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.