Peer Seminar: Chapter 3 Organised by The Department of English

The Department of English, The Bhawanipur Education Society College organised Peer Seminar: Chapter 3 on 27^th September, 2023 at 3 pm. The speaker was Prof. Gaurav Singh; his paper was entitled “Mapping Ideological Threats and Challenges against the #MeToo Movement in India”. The seminar was held in Room 515 from 3 pm; it was attended by faculty members, PG semester III students along with a few UG semester V students of the Department of English.

The Peer Seminar is a departmental activity initiated by the Department of English where each month, a member of the faculty presents their research papers in front of the other teachers of the Department. This has been instituted as an attempt to encourage academic dialogue and widen research perspectives amongst the faculty. In the third session of the series of seminars, Prof. Singh spoke about the #MeToo Movement, a watershed movement in the arena of postmodern intersectional feminism prominently known for creating a discourse and narrative of women survivors of sexual assault and other forms of gender-based violence. His paper aimed at mapping the ideologies, theory, and praxis of Men’s rights groups and activists (which centres majorly on anti-feminist propagandist politics), and assessing its intersections with right-wing politics and activism in order to trace the prevalent ideological threats, challenges, and backlash against the #MeToo Movement in India.

Prof. Singh inaugurated his presentation by highlighting the background and history of women’s movements in India, the origin of cyberfeminism, digital feminism and hashtivism (a portmanteau of activism involving the use of hashtags on social media platforms). Throwing light upon the global origin of the #MeToo Movement, he further discussed its subsequent transgression and appropriation in culture-specific contexts and how it spiralled into a global movement spreading across different continents and countries through diverse media platforms. He mentioned how the campaign reached India in October 2017 in its first phase, when a Dalit law student had shared a crowdsourced list of male sexual predators in South-Asian academic spaces on the social networking site Meta (formerly Facebook). The list was based on the testimonies of multiple survivors of sexual harassment and assault. This led to the hosting of debates, dialogues, and discussions on gender-based violence in academic spaces, empowering many women to share their stories of trauma, pain, and survival thereby leading to formation of digital and physical consciousness-raising spaces fostered on the bond of collective sisterhood. The second phase of the movement foregrounded the sexual assault narratives of actresses in the Indian entertainment industry.

The major research question that Prof. Singh’s paper aimed at addressing was: How do internal contradictions and resistances amongst feminists along with external forces such as right wing groups and men’s rights activists/movement challenge the pathways of contemporary Indian feminist movements and thinking in the context of  the #MeToo Movement? A self-reflexive feminist lens (Srimati Basu) from the self-conscious identity of a male feminist subject (Nivedita Menon) was the adopted research methodology. The #MeToo movement, like any significant women’s movement, was not immune to challenges, threats, backlash (Susan Faludi) and protests. According to Faludi, the aim of the backlash is to “push women back into their acceptable roles”, thereby eroding the progress of  women’s movements. The #MeToo movement has mostly been criticised as an elitist movement excluding many sections of women on demographic grounds as well (Pain, 2020).

The major counter-narrative discourse against the #MeToo campaign in India was provided by the sloganeering and hashtivism associated with the #MenToo movement, which had initially started as a social media campaign on a positive note to raise awareness against the sexual harassment experienced by men, but later shifted to refuting and undermining the historical cause of the former. Through the use of ICT tools, Prof. Singh highlighted a few anti-feminist responses and protests against the #MeToo campaign in India by presenting a few viral tweets on the social networking platform X (formerly Twitter).

He concluded his presentation by evoking Srimati Basu’s self-reflexive feminist perspective to critique the feminist movements in India by analysing the cracks and fissures which lead to the initiation of a movement to fight for the rights of the already privileged sections of society while delineating the #MeToo Movement. He further mentioned how a holistic self-critical lens may be adopted by feminist activists and academics to retain the essential self-reflexivity of feminism which is on the verge of being disparaged in this postcolonial era. He also highlighted how R.W  Connell’s concept of crisis tendency as an important method of identifying disruptions and recommended avenues for transforming relations between and within genders in the societal context may also be used to redefine and rethink the complicit and hegemonic masculinities associated with the Men’s Rights Activists. The final resolution would be to assess and trace common grounds in tandem with feminists in order to address the issues concerning all genders along with a reimplementation and reintervention of major Indian laws.

The session was a great success and a learning experience on interdisciplinarity of gender issues, and women’s questions. It was attended by not only the PG students but also a few UG students of the department who engaged in a stimulating discussion with Prof. Gaurav Singh during the Q&A session. The discussion centred around a strategic need of immediate legal reintervention and gender mainstreaming policy reforms to address the issues associated with false cases of sexual assault and harassment, feminist and gender sensitisation, among others.

Peer seminar continues to be a unique endeavour by the Department of English in order to encourage a promising atmosphere for research and the exchange of scholarly ideas. It serves to enrich faculty members and students alike through the facilitation of critical thinking and dialogue. The PG semester 3 students are included in the Peer Seminars as an attempt to encourage research aptitude among them and introduce them to research methodology.