Int J Polit Cult Soc (2016) 29:289306

DOI 10.1007/s10767-016-9226-6

Womens Movements in the Global South: Towards

a Scalar Analysis
Srila Roy 1

Published online: 15 June 2016

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Abstract This article explores the politics and ethics of scale in reading womens
movements in the Global Southhow they have always been simultaneousy regional,
national and transnational in scale (materially if not imaginatively) and read through
the twin lens of the global and the local. The first part of the essay underscores the
constitutive internationalism in the history of feminism. From the second wave of
the womens liberation movement, attempts at recognizing the internationalism in
global feminism have poorly served feminists in the third world. In more recent
times, transnationalization has become the dominant signifier of womens movements
with renewed attempts at capturing the shifting scales of feminist politics in transnational feminism. Recent processes of transnationalization and NGOization bespeak
an ontology of relatedness and a scalar epistemology as has been mobilized in recent
writings in postcolonial sociology. The second part of the essay uses the mass protests
around the rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in 2012 as a way of thinking
through the changing scales and sites of contemporary feminist protest in the Global
South. I use the spatial concept of the assemblage to emphasize the multi-scalar
dimensions of this protest especially through the determining influence of the media.
Such a protest assemblage produced endless possibilities of mobilization in the name
of women but not always in clearly recognizable feminist ways.
Keywords Feminism . Gender . Womens movements . Assemblage . Scalar epistemology . India

* Srila Roy
Srila.Roy@wits.ac.za

Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue Braamfontein 2000,
Johannesburg, South Africa

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Introduction
The brutal gang rape and murder of 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi in December
2012 has come to constitute a critical event in India (Roy 2014).1 This is largely ascribable to
the unprecedented public protests against sexual violence that the event propelled, at the hands
of politically unorganized and unaffiliated young people, rightly described as an otherwise
indifferent middle-class youth (Dutta and Sircar 2013, p. 294). The protests transformed the
judicial and discursive landscape by forcing the state to respond and by placing into the
mainstream the endemic nature of sexual violence that had hitherto functioned as a public
secret in India, known but not spoken of (Baxi 2014). They were accompanied by unusually
high levels of international media interest, including online petitions signed by international
human rights organizations, making Pandeys rape, over akin acts of violence, an international
cause (Roychowdhury 2013).
The 2012 Delhi protests are one critical and representative moment in a changing landscape
of protest in the name of women in India with significant global currency, insofar as they
travelled farther than other events of a similar nature. Operating, then, on a national as well as a
global scale and drawing in new political actors like middle-class youth and men, such a
landscape demands an analysis that is able to capture the spatial and scalar expansion of
feminist politics. But the 2012 Delhi protests were not straightforwardly new with respect to
their scale and potential to travel. Transnational feminist scholarship has by now firmly
established the manner in which, across the North and the South, categories of race and gender
and feminist theories and politics are constituted in and through connected historical processes,
whether of colonialism or globalization. As I explain in the first part of this essay, transnational
feminist scholarship has situated and theorized womens movements as constituted through
national and supranational processes. Contemporary instances of mobilizations in the name of
womensuch as the 2012 Delhi proteststoo demand a transnational feminist lens given
their border-crossing character. Viewed through what Fernandes (2013) calls the broadest
geographic unitthe transnationalhistorical and current moments of feminist protest trouble
the scalar divisions of conventional scholarship (Tambe 2010) such as the public and the
private, the local and the global and the centre and the periphery.
In this essay, I unpack the scalar implications of transnational feminist perspectives by
prioritizing the politics and ethics of scale in reading womens movements in the Global South,
particularly the Indian womens movement (hereafter, IWM). The first part of the essay draws
on feminist scholarship that (re)historicizes feminism and womens movements in relational
terms. It does so by foregrounding how womens movements have always been simultaneously national and global (materially if not always imaginatively), constituted by interconnected
histories of colonialism and imperialism and the uneven effects of development, globalization
and neoliberalism in both the periphery and the metropole. Such an analysis hinges on
multiplicities and connections that decentre hegemonic versions of feminism at varying scales,
be they national, subnational, regional or global.
The second part of the essay turns to the changing scales and sites of the IWM as
epitomized in the mass protests around the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey. These
protests embody the widespread dispersal and diffusion of feminism in India today away from
1

The 23-year-old physiotherapy student died battling injuries including partial disembowelment inflicted by six
men aboard a private, off-duty bus, including the bus driver. A male friend and Jyoti were taking the bus home
after watching Life of Pi at the cinema in a popular neighbourhood of the city of Delhi.

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its traditional stronghold of the IWM.2 I use the spatial concept of the assemblage to emphasize
this sense of dispersal and diffusion given the multi-scalar dimensions of the protests,
especially through the determining influence of the media. Such a protest assemblage
(Knudsen and Stage 2014) produced endless possibilities of mobilization in the name of
women, but not always in clearly recognizably feminist ways. Hegemonic feminist voices
jostled with counter-hegemonic or even non-feminist ones producing a sense of crisis amongst
metropolitan feminist activists as to what constitutes feminism in the Indian context. Against
this sense of anxiety, I argue in the conclusion that the disaggregation of Indian feminism
decentres dominant metropolitan narratives bringing to global focus existing tensions and nonmetropolitan minority feminist voices that existand have always existedwithin the nationstate. My reading of the 2012 anti-rape protests rests on media reportage and some published
commentaries analyzing the protests, analytically enabled by the transnational feminist toolbox that I detail in the first part of the essay.

