Exclusion in #MeToo India: rethinking inclusivity and intersectionality in Indian digital feminist movements

ABSTRACT

The #Metoo movement spread globally to include women in India who were employing social media platforms to discuss their experiences in sexual abuse and harassment. This paper investigates through literature review and data collection, why #MeTooIndia demonstrates a non-inclusivity towards marginalized, and gendered bodies and narratives on the Twitter platform. This exclusion is primarily the product of increased attention to issues of sexual abuse among the Indian elite including Bollywood celebrities, journalists, politicians, and well-known media personalities who employ Twitter as a space for “coming-out.” Secondly, non-inclusivity is evidenced through lack of discussion on the question of sexual abuse, and harassment in the daily lives of Dalit, trans women, women of lower caste and class, and other marginalized and gendered communities that have vastly different experiences of sexual abuse than the elite, urban woman. Finally, exclusion is exposed through the sparsity of personal narratives under the same hashtags owing to masculine toxicity as well as the creation of unsafe spaces for gendered minorities to recount their experiences. This research employs theory of intersectionality to ultimately rethink how to design and organize feminist movements online in order to create safer, more inclusive, and intersectional spaces for feminist activism.

KEYWORDS:

• #MeToo India
• intersectionality
• digital feminism
• global South
• feminist movements

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

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Narayanamoorthy Nanditha

Narayanamoorthy Nanditha is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University. Her research lies at the intersection of Digital Humanities, Cultural Studies and Computational Social Science, and is focused on the interrogation of identity construction for online collectivities and protest movements in the Global South. She is a member of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities (CSDH/SCHN) and the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR), York Sensorium, Canadian Sociological Association (CSA), and Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). She is published in Digital Studies/Le champ Numérique, The Journal of Social Media in Society, and the Digital Humanities Quarterly. E-mail: [email protected]