“ It wasn't allowed, I did it anyway”: Subjugated Feminist Knowledges and Affective Girls’ Activism through Girl Time in India

• In Event: Gender, Agency, and Education for Peace: Power, Resistance, and Identity in Divided Contexts

Proposal

In listening to the conference theme, this study re-envisions girls' education by focusing on the quotidian, unorganized forms of girls’ activism, modes of resistance, and praxis that operate largely outside the validation of formal institutions like family, non-governmental and civil society organizations, or organized mass mobilizations, through an examination of the experiences of young women (ages 18-24) from the Jaat community in India, who despite their age, are positioned as girls and therefore variously inhabit and disrupt forms of sanctioned girlhood in order to resist and restructure local patriarchal control.
While scholarship on girls’ activism has increasingly acknowledged organized, girl-led civic engagement and processes through which girls learn, adopt, and practice feminist activism (Gordon & Taft, 2011; Taft 2014; Bent 2020), it remains limited in accounting for the informal, relational, and often unconscious processes through which girls enact dissent (Gordon & Taft, 2011) and engage in what Jessica Taft calls acts of “becoming an activist” (Taft, 2017, p. 27). Previous research on girls' activism has extensively focused on formal or organized forms of girls' activism (Bent, 2013; Taft, 2017; Walters, 2019), often disentangling and isolating organized girls’ activism from the everyday negotiations, feminist transgressions, and affective dissent enacted by girls. In this context, this study go on to show how the everyday, unorganized acts of girls dissent enacted through mutually constituted desirable girlhood performances in education, including strategic navigations of patriarchal expectations such as submissiveness and high academic achievement and relational transgression such as hiding romantic partners and forgoing college to travel, signifies a vital site of subjugated feminist knowledges that disrupts dominant gendered controls and opens up decolonial possibilities for affective girls activism and intergenerational feminist transformations.
Accordingly, to advance the broader scholarship on girls’ activism and illuminating the role of affective eduction in it, the study asks: What really counts as girls' activism? What are the tactics, modes, and methods through which girls dissent and resist? And what are their implications for reconfiguring dominant feminist epistemologies and modes for intergenerational feminist transformations?
To investigate these questions, the study draws on the experiences of ten young women (aged 18 to 25) from the Jaat community in India, collected through qualitative interviewing. Jaat culture is marked by entrenched modes of patriarchal dominance, most notably in the form of so-called honor codes, including brutal consequences for transgressing honor codes (i.e., honor killings) (Choudhary, 2004; D’Lima et al., 2020). In our consideration of the informal acts of becoming activists through unsanctioned ways of transgressing patriarchal control and tactics of affective resistance in girls’ everyday lives, the study understands girls’ activism as a “movement in making” that incorporates a spectrum of embodied, political and affective practices through which girls navigate and negotiate to counter the “scattered hegemonies” (Grewal, 1994) that impact their lives. This spectrum of habitations also includes practices that may not always be institutionally recognized or discursively framed as activism by the girl activists themselves. Our focus on nuanced and unsanctioned modes of girls’ activism prompts our call for referential as well as representational solidarity with studies focusing on organized girls’ activism.
However, re-envisioning and reconfiguring what counts as girls’ activism not only requires us to attend to habitations and orientations that fall outside formal, sanctioned, and often structured activism, but we also have to contend with a tendency to recognize overtly rebellious girls’ behavior as a characteristic of girls’ activist paradigms (Griffin, 2004). Over the years, to broaden the frameworks of what counts as girls activism, scholars have questioned the dominant frameworks of girls activism by arguing the epistemological (i.e., such as exclusion of girls from youth led activism (Lesko, 2012)) as well as methodological practices within girls activism such as incorporating the liminal space between “becoming” and “being” an activist as ways to practice girls activism, to further emphasize a diverse array of formative practices, such as volunteering, organizing, and participating in rallies (Taft, 2017).
In this regard, girls who can not or do not follow these rebel girl frameworks are often excluded from the purview of scholarship on girls' activism and acts of becoming girls activists. Taft (2017) shows how girl activists in her larger body of work often distinguish themselves from other girls in schools who do not raise their voice by calling them silly, self-obsessed, and foolish. Girls activists in the study argue that “becoming an activist is finding others who are like you or finding a place to belong” (Taft, 2017, p.7). Consequently, girls who do not have normative rebellious or vocal ways of enacting their dissent might have difficulty in finding a place to belong in broader scholarship around organized as well as unorganized girls' activism. So does that mean that the publicly not-so-rebellious girls do not participate in the acts of becoming girls’ activists?
The narratives collected for this study prompt us to ask: how do the publicly “not-so-rebellious” girls function through and within the normative, desirable, and idealized edicts of girlhood to mobilize less recognizable (and less studied) “acts of becoming activists”? How does the neoliberal ‘compulsion’ for education and associated gendered empowerment help reproduce and sustain this desirability as well as feminist activist praxis? In doing so, the study attend to the affective, relational, and often unsanctioned tactics through which girls negotiate and subvert dominant gendered expectations and control, detailing how everyday transgressions by the young women in this study opens up possibilities of multiple decolonial futures, futures that are grounded in alternative feminist epistemologies, girls-led modes of empowerment, and post-neoliberal imaginaries to resist the logics of surveillance and respectability, through their own tactical agencies and subjugated feminist knowledges like "rigid timidity" and "girl time".

Author

• Namrata Shokeen, Arizona State University