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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.