Bodies Claiming or Being Thrown Up Into Public Space: Digital Mediations of Gender and Subalternity

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Our panel is a feminist intervention into the study of and celebration of social media based social movements. The papers and how they are written span a range of methods and engagements offline and online, textual and ethnographic. They are all collaborative even when single authored. The collaborative nature of the papers will be highlighted as a necessary intervention into academic practice of communication scholars as we engage the writing of these papers from multiple locations and raise feminist dilemmas around research methods and activist interventions that interweave the local and the global. The panel as a whole brings together productive tensions around geographical, caste, class and gender locations in activisms. In each of the instances discussed in this panel, social media is mobilized as an activist response to local/located issues. Thus the heteroglossia of authorly voices in the final paper of this panel is in itself intended as an intervention in order to question and disrupt the epistemologies of neocolonial academic formations. The panel is large and inclusive, yet diverse in the kinds of issues it brings together. Europe, Iran and South Asia are the main sites of investigation.

The panel has six papers and the final paper has multiple authors. Sandra Ponzanesi looks at how the circulation images around the Syrian refugee crisis invokes affective responses while Mahuya Pal looks at the representation and use of subalterns in online discourses by anti-globalization activist groups to mobilize collective action. Looking at Facebook as a site of intervention, Gilda Seddighi explores how the Iranian network of Mourning Mothers (Facebook page) is used by women’s rights activists to produce symbolic capital that plays on mothers’ love for children lost to war and Pallavi Guha documents India’s rural feminist activists and their challenges and successes as they use social media platforms in anti-rape and sexual harassment activism. The remaining two papers focus on multiple social media platforms and their use by women as they negotiate digital publics. Zeenab Aneez thus looks at online harassment and trolling of women journalists in India on Facebook and Twitter while Radhika Gajjala et. al look at instances of feminist online activism where women negotiate the placement of their digital and material bodies in public spaces in South Asia while focussing on their embodied negotiation of physical and digital space.

Sub Unit

• Feminist Scholarship

Individual Presentations

• Refugees Reloaded: Digital Images and Circuits of Resistance - Sandra Ponzanesi, Utrecht U

• Discursive Construction of Resistance on Subaltern Activist Websites - Mahuya Pal, U of South Florida; Md Khorshed Alam, U of South Florida

• Iranian Women’s Rights Activists’ Engagement in Production of Discourse on Social Media - Gilda Seddighi, U of Bergen

• Facebook, Whatsapp aur Hamara Narivaadi Sangharsh: The Role of Social Media Platforms in the Antirape and Sexual Harassment Activism by Rural Feminist Crusaders of India - Pallavi Guha

• Harrassment and Trolling Microsystems - Zeenab Aneez, Centre for Internet and Society

• South Asian Women’s Activism(s) to Claim Public Space - Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State U; Sriya Chattopadhyaya, Bowling Green State U; Tarishi Verma, TISS; Mohammad Ala-Uddin, Bowling Green State U