Paper short abstract:

This paper uses data from two women’s movements in Nepal, to show how backlash and collective subaltern identity enter into mutually reinforcing feedback loops. This shows that a) backlash be sustained through perpetuating a victim/ agent binary, and b) backlash itself can be generative.

Paper long abstract:

Gender backlash is marked by sustained assaults on gender and sexual rights and justice, alongside targeted attacks against individuals and groups advocating for them. Responding to growing calls for careful, situated analyses to better understand both how backlash operates as well as how it might be disrupted (Piscopo and Walsh 2020, Faludi et al 2020), this paper studies backlash-counter-backlash dynamics in relation to two subaltern collectives – sex workers and landless (or squatter) women. Drawing on empirical material from Nepal – the paper asks: How do women located at the intersection of multiple marginalities construct, contest and repurpose their subaltern identities as a resource for collective action under conditions of exclusion, oppression and stigmatization?

The paper offers three central reflections in relation to the interactions between collective subaltern identity, agency and backlash. First, we find that highly cohesive collective identities render women’s groups more vulnerable to backlash in the form of collective stigmatisation and vilification. This backlash is centrally sustained through a selective recognition and representation of the groups’ victimhood or agency. Second, in response to the backlash sustained through the victim/agent binary, we find that subaltern women’s collective refuse this binary attribution, insisting instead on a simultaneous recognition of both their victimhood and agency, insisting on the ‘duplexity’ of collective subaltern identity. Thirdly and finally, we find that collective subaltern identity and backlash enter into mutually reinforcing feedback loops, fueled and propelled by the agile ways in which subaltern groups construct, navigate and mobilize their shared subalternity.

Paper short abstract:

While addressing the gap in understanding the autonomy and agency of Indian Muslim women, this paper unveils their tactful navigation through politicised, masculinized, and classified urban civic spaces in the face of Hindutva fundamentalism, challenging the narrative of controlled and enslaved.

Paper long abstract:

As Hindutva fundamentalism in India advanced to assertively regulating the polarising politics, the relationship of the already dissociated and marginalised Muslim minority with urban civic spaces started eroding. Within this community, the distinct subset of Muslim women is tactfully navigating through urban civic spaces, diverging from the Hindutva-subscribed global monolithic narrative that renders them as controlled and unaware, who need to be liberated from Muslim men, even against their will, if necessary. While assessing Muslim women's mobility and accessibility, the disproportionate emphasis on gendered and cultural orthodoxy has neglected vital factors such as urban planning and political regime, risking incomplete consideration of nationalist forces that are reversing the gains made by Muslim women by pushing them into socially and economically less productive spaces.

Through auto-ethnography and in-depth interviews conducted in Muslim ghettos in Delhi, the paper addresses this gap while examining the relationship Muslim women share with urban civic spaces and how the issues around autonomy that Muslim women encounter from their community members, are closely connected to the broader economic and socio-political backlash Indian Muslims face.

Despite the cultural and political challenges, Muslim women are 'switching and redirecting' their multi-layered identities, exemplified by the choice of modern modest attire that serves the same purpose as traditionalist hijab or burqa. As women navigate political regimes, patriarchal orders, and financial disadvantages while lacking meaningful belonging to public spaces and limited social connectivity, they are coming together over shared experiences and forming groups to publicly practice their identities as a collective.

Paper short abstract:

Building on Alver (2021) & Ciccia & Roggeband (2021), we examine alliance building processes and attentiveness to intersectional issues within selected South Asian women’s movements. We explore negotiations, conscious compromises and trade-offs implicit to such processes amid intensifying backlash.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines alliance-building in women’s movements in South Asia and the extent to which they are attentive to intersectional issues. Challenging the simplistic romanticism around female solidarity and feminist coalition building, we analyse how contentious issues are negotiated within feminist alliances. We use the framework of “negotiated sisterhood” (Alver, 2021) and focus on the trade-offs that are implicit in such alliance formation processes and hence, necessitate an understanding of solidarity as a continuous, iterative, and contentious process. In the context of intensifying backlash and shrinking of democratic and civic spaces across South Asia, the movements are often pushed to choosing “safer”, less threatening, and less divisive issues to coalesce around or deprioritising intra-movement intersectionality by downplaying the marginalised voices and issues. In exploring these bargains both within and among women’s groups, we ask, how do trade-offs implicit in coalition-building impact the substantive representation of intersectional issues and identities? Through a comparative analysis of selected cases, we examine which issues take prominence, which/‘whose’ issues are dropped, and the outcome on intersectional solidarity(Ciccia and Roggeband, 2021). This analysis will enable us to envision ways in which strategies of “same difference” and “difference-in-sameness” deployed in a “constantly negotiated balance” (Luna, 2016) can help realise intersectional solidarity – not in full, not as given or static, but as an ongoing process. 