From Southern to Connected Theories of Gender

These kinds of tensions and multiplicities within Southern feminisms cannot be discerned from
sociological research on gender and feminism that remains beholden to Eurocentric models.
Raewyn Connell is the best example of recent attempts to critique such models and to develop
a genuinely Southern theory with respect to sociology more generally and the sociology of
gender in particular. In her many writings on Southern Theory (see for example 2014a, c),
Connell argues that metropolitan theoretical frameworks have to be critiqued, radically
rethought and transformed; they cannot just be applied from the metropole to the periphery.
She proposes the resources of decolonial thought, Southern theory, indigenous knowledge
and postcolonial thought (Connell 2014b, p. 555) in order to do so. But the kind of solution to
the problem of Eurocentrism in the sociology of gender that she provides ends up suffering
from the same limitations that have been noted of her Southern theory more generally: first,
that it treats the North and the South, the metropole and the periphery and the colonial and
postcolonial as bounded entities that are independent of each other. Consequently, the picture
that emerges is that of local feminist epistemologies existing in a Southern vacuum and,
correspondingly, of Northern feminist scholarship as untouched by historical processes of
colonialism and their continuing global implications. As Isaac Reed (2013) notes in his
critique, Connell appears to separate traditions and concepts from each other into different
intellectual silos. Gurminder Bhambras (2014) idea of connected sociologies shows us
instead the interconnections between the North and South given the conjoint histories of
colonialism and imperialism and asks how sociological thought could be differently conceptualized if we took seriously global historical interconnections.
Secondly, Connells intervention tries to counter Northern epistemological privilege with
the authentic voices of a few individuals located inand assumed to speak forthe South.
As many critics have noted (see Ray 2013; Reed 2013 and other interventions of Decentering
Social Theory), this exercise smacks of romanticizing Southern theory and theorists simply by
2

The term feminism is contested in India as it is in most postcolonial countries where it becomes an easy
signifier of Westernization and elitism. For a recent overview, see Dave (2012) who also shows how this
distancing from accusations of Westernization/elitism has historically translated into the IWMs privileging of
class over sexuality.

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virtue of their alterity. There is also little interrogation as to why the scholarly work that she
upholds as emblematic of a Southern theory of gender has not ever travelled to curricula in
Northern-based universities. What might be the circuits of marginalization at work here, and
how might they be challenged and changed? Instead of upholding individual authors as
constitutive of Southern theory posed in binary terms from their Northern counterparts,
might it not be more productive to reconstruct, again taking from Bhambras idea of connected sociologies, core concepts like gender and sexuality from a longue dure of the global
circulation of feminist ideas and mobilizations?
Like Bhambra, feminist scholars adopting a transnational and postcolonial perspective have
uncovered complex, albeit uneven, linkages in the production and circulation of feminist
thought, knowledge and political imaginaries, thus emphasising subnational and crossnational
cultural formations (Tambe 2010). They have rewritten the history of feminism as a set of
circulating ideas (Tambe 2010) in ways that confound easy divides between the global and the
local, the centre and the periphery and the self and other. The picture that emerges is one of the
multiple and diverse feminisms whose local identity varies along differential scales of power
and powerlessness in ways that an easy postulation of the local-global binary is unable to
capture. Curiously, Connell does not seem sufficiently aware of this long tradition of transnational feminist writing and activism given that she writes: Ashwini Tambe (2010) has recently
offered an intriguing model of Btransnational feminist studies^ that contests the metropolecentred narrative of development, the homogenizing vision of essentialist global feminism, and
even the kind of metropole/periphery model used in this article.
Indeed, a range of feminist scholars from Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994) to
Amanda Lock Swarr and Richa Nagar (2010) have presented transnational feminism as a
conceptual and political advance over international feminism and global feminism, both
of which reproduce power along Eurocentric lines by centering the (European) nationstate and universalizing (European) womens experience (see also Alexander and
Mohanty 1997). Transnational feminism instead attends to (a) differences rather than
commonalities amongst women while (b) situating those differences and inequalities in
historical formations and (globalizing) flows that are cross-cultural and cross- or even
post-national. Women are, in other words, different but inhabit an interconnected and
interdependent world riveted with clear asymmetries of power and privilege. Distance
and proximity are together mobilized with difference and relatedness as analytical,
political and pedagogical lenses (see also Mohanty 2003). It is no coincidence that
prominent transnational feminist perspectives, like that of Grewal and Kaplan (1994),
draw on Anglo-American black feminists, given an understanding of interconnected
histories, however differently experienced in different parts of the world and by different
groups.
Transnational feminism is ultimately set apart by its practices which can foster South-South
feminist dialogues and collaborations as opposed to privileging Northern feminist agendas and
perspectives. Mary John (1999) emphasizes such a possibility in the name of a new feminist
internationalism under globalization, even as she notes tensions within feminisms of the Global
South. These stem not just from the politics of location (Latin America vs. Asia) but also from
internal asymmetries of power such as caste in India, an important point to which I will return.
Implicit in these efforts is the attempt to move beyond nation-centric visions of the world (cf.
Fernandes 2013) or the tendency to think of the local as being contained within the national and
defined in nationalist terms, an analytic perspective that has been recently theorized and
criticized as methodological nationalism (Chernilo 2006; see also Wolf 1982).

