Gender Question | Years after #MeToo lit a fire in our lives, a group of feminists look back at what it left in its wake
A new book examines everything from pre-histories to post-realisations as well as the continuing impact of the movement that reframed the gender conversation
Intimacy and Injury is an excellent read. And a crucial I one, for its revisiting and reframing of difficult conversations. The articles in this anthology examine events around the global #MeToo movement along the axes of intimacy and injury, rather than power, hierarchy and violence, thus making space for the unacknowledged, unsaid, and equally vital. For one, such a framework permits us to examine the messiness inherent in all kinds of intimacies (not just sexual ones); it also lifts the veil and invites us to look at the wholly unaddressed mix of pleasure and danger that guides us.
The authors — a mix of Indian and South African academics and activists — ask fundamental questions about the difficult years roiled by #MeToo allegations and lawsuits across the globe. The idea for this anthology arose out of a university workshop, where a keenness to talk to similar global south contexts, emerged. . Yet, Intimacy and Injury offers site-specific analysis — #MeToo in the university, #MeToo in the newsroom, institutional responses to #MeToo — as well as the pre-histories of the systemic and unaddressed nature of the violence and discrimination which informed the milieus in which these accusations were made, several accused received immunity and several accusers were shamed.
The anthology is strikingly different not only in how it re-frames the conversation, but also in whose voices it chooses to draw our attention to — trans, working class, Dalit, rural women, whose experiences remained largely invisible during the #MeToo years. At the same time, the book examines the specific online nature of the movement, from the impact of internet time on feminist solidarity-building, to the role of hashtag campaigns in demanding institutional accountability.
The essays underscore the vital need for such a book: #MeToo was not an online defamation campaign against men, or a compendium of women’s woes; it was a site of several conflicts that played out — and continue to play out — across different locations, including in our psyches. I’d like to draw your attention to four essays by Indian authors — the milieu I am familiar with — that make vital points.
This review is a truncated version of what I wrote for The Third Eye, a bilingual feminist think tank working on the intersections of gender, sexuality, violence, technology and education, as part of their upcoming edition on sexuality titled ‘Pleasure and Danger’. More on that when it's up on their website.
Inside the digital: Inhabiting internet time
Shilpa Phadke’s ‘Rebuilding precious solidarities: A feminist debate in internet time’ describes with urgency the kind of panic that gripped all of us as the #MeToo allegations began spilling forth.
The series of sexual harassment accusations against public figures that broke out in 2018 was more widespread and affected several types of workspaces, from the art world to the classroom and the newsroom, but a year before that, a group of students circulated a list collated and posted by Raya Sarkar, a PhD candidate, which named male professors who were allegedly well-known harassers in academic circles. Referred to as the List of Sexual Harassers in Academia, or LoSHA, or simply, the List, it’s publication went on to lay bare some of the deep fissures in the community of Indian feminists.
Phadke, an academician with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and a co-editor of this book, writes: “Given that the digital is here to stay, and that the digital has also given us exciting ways of engaging with feminism and with each other, how can we reflect on hostile and acrimonious debates between feminists which have taken place in these very public fora?”
The List and the response signed by several older feminists and published on the blog, Kafila, which condemned the List, as well as the debate that ensued between feminists who defended the List and those who generally agreed with the Kafila statement, generated intense feelings of “rage, pain and betrayal,” Phadke writes.
“One of the things that made this debate different from those that had gone before was that it took place almost entirely on the internet, specifically on social media — Facebook and Twitter — and on blogs,” Phadke points out.
Internet time — where “conversations took place over multiple geographical locations, travelled swiftly and produced rebuttals almost instantly” — created a space within which “one might speak and be heard and a space in which one might be misheard, re-heard, reinterpreted and reimagined.” “[This] internet time was crucial to the way in which this debate unfolded,” Phadke writes.
While internet time allowed feminism to expand through new solidarities and means of expressions, as well as new and innovative ways of holding those in power accountable, it also enabled what Phadke calls a “public acknowledgement of larger fractures that are not new”.
What do we do with these fractures, which we did not even know existed till #MeToo brought them out into the open?
Inside the mind: Where all certainties come to grief
Jaya Sharma’s piece, ‘Queer Feminism and India’s #MeToo’, uses the lens of the psyche to explain how we responded to the #MeToo movement. Pleasure and danger — the twin axes of erotic desire — offer a framework through which the messy realities of the #MeToo movement, and its implications for consent, might be understood. Such a lens allows “an openness to the possibility of mutuality of desire even in contexts of inequality of power,” Sharma, a long time student of psychoanalysis, writes.
A questionnaire, which forms the basis of Sharma’s essay, sought responses on several such viewpoints. One of the respondents said that it was difficult to remember that sexuality is “not just fluid, but also fuzzy”. This fuzziness or messiness is an uncomfortable place to occupy, and carries with it a high likelihood of injury.
