Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper is about the publics created by the performative naming of the #MeToo movement in India. More specifically, it is about what it means to announce, as CNN did on October 18, 2018, that Indian actress Tanushree Dutta’s public accusation against actor Nana Patekar for sexual assault kickstarted India’s #MeToo moment. Calling this India’s #MeToo moment ignores the past 6 years of history. In response to the Delhi bus gang rape of 2012, Indian feminists embarked on an explicitly public, performative project to demand that everyday moments of sexual violence be taken seriously as violence. Turning the accepted narrative of the originality of America’s #MeToo on its head, I argue that the #MeToo movement reflects other movements across the globe including India’s reaction to the Delhi bus gang rape (and also including older forms of publicly performative feminism such as SlutWalk and Take Back the Night). What does it mean to use the same name for two vastly different social movements, to insist on a transnational public that may or may not accurately reflect the daily political performances happening on the ground? Turning to feminist public art groups such as Blank Noise and Why Loiter, I demonstrate the ways in which India was talking about daily sexual violence on a national scale nearly five years before it became an American hashtag and interrogate how digital media both spreads and subsumes these groups’ work in the name of #MeToo.