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These dimensions of historical and contemporary womens and feminist struggles are
marginalized in Connells analysis primarily because it operates along one scale alone, that
of the North and the South, and thereby, erases from view important interrelations as well as
tensions occurring at variousupwards, downwards and sidewardsscales. Her response to
Northern epistemological domination (in the production of feminist and social theory more
generally) ends up reproducing many of the things she warns against: a reproduction of the
North-South binary that presumes that knowledge and power flow unidirectionally from one to
the other, a flattening of the diversity of womens struggles, and the risk of replicating both
relativism and homogenization by privileging the voices of a few hand-picked Southern
scholars. Instead, I draw in this essay on the resources of transnational feminism as a set of
analytic tools that emphasize multiplicity, fluidity and relationality emerging from different
spatialities in political practice (as opposed to limiting politics to one domain of social action/
life) that can potentially expand what we understand to be feminist knowledge, politics and
identity beyond North-centric epistemic projects (cf. Fernandes 2013).

Spatial and Scalar Dimensions of Womens Movements

Scale is an implicit theme of transnational feminist analyses. Scalar and spatial investigations
of womens movements do not merely reflect the truism that womens movements are very
much the product of both local and global forces (Basu 2010) but think of the local and the
global as relational concepts, as continuously produced in and through an active and
constitutive relationship to each other (Mohanty 2003; Go 2013). While globalization has
made the transnationalized nature of feminism and womens movements more obvious, there
is an older history to the constitutive internationalism of feminism as a social movement. This
is in spite of the centrality of a hegemonic view in which feminism is spatially contained in
Europe and temporally bound to particular time periods and as occurring in waves of change
(Dean 2013).3
The history of colonialism proves critical here: both, in terms of overturning this wave
model that has rendered commonsensical the idea of feminism as originating in the West and
emanating from there to the rest of the globe (in a diffusionist model that is common to
theorizations of modernity; Bhambra 2007) and in terms of foregrounding relations across
space. So much so that it has become common in new critical womens historiography to insist
that, like gender, the category of feminism itself emerged from the historical context of
modern European colonialism and anti-colonial struggles, and that therefore histories of
feminism must engage with its imperial origins as well as its national(ist) legacies (Burton
1999).
Linkages between womens movements across the North-South divide and, more specifically, the imperial metropoles and their colonial peripheries have a long and complex history.
Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, feminist campaigns in the West (like The Votes
for Women in Britain) were necessarily shaped by their alliances with women elsewhere in the
world, and deliberate attempts were madethrough international conferences and congresses
over particular causes like the Womens International League for Peace and Freedomto build

I am referring here to the wave model of historicizing the womens liberation movement in the West in terms
of the first, second and third wave.

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alliances between women in the centre of power and at its peripheries, namely in the colonies.
Dominated by European women who spoke a language of universalism while excluding
women from the colonies, such feminist solidarity efforts became another mode of legitimizing
imperial authority (Burton 1994; see also Midgley 1998). Women from the colonies who
supported nationalism back home and global calls for gender equality resisted their silencing in
the name of international sisterhood (Sinha 2006).
But well into the 1970s, attempts to speak on behalf of all women in calls for an
international or global sisterhood were plagued with similar problemsof Eurocentrism,
imperialism and racism. Amos and Parmar (1984) made the links between the imperial
feminism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and feminist activism of the 1970s
and 1980s clear in their scathing critique of second wave feminism in Britain by arguing that
both render a particular tradition of white, Eurocentric and Western feminism as the only
legitimate feminism (see also Mohanty 1984). Works like Robin Morgans (1984) Sisterhood
is Global were unable to appreciate the local contexts in which womens movements emerge
and flourish, a task that Basu (n.d.) set out to fulfill in documenting the challenge of local
feminisms to macro understandings of womens movements that ignored postcolonial particularities (such as the influence of nationalism and the state on their nature and functioning).
Basu (n.d.) knowingly called for this attention to local feminisms at a time in which the
global was ascendant over the local in defining the character of feminism, at the time of the
1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the culmination of a
series of UN sponsored conferences that began in 1975. For many commentators, these
conferences provided the material conditions for the evolution of a framework of transnational
feminism, for building, in other words, genuine solidarity, collaboration and exchange especially amongst womens activists from the Global South.
Post Beijinga common mode of temporalizing the recent history of global feminism in the Southit becomes difficult, Basu (n.d) notes, to say whether, in fact,
Northern feminism continued to dominate Southern-based womens movements. On the
contrary and in a sharp departure from the past trends, Southern-based feminist organizations came to play a major role in defining the agenda of global feminism and
transnationalizing particular issues like violence against women. Beijing has come to
acquire particular significance in documenting the recent history of womens movements
in the postcolonial world. It not only signalled a global recognition of womens movementsand thereby attested, on an international scale, to their coming of agebut also
the shifting terrain of feminist organizing at the local and domestic level. These shifting
scales of feminist protestin terms of construal, scope and point of address (the
international community and not just the nation-state)point to a larger process of
transnationalization that has crystallized in the form of an aid chain centred on international funding and NGOs. Post Beijing, NGOs have emerged as the paramount form of
representing womens interests, assumed to be better than the nation-state that has
historically underrepresented women and gender interests in the postcolonial period
(notwithstanding elaborate formal commitments to equality) (see especially Alvarez
1999, 2009). Suffice it to say that the transnationalization and NGOization of womens
movements in the South bespeaks an ontology of relatedness (a relational ontology, Go
2013) that makes it difficult to posit the local, nation, home and self as stable categories
outside of the global and transnational. It also evokes what Stephen Legg calls a scalar
epistemology that forces attention back to the specific, quotidian effects of processes
which are global in scope (Legg 2010, p. 69).