Both sides felt the anxiety of being cancelled. Respondents to Sharma’s questionnaire also pointed to their “fear” of sharing reflections in public, digital spaces. The discourse held little room for diverse views, or indeed, even dilemmas — one of the respondents told Sharma that #MeToo was not just ‘for’ or ‘against’ viewpoints, but between ‘for us’ and ‘against us’ views [My emphasis].
A queer location makes it possible to recognise and handle this messiness, Sharma writes — it’s a position I agree with.
“For those of us for whom marginalised desires are core to our life experiences or identities, other than facing sexual consent violations, there is the reality that — even for desires experienced within the self, that harm no one or for desires expressed and acted upon with mutual consent — desire itself becomes the basis of our marginalisation,” Sharma writes.
Sharma refers to feminist psychoanalytic thinker and writer Jacqueline Rose, whose psychoanalytic framework is useful if we are to accommodate the all-too-important (and neglected) psyche in our way forward. Rose speaks of the collective psyche: “We are ‘peopled’ by others. Our psyche is a social space. This is a valuable space because it is in the “sexual undercurrents of our lives where all certainties come to grief.”
Sharma draws out Rose’s argument about the collective psyche to posit a way forward kind of feminism that would have “the courage of its contradictions” and “accept what it is to falter and suffer inwardly, while still laying out — without hesitation— its charge-sheet of injustice.”
Inside the invisibilisations: othered by one’s own
In ‘Moments of erasure of the testimonies of sexual violence against Dalit women’, Rupali Bansode speaks of how Dalit women’s testimonies of sexual violence get sidelined, erased or concealed. Even a movement like #MeToo, although initiated by the Dalit-Bahujan feminists (Sarkar, who collated and posted the List is a Dalit woman) was “limited in engaging with the phenomenon of caste-based sexual violence perpetrated against women from the marginalised sections of India.”
Violence against Dalit persons “mirror the histories of violence they and the other Dalits have faced in the past,” Bansode found, while staying at the home of a victim of sexual violence whose recourse to justice was fraught with delay, disbelief and fear of retribution by the perpetrators. This led Bansode to also conclude that the “public silence about the violence” teaches us that “we have to read the silences” particularly in light of the “ multiple lived realities of Dalits”.
Disha Mulick brings up the impact that such positions of marginality have in a movement that aims to draw from a ‘common’ gendered experience, in’ #MeToo and the troubling of the rural public sphere in India: a feminist media house reports from the hinterland’. “The news media and the entertainment industry in India, for instance, have been domains of work occupied by ‘privileged’ women, in terms of class, caste and mobility. Similar to other forms of public engagement, women’s entry into a male-dominated space like journalism necessitated a constant proving of worth, of entitlement,” she writes.
In Khabar Lahariya, a local news organisation based in Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh, which aims to provide hyperlocal news for a hyperlocal audience and employs women from marginalised backgrounds, Mulick (who was associated with the news organisation for several years) and the editorial team found that a similarity in experiences of harassment didn’t translate to a similarity in response during the #MeToo outpourings.
“(...) There was an instinctive alignment with #MeToo; a deep sense of liberation in connecting experiences of women in different locations. However, we also felt some concern about how the local audience would react if we published stories about #MeToo. We were in agreement that it could elicit a backlash from our predominantly male, upper-caste audience, who would argue that women should not be in the public domain in this manner and that harassment was just due punishment.”
What’s more, as Mulick astutely points out, the mobile phone is already a fraught device: it’s a site of pleasure, a privilege not available to many women in rural households. To report #MeToo meant also to report the dangers that the women were exposing themselves to through this device. For many, this was a far more immediate challenge to tackle.
In conclusion, #MeToo questioned the silence imposed by caste-based heteronormativity on the power dynamics of the erotic, but it was nevertheless underpinned by an assumption of guilt, shame and disgust. This conservative strand is one of the many fault lines that the book Intimacy and Injury prises open as it examines the continuum between pleasure and danger.
This is not to say that violence and violations do not occur, and ought not to be punished. The various South African and Indian authors examine the social structures in which such violence continues unimpeded, no matter how much scrutiny we bring to bear upon it. Thus, structural change is vital, and getting victims to believe that such change is there to stay, even more so. At the same time, it is important to examine our assumptions about sexuality and consider the ways in which our comprehension of intimacy is laced with notions of opprobrium (self-imposed as much as socially constituted) that seem totalitarian in their hold on us. It is a dictatorship of the heteronormative, the patriarchal. Perhaps the only way to break away is to examine the consequences of desire, one guilty pleasure at a time.
‘Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa’ is edited by Nicky Falkof, Shilpa Phadke and Srila Roy. It is part of a series titled, Governing Intimacies in the Global South, which deploys the categories of intimacy and governance to offer novel insights into the subjects, politics, cultures and experiences of the global south. It is published by Manchester University Press.
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