Paper short abstract:

An evidence-based audio-visual portrayal of how women in all-diversities, from multi-ethnic, multi-cultural backgrounds and various geographical areas in Sri Lanka occupied patriarchal protest spaces searching for a gender just and feminist peace process in post-war Sri Lanka.

Paper long abstract:

Twelve years since the end of the thirty-year civil war between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Sri Lankans experienced their worst economic crisis as a result of a long term corrupted and violent political culture led by men. As citizens were eking out a living during the crisis, women mobilised themselves as one of the first groups to occupy public spaces in the non-violent resistance movement - #GoHomeGota - to oust the corrupted political dictatorship. However, mainstream media did not do justice for visualising women’s representation in the resistance movement including their vulnerabilities. As a feminist ethnographic response, #WeVoice, a facebook group was created by the researcher as a safe social media space for collective visualisation of vulnerabilities of women in all-diversities. This paper is an evidence-based audio-visual portrayal of how women in all-diversities, from multi-ethnic, multi-cultural backgrounds, and various geographical areas in Sri Lanka, not only occupied patriarchal non-violent protest spaces - traditionally led and participated in by men – but also collectively searched for gender justice despite their vulnerabilities emanating from the economic crisis and participation in the non-violent resistance movement.

Paper short abstract:

What I hope to bring to the workshop is a novel and nuanced understanding of the context specific challenges of women's groups in Lebanon as they try to further their demands in a constricted sextarian political system

Paper long abstract:

The matrix of deep-rooted social, political, sectarian, and patriarchal structures in

Lebanon necessitates the introduction of a nuanced understanding of “backlash” that

veers away from the notion’s definitions that apply mostly in Western contexts.

This paper proposes a contextualised definition of backlash for Lebanon, and frames

it by unpacking the structural flaws in the very way society is constructed, and in

power relations within the country’s familial structures.

It also discusses the different forms of anti-feminist backlash observed in the country

over the past few years, focusing on three axes: systemic violence, tactical backlash,

and atomised backlash. Explored through case studies ranging from the hostile

sectarian system against women in politics, to radical religious groups, this paper

explores how backlash in this context diverges from the conceptualisations of

backlash in existing literature.

Paper short abstract:

This study investigates the BBOG movement's pathways in gender justice, the struggle for belonging, and negotiations within the context of fragility and violence in Nigeria. In Nigeria, challenges ranging from insecurity, spousal consent to inadequate funding by stakeholders will be addressed.

Paper long abstract:

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 acknowledges the crucial role of women in fostering global peace, resolving community disputes, and managing cultural diversities. This study aims to underscore women's significant contributions to gender justice, dispute mediation, and resolution, particularly through peaceful protests. Historical struggles, such as the Women’s War in Nigeria, Cocoa Holdups in Ghana, Nyabinghi Movements in East and Central Africa, Mau Mau in Kenya, and liberation efforts against colonial rule, including anti-apartheid movements, have laid foundations for contemporary struggles for gender parity and negotiations in conflict-ridden states. Examining the "Bring Back Our Girls" (BBOG) movement in Nigeria as a case study, this research delves into its emergence in April 2014 following the abduction of 276 girls by Boko Haram. The BBOG movement, led by Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former Vice President for Africa at the World Bank, has persisted for nine years, organizing public protests and building a sustained coalition of diverse stakeholders to press the government for the girls' return. This study investigates the BBOG movement's pathways in gender equality, the struggle for belonging, and negotiations within the context of fragility, conflict, and violence in Nigeria. It also examines the movement's achievements and challenges. In Nigeria, challenges ranging from insecurity, spousal consent to inadequate funding by stakeholders will be addressed. The research adopts content analysis of relevant literature, materials, pictures, and news reports to draw conclusions based on the researchers’ scope. Recommendations include advocating for legislative measures against violence towards women with defined penalties for perpetrators.

Paper short abstract:

We explore how women's struggles in Bangladesh use coalition building strategies to counter backlash and how impact of this strategy varies by the coalition’s focus, and space it engages in, leadership composition, and form, and what lessons it entails for building sustainable movements.

Paper long abstract:

Bangladesh made significant gains in women’s rights and gender equality, but in recent times these gains are facing a strong backlash and women’s rights organisations and feminist groups are taking counter actions. We use four longitudinal case studies of women’s struggles to explore the question: how do women’s struggles in Bangladesh build sustainable coalitions to counter backlash from State and non-State actors, and to what effect? The selected case studies covered the struggles for decent wages, the anti-child marriage movement, the movement for the introduction of comprehensive sexuality education and rape law reform.

