Disrupting the Status Quo from Within: Micro-Modal Feminist Activism among Haryanvi Jaat Girls

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8: Social Movements and Collective Action

Abstract

In this article I explore how young Haryanvi Jaat women in urban India enact affective everyday forms of feminist resistance within patriarchal regimes that regulate sanctioned girlhood. Drawing on qualitative interviews with self-identified girls aged 18 to 24, I theorize what I refer to as relational transgression as a feminist practice enacted through the two micro-modal tactics that I call rigid timidity and girl time. These affective strategies transform compliance, silence, and waiting into means of negotiating gendered control and generating spaces of autonomy. Rather than framing resistance solely as overt confrontation or public protest, I attend to the subtle, embodied, and relational practices through which girls maneuver within tightly surveilled social worlds structured by caste, family honor, and educational aspiration. I argue that rigid timidity operates as a strategic performance of modesty and restraint that allows girls to exceed normative limits without openly challenging authority. Similarly, girl time captures how waiting, delay, and temporal deferral become political resources through which girls stretch the boundaries of permissible futures. These practices do not reject patriarchal authority outright; instead, they rework it from within, producing incremental shifts in mobility, education, and relational expectations. By foregrounding these less legible modes of resistance, I expand feminist conceptualizations of activism beyond visible, organized mobilization to include affective and relational acts that unfold in everyday life. In doing so, I demonstrate how young women sustain and imagine intergenerational feminist futures through intimate negotiations rather than dramatic rupture. Our analysis challenges dominant frameworks that equate feminist activism with public disruption and instead situates resistance within the micropolitics of sanctioned girlhood, where transformation emerges through disciplined, affective, and temporally strategic practices.

Author

• Namrata Namrata, Arizona State University-Tempe