Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Memory breathes in narratives – it speaks from a threshold of the symbolic order. Subjects speak of fragments of a shared cultural past of oppression – in a language ascribed with meaning, which simultaneously inscribes the self with reflexivity towards political identity – as ‘women.’ In putting together a narrative of becoming women through a shared experience of sexual control and violence - memory serves as a premise for self-constitution, provides ontological security by stabilizing that which is a constitutive lack - relating the limits of the ungraspable traces of the past to the elusive present. Feminist digital ‘archiving’ of experiences both reconstructs history while deconstructing it. Since lived experience is undercut by a shared imaginary of gendered human condition - the other is a version of myself - which is in dialogue with me in a correlative ontological gap - but is not me. Retaining both the singularity of experience within a totality of a shared generality of being women. The digital public sphere is marked by a memory which insists being one with the representations that always exceeds itself. The #MeToo movement in India, saw a lot of screenshots of ‘predators’ being circulated online as ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ of their ‘predatory’ ways. A carceral prison discourse repeats itself, triangulating – the other, me, and the camera - the ‘pure’ evil stabilises my political identity while creating a self-referential memory of resistance sustained by the fantasy of a ‘whole’ which is forever lost. Is cultural memory ideology par excellence?