We analyse how these four struggles as coalitions frame their issues for their constituency and the outside public, what role their leadership plays in building and sustaining coalitions, and what kinds of compromises are made in the process. We show how the impact of coalition building strategies varies by the focus of the struggle, the space the struggle takes place in and the form of the coalition and its leadership. We argue that while building coalitions provides struggles security through numbers and allow them to gain influence and access to policy and popular spaces, it also comes with costs. Success with respect to creating space both in terms of public discourse and working with the state on policies means compromises within the movement with respect to contentious agenda and inclusion of unruly groups and comes at the cost of losing radical impact.

Paper short abstract:

This paper tracks the circulation of affect within women’s movements in South Asia as they come together and fall apart in their struggle against backlash. It offers a complement to literature on how affect is invoked in the justification of attacks on women’s rights and movements.

Paper long abstract:

While there is increasing attention paid to the affective life of anti-gender ideology (Hemmings 2022), less is known about the circulation of affect within and through women’s movements and the entangled subjects that constitute them. Tracking these affective flows and their subjectivizing, embodied, and material effects is crucial to arriving at a coherent conceptual account of the nature of women's movements where the affective, personal and political collide under backlash.

The paper follows a sub-set of affective currents and intensities, through cycles of eruption, repression, and diffusion, to present an account of the political work these affective circulations enable or foreclose within women’s movements. We track how certain affective orientations come to cohere around and overdetermine the figure of the 'activist'(sacrifice, duty, asceticism, self-denial) , while others are disallowed (joy, pleasure, playfulness, desire, abandon), with specific and limiting consequences not just for individual political subjectivities, but for collective political possibilities.

Extending beyond a descriptive cataloguing of these affective circuits, we uncover the work they do, and their implications for the possibilities of countering backlash. Finally, we turn our attention to the ways in which women’s movements have actively mobilized affect in the furtherance of their collective political goals in more outward-facing ways- deploying artistic, embodied practices and processes to ‘affect’ diverse audiences. Here, we introduce the frame of ‘affective opportunity structures’ as a productive lens through which to identify and embrace moments of possibility in the long struggle for women’s rights and gender justice.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is an article manuscript in progress that examines how contemporary Kenyan feminists navigate in an increasingly anti-feminist popular environment online while they experience disillusionment with established and institutionalised forms of gender rights work.

Paper long abstract:

Feminist activists are facing a multi-layered crisis in Kenya: on the one hand, rising authoritarianism and conservative anti-gender popular movements are shrinking the spaces for gender and sexual rights activism. On the other, young, radical feminists are disillusioned with the gender rights discourse set by previous generations in gender and development work, which many perceive not transformative enough. Drawing form a qualitative study among feminist activists in Kenya between 2019 and 2022, this paper suggests that while many young Kenyan feminists have not abandoned traditional civil society activism, they may navigate in the context of disillusionment by creating new forms of activism in online spaces without explicit political aims. Following Davina Cooper’s (2014) conceptualisation, this paper investigates such spaces as everyday utopias: for example, activists create communal and entertainment-driven utopian spaces on social media, where they express themselves in more radical and sex-positive ways than would be accepted in traditional gender rights activist spaces, and in the Kenyan society as a whole. Personal social media sites and spontaneously emerged, sex positive online communities accessible for the social media-savvy youth create safe spaces for radical feminist and queer self-representation and peer support. This paper argues that such everyday feminist utopias allow young Kenyan feminists to create small-scale changes they wish to encounter in the society, making them political activist sites even when political change making is not their primary goal.

Paper short abstract:

I seek to provide a different avenue for discussion, in terms of how patriarchal backlash hinder the possibilities of structural transformation within the humanitarian system. Here, the voices of feminist and non-feminist Colombian humanitarian workers are centred.

Paper long abstract:

Concerned by a reductionist approach to gender, a reluctance to address power imbalances and hierarchies, a perpetuation of gender norms, and essentialist roles of women in humanitarian crises, feminisms hold their space in the theory and practice of humanitarian action. Doubts around the “too political” aspect of feminisms deter some humanitarian actors to openly adhere to feminist principles. Conversely, lack of accountability and risk of co-optation of the feminist struggles by non-governmental organisations are increasingly problematised by feminist activists and scholars. The unlikely relationship between humanitarianisms and feminisms is discussed in this paper by bringing the voices of humanitarian workers in Colombia, a country that witnesses the convergence of different and prolonged humanitarian crises alongside strong feminist mobilisation. While feminisms still face prejudice and patriarchal backlash in Colombia and other parts of the world, there are also political commitments that seem to bring feminist principles to the front. By means of a feminist epistemological approach and situated multimethod research design, I delve into the notions and perceptions shaping the everyday practices of humanitarian workers from three international humanitarian organisations that openly adopted feminist principles in Colombia.