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.