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With these spatial and scalar considerations in mind, I now turn to a womens movement
that has been historically framed in national and nationalist terms, the Indian womens
movement. The national framing of this movement is not only less sustainable in the face of
its recent transnationalization but also with respect to the challenges it faces from minority
feminisms that exist within the nation-state especially dalit and queer feminisms (see Menon
2008 for overview). The cleavages amongst metropolitan feminists alone that erupted after the
screening of a documentary film on Jyoti Singh Pandey (discussed below) led Nivedita Menon
(2015) to remark on the deeply contested terrain that we call feminism in India. Analyses of
the IWM that consider these scalar relations and complexities are better placed than uniscalar
or flat epistemologies and methods as they emphasize rather than suppress issues of
diversity, conflict and multiplicity within categories (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, p. 3).

The Indian Womens Movement: Fields of Protest?

In one of the few studies of womens movements in post-independence India, Raka Ray
(1999) employed the Bourdieusian analytic of field to move beyond conceptualizations of
movements as fixed entities that exist in a political or analytic vacuum. Instead, she uncovered
the larger political culture or field within which womens movements are situated and which
varyingly determine their mode of organizing, the issues around which they mobilize and
activist identities. Even the most autonomous of social movements are then shaped by the
cultural factors of the wider fields in which they are embedded and to which they respond.
Movement actors in turn do not act autonomously but relationally. Notwithstanding Rays
commitment to move beyond standard classical and macro level understandings of womens
movements at the cost of their local character and evolution, they appear, in her account, as
being internally homogenous, relatively stable and unified things, albeit ones that are
moulded and changed by the external environment in which they are rooted and to which
they ultimately remain beholden.
Such an ontology of stability, internal coherency and containment does not take us far in
understanding the changed terrain of the IWM in the decade of the 1990sthe decade of
globalization, privatization and the opening up of the Indian economy or (neo)liberalisation.4
Rays study in fact ends at a temporal moment when the impact of economic liberalization
begins to be felt. What John (1999) identifies as a watershed decade in the IWM radically
transforms the terrain of feminist mobilization that Ray studies, namely, one that is populated
by politically affiliated or autonomous womens organizations.
Feminist struggles in the period of economic liberalization can be broadly characterized in
terms of deterritorialization, dispersal and diversity; characterizations that together emphasize
the scalar expansion of the IWM from the national to the global owing to the twin processes of
transnationalization and NGOization. By transnationalization, I mean the availability of
external, particularly foreign funds for developmental work.5 The transnationalization of the
IWM is especially significant given the imbrication of this particular social movement in

In the Indian context, neoliberalism refers to those reforms that were inauguratedalbeit stealthily and
unevenlyfrom 1991 onwards as a response to the fiscal crisis of the state and in accordance with elite
preferences and interests (Corbridge and Harriss 2000).
5
While such an aid chain has a longer, post-war history, it is traceable in the Indian context to the liberalization
of the Indian economy in 1991.

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histories of colonialism and nationalism, and the manner in which, well into the postcolonial
period, the nation-state served as its primary point of address. 6 The autonomous IWM
worked solidly within the parameters set by the newly independent nation-state on recognizable constituencies of poor, grassroots women and with the nation-state as its main source of
redress. Deterritorialization thus entails the literal and imaginative severing of feminism from
the episteme of the nation-state (John 2014).
NGOization is a key signifier of the deterritorialization and expansion of the boundaries of
feminism.7 This is insofar as they delink the pursuit of feminist projects from nationalist
frames through aid chains which enable the flows of funds and development apparatuses
across national boundaries. While working domestically, NGOs are more beholden to transnational agendas given their dependence on donor funds. The rise of NGOs in the feminist
field in India has meant that feminism is no longer spatially and ideologically contained in
the progressive and left-leaning activity of autonomous or politically affiliated womens
groups of the pre-liberalization period, the subjects of Rays study. NGOs have played a key
role in the organizational transformation of Indian feminism from autonomous feminist
formations in the 1970s to transnationalized and professionalized NGOs that provide a range
of services on behalf of and for women and are not necessarily populated by individuals with
political histories of even proclivities. As detailed elsewhere (Roy 2015), NGOization in the
Indian context is the locus of several anxieties bringing the IWM to a critical juncture (Dave
2012, p. 122) insofar as the movement has scaled up precisely at a time of the further
feminization of poverty under (neo)liberalization. Secondly, the donor-dependency of NGOs
has meant a shift in the scale of interventionto the global from and at the cost of the
grassroots. And finally, NGOization signifies the decentralization of the IWM in ways that a
precise demarcating of the boundaries of Indian feminism as a social movement from that of
NGOs is not always possible.
NGOs are merely onethough highly significantsite upon which Indian feminisms
dispersal can be marked with the virtual, of late, constituting another key locus of feminist
imagining and intervention. The deterritorialization and dispersal of feminist struggles in the
post-liberalization period has thus been accompanied by their re-territorialization in the new
spaces made possible by Indias globalization such as the media, cyberspace, the market,
besides, of course, the institutional forms created by the neoliberal state and international
development. These new spatialities of feminism have resulted in the broadening of concerns
and strategiesaway from a primarily state-centric legal feminism (see Roy 2015)and have
been able to hail a variety of gendered subjects, such as the young middle-class women and
men who took to the streets in Delhi in 2012. There is however a recent history to middle-class
mobilizations around womens rights; one that can be traced to the early 2000s in urban India.
These include self-consciously feminist protests such as the Pink Chaddi or Pink Panty
campaign, the Slutwalk marches and innovative online campaigns around womens public
safety (such as Blank Noise), all of which galvanized urban, middle-class and upper-caste
women and men largely through the use of social media. In a sharp break from an earlier
6
The IWMs prioritization of the state and legal reform over other types of political intervention has been subject
of much discussion and critique. See Sunder Rajan (2003) for overview.
7
NGOization is employed by feminists and leftists alike as an umbrella term to capture the many changes and
transformations that have taken place in the IWM in terms of its form, functioning and the wider political context
in which it exists. Coinciding with economic liberalization and the withdrawal of state funding from key areas,
NGOs stepped in to deliverand not merely demanddevelopment. See Roy (2015) for overview of these
debates.

