https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1446-9489
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ABSTRACT
This article examines the performative digital practices of India’s feminist campaign group Blank Noise, with a focus on their 2016 project #WalkAlone. The event sought to explore and challenge embodied notions of female safety and visibility in night-time urban public spaces, by inviting women to walk alone in a place of their choosing between 9pm and midnight. In doing so, Blank Noise called on participants to ‘walk alone, together’, utilising digital documentation tools and media platforms to network these dispersed embodied acts. Drawing on my participation in #WalkAlone from the remote position of the UK alongside online documentation of the project, I examine how these tools established ‘digital proximities’ between participants, transforming our solitary acts into collective embodied action. I argue that Blank Noise’s project extends Butler’s notion of ‘plural performativity’ (2015) into a digital public sphere, by constructing a mode of embodied assembly within media spaces. Here, digital proximities between dispersed participants forged a concerted enactment from the private and personal actions of individual women, walking on the stage of the nocturnal city.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Rebecca Savory Fuller is a Lecturer in Acting at the Arts University Bournemouth and holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Exeter. Her doctoral research was conducted through Exeter’s international, interdisciplinary collaboration with the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, India.
ORCID
Rebecca Savory Fuller http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1446-9489
Notes
1 The research for this article was conducted alongside my doctoral research project, constructing a cultural history of flash mob performance practices in India (Savory Fuller Citation2018). The interdisciplinary project was funded by the UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) and co-supervised across the fields of Performance Studies and Social Anthropology at the University of Exeter and the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru.
2 The rape and murder of comedian Eurydice Dixon prompted wide protests in June 2018, after she was attacked walking home from a gig in Melbourne. Anger was fuelled by the subsequent police advice to women to take responsibility for their personal safety by making ‘sure you have situational awareness, that you’re aware of your surroundings’ (Alcorn Citation2018: n.p.).
3 SlutWalks were independently organised in each location with no overarching organisation or format. However, they tended to be staged as mass protest marches, inviting women and allies to challenge ‘slut-shaming’ and to reclaim women’s right to expressions of sexuality through slogans such as ‘my dress is not a yes’. While some regional protests were characterised by women marching in bikinis and skimpy or ‘provocative’ clothing, more conservative countries such as India focused attention on the issue of consent, while debating the applicability of reclaiming the term ‘slut’ in their own context (Kapur Citation2012; Taneja Citation2019).
4 For more information, see http://www.blanknoise.org/ [accessed 27 Feb. 2019].
5 This written reflective documentation, which I return to in the sections below, was used to compile an account of the December 2nd event as a blog post on Blank Noise’s public website (see Patheja Citation2016b).
6 Participants’ locations were shared informally between the group on WhatsApp during the event and also published by Blank Noise on their blog post documenting the action.
7 Meet To Sleep invites women to gather in groups in public parks, to bring a book and a blanket, and to share an experience of dozing or sleeping in public for an agreed time period. I Never Ask For It gathers photographic images of the clothes women were wearing when they were sexually harassed or assaulted. Hahaha Sangha invites women to create a laughter group and share a collective experience of loud, bold laughter in public spaces. Each also employ digital media tactics in similar ways to those examined here.
8 It is worth noting that in India the term ‘middle class’ is applied to a broadly visible but proportionately narrow elite minority of the national population, rather than the wider ‘middle-income’ demographic implied in other global regions (see Baviskar and Ray Citation2011). Emerging within this social group are those who Kenniston describes as India’s ‘digerati’: those with the education, resources, cultural capital, and English-language skills to confidently navigate new media technologies and platforms, who are likewise disproportionately visible in the media and public sphere in comparison to the total population (Keniston Citation2004, 17). Access to and engagement with social media-enabled protest is therefore predominantly urban and middle class, although certainly not limited to feminist or left-wing liberal politics (see e.g. Mohan Citation2015).
9 The Pink Chaddi campaign launched online in 2009 in response to an attack on women in a pub in Mangalore. The attack was led by members of right-wing Hindu nationalist group the Sri Ram Sena (SRS), who followed these events by announcing further planned attacks on unmarried couples found together on Valentine's Day. Campaigners called on women to protest by posting pink chaddi – knickers – to the SRS headquarters as a Valentine’s Day gift, using social media to mobilise participants and spread their campaign (see Susan Citation2009; Kapur Citation2012).
10 Also echoed in Blank Noise’s early performance intervention ‘Being Idle’, staged between 2006-2009. See: http://www.blanknoise.org/being-idle [accessed 15 Aug. 2019].
11 A recent set of anti-rape protests initiated in Bengaluru also applied this approach, through the hashtag #MyStreetMyProtest (Thomas Citation2018).
12 As noted in the opening section above, participants were predominantly based in cities across India (Allahabad, Bengaluru, Chhattisgarh, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Pune, and three towns and cities in Goa), and walked at individual times between 9pm and midnight. Four participants including myself participated remotely from other global locations, and chose to walk or run during the same night-time hours within our own time zones. Thus the walks were clustered around the evening of December 2nd rather than synchronised to an exact, shared temporal moment.
13 Participant messages cited here were posted by members of the ‘Walk Alone’ WhatsApp group to the shared group chat (set up by Blank Noise organisers), 2–3 December 2016.
14 Text and images included on the Walk Alone blog post were therefore shared with consent to be made public. Blank Noise included the names of participants where consent was given, while some participants opted to remain anonymous in the online record.
15 This observation echoes the findings of Pramod K. Nayar, whose work on personal blogging literacies in India highlights the hybrid public-private nature of this form of digital performance-of-self (Nayar Citation2008).