Movement

The gruesome rape and murder in Delhi of twenty-three-year-old Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012 unleashed mass protests across India, reigniting public debates on the pervasiveness of sexual violence in the country, foregrounding for the first-time sexual violence as a political issue in liberal democracy (Ratna Kapur 2014). Singh had gone out to watch a film with a male friend, Awindra Pandey. On their way home in a private bus, Pandey was savagely attacked and Singh was brutally gang raped. Singh succumbed to her horrific injuries thirteen days later. Her death lit a spark to the simmering discontent in the country against a profoundly misogynistic culture—that oppresses women across class, caste, and religious divide at home, in public places and institutions—and turned it into a broad-based, nation-wide, intersectional, anti-rape movement. People in their thousands—the first protests being led by students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) that houses a powerful gender sensitization committee on campus—joined in mass demonstrations on the streets of urban India, “mobilized by a sense of outrage, social media tools and word of mouth” (Sen cited in Titzmann 2015: 79) demanding an end to the state’s indifference to sexual violence claming that it denies women their right to life. While the political classes agitated for women’s safety, and many young men and women cried for death penalty for the perpetrators and safety for women, the Hindu right bemoaned Indian women’s sexual corruption through Westernization and blamed the rise of women’s mobility and freedom as the root cause of sexual violence.

The 2013 Criminal Law Amendment Act¹ that followed the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh was a culmination of feminist discussions that had preceded in the years leading up to this. The unprecedented furor across national and international borders elicited by the 2012 incident was not too dissimilar—albeit magnified manifold in scale and number—to other public expressions of outrage against the culture of sexual violence in India: Mathura 1972; Rameeza Bee 1979; Maya Tyagi 1980; Suman Rani 1989; Bhanvari Devi 1992. It replicated previous cases mobilized by people around the need for ending state apathy to sexual violence, for amending rape law, for holding the police accountable, and implementing tougher penalties for sex offenders. While Singh’s rape made talking about sex and sexuality in public “respectable” (Dutta and Sircar 2013), it also offered a platform for some to reflect on the paucity of response to other cases of sexual violence, some even more gruesome than Singh’s, such as the rape of women at the hands of the Indian army in Kashmir (Essar Batool et al. 2016) and the Northeast, or of Dalit, tribal, and Muslim women. Instead of empathizing with the mood of the people, the state imposed reactive measures to deal with the intensity of the protests in Delhi and tried to disperse the agitating crowds by means of water cannons, batons, tear gas, and curfews. Faced with an increasing national and international pressure, the government set up the Verma Committee to revise the anti-rape law in the country. The discussions afforded by the Verma Committee outlined precisely the “continuum of violence against women” (Geetha xv) whether at home or in public spaces, in cities or in border states, that targeted women with sexual violence in the name of honor, identity, or national protection (Geetha xv).

In this section, I investigate feminist activism in India that was triggered by this incident and which railed against the culture of sexual violence, especially against everyday sexual harassment in the country, where walking the streets becomes a sexually hazardous activity for women and which is normalized as an inevitable part of the culture. It looks at the gaps and erasures within mainstream Indian Women’s Movement with the attempt to understanding where within the civic society are conversations being led on this question. In the first instance, I attempt to understand this phenomenon against the background of the deepening intersection of women’s lives with sexual violence in India, a reality that has historically been cloaked in silence.

Second, I draw on Mitra-Kahn’s (2012) analysis to reflect on the transformations within the IWM from its earlier “non-autobiographical” formation to its present-day incarnation of non-mainstream cyberfeminism. I draw on Mitra-Kahn to gain an insight into the ideological feminism of the postcolonial IWM and the profoundly transformative 1990s neoliberal turn of the country to understand the rise of online feminist activism (2012: 110–11). The rapid transformations taking place in feminist politics in India today locate cyberfeminists in radically new feminist spaces and conversations on feminism itself, who use the democratically accessible Internet as a tool for activism on a wide range of issues. I claim that the passionate engagement of cyberfeminists with the politics of sexual violence, for example the one that we saw during the 2012 protests, challenged the perceived sense of political apathy, conservatism, and consumerism among younger women and helped inject a new life into the IWM whose NGO-zation since the 1990s had blunted its edge (Menon 2004) and weakened and fragmented its feminist politics. Moreover, IWM has historically privileged institutional forms of women’s oppression related to sati, widows, dowry, custodial rape, female infanticide/feticide, inflation, environmental degradation, etc. The IWM’s focus, therefore, has tended to be on specific forms of gender oppressions that impact mostly socially and economically backward and mostly rural layers of Indian society. Without undermining IWM’s significant contribution to these major “issue-specific conceptual frameworks” (Chakravarti et al. cited in Mitra-Kahn 111), the class differentiation between “activists/theorist middle class feminists” and their disenfranchised “objects of activism and inquiry,” (Mitra-Kahn 110–111) has created an unbridgeable solidarity gap between their self and the other. The privileged members of the IWM understood the pain of the socio-economically oppressed: it happened elsewhere and to other women, i.e. the laborer, the cleaner, the widow, the destitute or the Dalit. But operating from the comfort of its middle-class home or workplace, this “split subject” (John 1998) of the IWM juggled the privilege of the self and the oppression of the other by inadvertently emulating, what I claim, a homegrown “Feminist-as-Tourist” model (Mohanty 2003), causing in the process alienation between the two and fundamentally damaging the IWM. This hands-off approach of the IWM, argues Kshama Sawant (2017a), stemmed also from the IWM’s NGO-ization, a process that “did not happen in isolation,” but caught many social and political movements in its fold.

However, with more and more girls from across the class system joining the workforce in contemporary India, and consequently getting out of domestic and into public space, the dominant feminist discourse post-1990s has shifted from the other to the self and the concerns of the erstwhile IWM have become youth concerns. In a situation like this, by neglecting to theorize everyday street sexual harassment², considering it to be exclusively a class issue (Phadke 2003)³ that was far too incidental and sporadic in nature to merit its intervention, the ideological feminism of the postcolonial IWM, with its focus on developmental issues, projected itself as exclusionary and too out of touch with the needs of contemporary feminism. By intervening in the resultant activism gap, the younger cyberfeminists proceeded to operate along, what I claim, a “comparative model,” illustrating through their actions powerful “relations of mutuality, co-responsibility and common interests, anchoring the idea of feminist solidarity” (Mohanty 2003: 242). By using the Internet for discussion and activism, and relying on its power to “call out” and challenge the culture of sexism and misogyny, cyberfeminists or the “power users of social networking” (cited in Munro 2013) have lain claim to both the site as well as the content of knowledge production hitherto monopolized by the mainstream IWM.

Indian Feminisms: A Historical Background

It is difficult to understand social movements from the prism of waves: there are no clear definitions and meanings tend to seep from one into another, and the appellations only make sense retrospectively. The first wave of the Indian women’s movement is understood to have begun during the nineteenth-century social reform movement with women’s organizations battling against both patriarchy and colonialism. The second wave of women’s political activism in the post-colonial India of 1950s and 1960s took on a radically different form and method of mobilizing and embodied class and anti-caste struggles. These included tribal landless laborers’ movement against feudal oppression, rallies against price rise, black marketeering and corruption, formation of trade unions for women working in the informal sector, and agitation for land by landless peasants. The third wav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Theoretical Imaginings
• PART II Social Media
• PART III Film
• PART IV Literature
• Index