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discourse on womens vulnerability to violence in the public sphere, these recent forms of
mobilization have generated public debate on womens sexuality not in terms of violence and
victimization alone, but also with respect to sexual freedom, pleasure and agency.8 Organizationally, they are mostly contingent, provisional and still-evolving feminist formations that are
yet to be consolidated into a coherent framework or field such that their outcomes cannot be
anticipated in advance.
These mobilizations and especially the 2012 anti-rape protests are emblematic of just how
porous the boundaries of Indian feminism have become. Such a heterogeneous and shifting
activist landscape makes it difficult to conceptually clarify what or who a feminist is and
what canor cannotbe counted as feminist knowledge and practice. This is especially true
when we compare the manner in which todays feminist formations exceed national boundaries and encompass a wider range of strategies, actors, discourse and practices than did the
feminist objects of Rays study. Given this variegated and changing field of protest, is there
any analytical or political purchase in thinking of feminism as a field or as a movement at all?

Characterizing the Protest Assemblage

The 2012 anti-rape protests defy the labels of field and movement given their highly
contingent, unstable, internally diverse and non-homogeneous nature. As I detail in this
section, the protests were constituted by a multiplicity of agents, a large section of whom
had no history of political mobilization, whose actions were disaggregated across different
spaces and sites (the street/the web), and operated on multiple scales (metropolitan/national/
global) and even in terms of different temporal registers such as the immediate demand to
hang the rapists versus the long-term demand for structural change.
To this extent, they might be more productively understood as an assemblage that Deleuze
describes as a multiplicity made up of heterogeneous terms with its only unity existing in a
contingent sense of alliance and co-functioning (Bignall and Patton 2010). The concept of
assemblage forces the researcher to conceptually move from structures to relationships, from
temporal stability to uncertain periods of emergence and heterogeneous multiplicities, resisting
the siren call of final or stable states, which are the foundations of classical social theory (Legg
2009, p. 238). Such a spatial concept is being increasingly employed to describe social and
political formations in ways that the usual descriptors of national, local, transnational and
global cannot (Ong 2006; Sassen 2006). Tormey (2013), for instance, writes of the difficulty in
calling the anti-capitalist movement a movement, given that it functions as an Bassemblage^
of different currents of thought, different groups and organizations, some allied to the interests
of the nation-state or regional agendas, others genuinely global in scope and orientation.
Knudsen and Stage (2014) use protest assemblage to describe how internet technologies
mediate anti-state protests in contemporary Iran in ways that can be both transgressive and
repressive. Such high levels of contingency and indeterminacy cannot be captured or explained
by concepts that are tied to an ontology of stable foundational structures and ultimately

This turn to sexuality in the Indian context has to be located in the broader and very substantial challenges put
forth by sexual subalternssex workers, sexual minorities and members of the queer movementto the
mainstream IWM that traditionally shied away from the issue of sex, if not being openly hostile to lesbian
women and sex workers (see, for overview, Narrain and Bhan 2005 and Menon 2008).

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produce social movements as the constant while accounting for variations in different fields. In
contrast, there is no constant in an assemblage, but variation to variation (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987).
Field, in Ray (pace Bourdieu), does the work of containment in analytically carving out a
specific socio-political space in which womens movements exist and function as fairly stable,
structured albeit changing and not pre-given entities. Instead, I use the framework of assemblage with the explicit intention of undoing this sense of containment and emphasizing,
instead, the seepage of the IWM from its ideologically prescribed boundaries and its nationally
determined spatiality in the post-liberalization period. I also use the assemblage model to
capture the internally non-uniform and heterogeneous nature of feminist formations today,
exemplified by the 2012 anti-rape protests. According to Aradhana Sharma (2008), also
writing about contemporary feminist mobilizations in India, an assemblage is made up of
heterogeneous elements that are not necessarily internally coherent but are brought together for
specific strategic ends. While all social movements and mass protests can be characterized by
a degree of heterogeneity, what makes the 2012 protests markedly different from the history of
feminist struggles in India is the inability to reduce them to a singular or coherent ideological
or discursive formation, even in the name of feminism.
What is well known of the mass movement that followed the Delhi rape was that it was
comprised of different and divergent publics. They represented vastly different currents of
thought to the extent that some saw the state as the singular oppressor of women while others
looked upon it as a protector and saviour. Indeed, many self-identified Indian feminist activists
recoiled with horror at the calls for chemical castration and death of rapists that were heard on
the streets of the capital and were louder than the more progressive calls for azadi, the
unconditional freedom for all women.9 While the protests might have been aimed at some
loose sense of justice on behalf of a rape victim, the affective articulation of this demand
whether through empathy, loss, rage or fearwas not consistent or unified. Consequently, and
departing from previous protests in the name of women or sexual violence, there was no
unified vision of how to combat Indias rape culture, given the disparate understandings of
rape as injury, harm and crime. Ultimately, the protests cannot be reduced to the divergent
publics and ideologies that constituted itthey were something more. The heterogeneous,
shifting, highly conjunctural, evolving and excessive nature of such a protest made it impossible to know its outcome in advance; one that could not, moreover, be reduced to the agency
of the actors involved or to their intentions.
The media, both old and new, played a key role in shaping the manner in which this protest
assemblage came together and transformed in its unfolding and even aftermath, as I note
further below. This is not to say that the media or the Internet created the 2012 protests but that
they would look rather different without the intervention of the media and communication
technologies (especially if we compare this protest to older moments of protesting violence
against women in India; cf. Shandilya 2015). Not only did the media environment shape and
transform Jyotis story as it travelledfrom being about a local rape victim to making Jyoti a
9
Two opposing camps have since been read into the vocabulary of the 2012 protests: one that focused on
justice as retribution, demanding the death penalty and even chemical castration of rapists (castration being an
entirely new addition to the cause of gender justice in India), and the other that demanded widespread and
structural reform based on enhancing womens freedom, rather than further constraining it in the name of
protection. Anupama Roy (2014) has designated these camps as representing, on the one hand, the masculinist/
patriarchal izzat or honour strand of the 2012 protests and, on the other hand, the feminist azadi or freedom
strand.

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global iconbut it also constituted and channelled the outpouring of affective responses to
Jyoti in particular ways. Given the disproportionate attention that was given to the cries of
death and castration on the 24/7 news channels, for instance, it is not surprising that a
retributive public (Baxi 2012) came to represent much of the face of the 2012 protests.
The states punitive and carceral response to Jyotis rape and murder, exemplified in the
deployment of the death penalty as the mode of abating violence against women, can be traced
to the demands of such a public, suggesting that mediatized affective responses fed into
concrete forms of redressal. In sum, affective responses to this critical event were structured
by the media in ways that closely aligned the protests, at the domestic level, to the concerns of
the securocratic state (Kapur 2013) and, at the international level, to the global communitys
Orientalist readings of Indias rape problem.
In the afterlife of the protests, its global significance has become even more apparent, but
not always in straightforwardly Orientalist or Eurocentric ways. In the mainstream media,
NGO and academic discussions, feminists from other parts of the world have contrasted the
quietism that surrounds sexual violence there with the national outrage around it in India. In
these discussions, India becomes the benchmark against which mobilizing around sexual
violence in other parts of the worldfor instance, South Africa but also the United States
comes to be measured, rather than simply being the index of non-Western inferiority
(Roychowdhury 2013). In comparing the scales of protest around sexual violence in the US
and India, Krupa Shandilya (2015), for instance, writes: in viewing the Delhi case through a
global lens we see that, contrary to popular opinion in the West which painted the Delhi rape as
yet another instance of the backward, regressive East, the Delhi case swiftly ignited a robust
movement that galvanized a nation to protest against sexual assault.
It appears, then, that the indeterminate nature of the protest assemblage around Jyotis gang
rape produced a transnational circulation of multiple meanings, some of which reproduced
Orientalist framings of saving Third World women while others inverted these power
relations in unexpected ways. It produced what Leela Fernandes (2013) calls transnational
knowledge about violence against womenknowledge that is produced in a certain context
that ends up having a differential impact in another context owing to its transnational
circulation. The documentary Indias Daughter that I now turn to was one of the most directed
attempts at producing knowledge around the Delhi rape and ended up being a transnational
object, par excellence, consumed by global publics over local elites who were prevented from
doing so by their government and feminists alike. In reflecting on the controversy that
surrounding the documentary and its ban in India, I underscorein this final sectionthe
unexpected moments of critique and solidarity that are made possible by particular
conjunctural assemblages.

Feminist Fault Lines Around Indias Daughter

Leslie Udwins BBC documentary of Jyoti Singh Pandey, Indias Daughter (Udwin 2015), that
showcased interviews with Pandeys parents and, most controversially, one of the men
convicted of the crime, Mukesh Singh (whose case was then and is still pending appeal),
was quickly banned by the Government of India for being offensive towards women. More
interestingly, the controversy surrounding the film and the ban brought to the fore sharp differences
within the IWM over the issue of representing sexual violence, its subjects and its perpetrators
in a country like India and through the lens of an English female filmmaker (herself a rape

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survivor). Amidst angry dismissals of the film as Orientalist for patronizing Indias daughters
(already framed by the title in patriarchal paternalist terms) and predictably linking rape to Third
World poverty, critique and censorship converged on the unparalleled screen time the film affords
a convicted rapist. A group of influential Indian feminists called for restraint on the films release
initially on the grounds that Mukeshs misogynistic statements comprised hate speech against
women while later arguing for the rights of the accused to a fair trial. The counter critiques to this
feminist position, that coalesced around a number of concerns relating to freedom of speech,
mediatized representations of sexual violence, and the possible influence of the media on legal
process, identified the real danger of how the feminist demand for restraint ultimately fed into the
Indian governments reactionary move to ban the film; a move that was more about international
image building than one of upholding womens rights.
Not only, then, did the film create a new assemblage of discourses, meanings, practices and
affects around violence against women, but the Indian governments attempt to censor it
created new capacities of protests even within the media. The popular private news broadcast
channel NDTV telecast a tribute to Indias Daughter in the form of blanking its screen for a
full hour, thus making the ban [] the object of protest (Baxi 2015). A final moment in this
new assemblage of meanings around Jyoti came in the form of the mass lynching of a man
accused of rape in Dimpaur in Nagaland, an economically marginalized Indian state in the
north east of the country. This event was linked, by metropolitan feminists and the media alike,
to the incitement to avenge sexual violence that both the 2012 protests and the controversy
around Indias Daughter had constituted. Dimapur is another key moment in the journey
through which Jyoti has travelled and been transformed in the aftermath of the Delhi gang
rapein protesting publics that exceeded national frontiers, in digital and broadcast media, in
its filmic rendition for a global audience and in the silencing of this testimony by national
elites, including metropolitan feminists. In tracing this journey, we see how a singular event is
transformed and has limitless capacities to assemble meaning, affect and action.
Let me end with a final point that goes back to the feminist fault lines that I began with:
while the clamour of disagreements around the film remained limited to a group of influential
(largely Delhi-based) feminists, an important intervention was staged by dalit activists on their
online forum, Roundtable India. Karthik (2015) called out elite upper-caste feminist hypocrisy
in questioning the right of a Western woman to make a documentary on Indian women while
effectively maskingand thereby naturalizingtheir own privileged position in the Indian
context. In calling out these assumptions held by prominent left-wing feminists, Karthik
underscored the lack of solidarity across caste lines, given that anti-Westernism is perceived
in these circles as being radical while anti-brahminism is decried, he says, as identity
politics. He angrily asserted:
but in condemning western universality, who gave these members of an ultra-elite closed
group the right to condemn in the name of all brown women and men? If it was not for
the intervention of Bwhite imperialist capitalist patriarchy^ women of a particular low
caste in Tamil Nadu would not be allowed to cover their breasts. It was British
colonialist legislation that put an end to the barbaric practice of temple prostitution in
the state. All these moves were also fought for and welcomed by women of the
concerned castes. (RM 2015)
Karthiks critique needs to be read alongside the important reminder that dalit
feminists were some of the most vociferous critics of the publicity surrounding Jyotis
gang rape. Their critique was posed at two levels: one, emanating from their struggle

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to accrue any publicity, whether from old or new media, for routine acts of sexual
violence that serve to uphold caste hierarchies and second, for serving to further make
invisible their victimization to sexual violence in the face of the heightened visibility
of violence towards urban, aspirational, upper-caste women (and the consequent
framing of sexual violence itself in terms of public safety thus entirely obliterating
its caste-class dimensions). Their critique was not directed at media representations
alone but, as is explicitly the case in Karthiks rebuke, towards metropolitan feminists.
There is a long history of the manner in which mainstream metropolitan Indian
feminists have, much like their Western/imperialist sisters, eclipsed from view internal
asymmetries of power pertaining to caste-class and sexuality in speaking on behalf of
Indian woman. Consequently, the Hindu middle-class woman, Beverywoman^, has
become the de facto subject of Indian feminism, as Shandilya (2015, p. 465) writes
of the protests on behalf of Jyoti Singh Pandey. The upper-caste politics of metropolitan Indian feminists have been called out more and more in recent times, and dalit
feminist suspicion of the mainstream IWM has now come to be taken as a given
(Menon 2012).
Karthiks critique does more than attack Indian Brahmanism. It posits Western
imperialism as a historical antidote to its caste and gender hierarchies. Whether rightly
or wrongly, he juxtaposesand defendsWestern colonialism with caste-based
(sub)colonialisms in ways that radically shift the dominant registers of critique by
Indian feminists around gender and sexual violence. By shifting the scales of protest
from the colonial/global to the subcolonial/subnational, the dalit feminist position as
expressed here deeply fractures any claims by Indian feminists to speak on behalf of
Indian woman. In positing connections with the West, this critique also opens up the
possibility of building solidarity on the international scale and countering, thereby, the
power of internal elites. It is interesting to note that dalit feminist attempts to develop
a feminist voice of their own have drawn on black feminist politics in the US (Menon
2012).
A final instance of a dalit feminist intervention into the Delhi rape comes from the
rural womens newspaper, Khabar Lahariya (Waves of News; hereafter KL) which is
run by dalit women of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh with financial and
administrative support from a Delhi-based feminist NGO. KL is a significant instance
of the production of feminist theory at the margins in ways that deserve a paper of
their own. Suffice it to say that this instance of Southern feminist theory making does
not represent the interests and voices of those on the margin as cultural alterity nor
does it simply mimic metropolitan conceptualizations (Connell 2014a, p. 525). The
centre-margin model is, in fact, displaced by their representation of and negotiation
with the interplay with power in various levels of socio-political agendas (Grewal
and Kaplan 1994).
While still occupying a position at the periphery, KL speaks across boundaries and against
elites, which is made clear in Shandilyas analysis of KLs representation of the Delhi gang
rape as being qualitatively different from those of metropolitan feminists. Shandilya (2015,
483) further points to the global relations that this instance of local feminism enables:
days after the Delhi gang-rape, KL ran an article about rallies in Canada, thus
situating the readers of the collective [rural dalit women] within a global womens
movement. This reverse gaze from the bottom up suggests that one of the purposes

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of the newspaper is to educate dalit women about their location in the world, in order to
endorse their political mobilization but also to problematize the global feminist movements relationship to them. This newspaper, unlike the urban feminist movements,
posits a global analysis, in which sexual assault is seen as endemic to the world, in the
spirit of second-wave feminists, but it also contains a recognition that its redress must
arise from local espistemologies.
By placing the gang rape of a young student in Delhi in relation to acts of sexual violence
and protests in the North, dalit women journalists provincialize the North while rendering
unexceptional sexual violence in the South. They represent heterogeneous subjectivities,
critiques and tensions that end up being flattened by positions that uphold even as they
criticize a centre-periphery model.
Both the cases of dalit intervention into the Delhi gang rape and its representation in Indias
Daughter represent what Nicholls et al. (2013, p. 10) call scale-shifting strategies of political
activism or the manner in which collectivities continually reshape scalar relations in an
ongoing process of asserting and contesting power (Nicholls et al. 2013, p. 9). While
metropolitan Indian feminists posit the national as the scale upon which authentic politics is
carried out against the international as the domain of imperialist intervention, dalit responses
do otherwise. They problematize the idea that the national is the scale upon which authenticity,
representation and political solidarity can be built, given the kind of power relations that crisscross the national field and the marginalization that flows from it. Instead, they shift the scale at
which Jyoti Singh Pandeys gang rape is posited and interpreted and move beyond a simplistic
Northern-Southern binary to subnational and cross-cultural forms of interpretation that could
form the basis of a robust transnational feminist intervention into violence against women. Just
as marginal subjects have critiqued national elites and thereby decentred the national as the
main scale of political intervention, they have long fostered solidarity networks across and
beyond borders, as evidenced from the history of activist exchange between women of colour
in the North and Third World feminists in the South and, more recently, within the South.
These kinds of interrelations are poorly captured by modes of analysis that confine the sociopolitical to static scales of the centre and the periphery and the local and the global. A multiscalar reading of the 2012 protests that not only brings to the fore its exceptionality in terms of
organizing around sexual violence in highly spontaneous and indeterminate ways but also
places it on a global continuum of the violence against women eschews both the homogenization and the relativism that Connell worries about in her critique of Northern theory.

Conclusion
The history of womens movements in the Global South is an archive of how feminism has
travellednot from the imperial heartland to the colonial periphery as is invariably assumed
or, in an age of globalization, from global to local sites. Such linearity and ontological
fixedness is disrupted by the fact that feminism has always been implicated, as ideal and
practice, in the transnational flow of ideas, concepts and power relations, even as it has
crystalized in relation to highly specific concerns within particular local contexts. The
increased transnationalization of womens movements in recent years simply makes these
processes and dynamics more obvious even as it has not entirely displaced from view the two
default axes of our dominant frame of reference, namely, the West and the nation-state. Still,

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owing to critiques made by women of colour both within and outside of the North, it has
become impossible today to speak of gender in terms of women alone or to ignore the global
dimensions of gender relations or think of the local in terms of the national.
The 2012 Delhi protests decentred nationalist discourses on sexual violence by bringing
into play multiple and competing narratives and expanded, at the same time, understandings of
the political as informed by a range of local identities, transnational meaning-making around
women and violence, and the circulation, via internet technologies, of varied affects and
attachments. A scalar analysis of this critical event shows complex interactions at national,
regional, local and global levels that together produced the 2012 Delhi gang rape as a
transnational object forming the basis of endless knowledge-production around gender and
violence. A simple local-global model would not be able to capture or adequately represent the
complexity of these transnational connections and modes of meaning-making or, indeed, the
deep cleavages that came to mark this unprecedented moment of public consensus around
violence against women. I have found it useful to make sense of this moment as an assemblage
precisely to emphasize its unpredictable nature and indeterminate effects. The assemblage
model enables me to highlight the current dispersal and diffusion of feminism in India in ways
that related concepts like field do not. The essay also begins to hint at the some of the
emergent relationships between these heterogeneous elements, such as the unexpected possibilities of critique, struggle and solidarity around caste and gender.
The highly heterogeneous and indeterminate nature of the Delhi protest and its unfolding
aftermath has come to be considered highly contested and complicated. It has lead many
established metropolitan feminists to express anxiety and loss as to what counts as feminism.
Instead of considering such a protest assemblage as representing the loss of feminism in the
Indian context, I contend it to be its greatest strength: in undermining traditional power
structures, whether of the nation-state or of hegemonic metropolitan feminisms, and in
producing, at the same time, much more diverse, contested and multiple political responses
and identities (even if centred around a normative identity of woman). In the words of
Grewal and Kaplan (1994, p. 18): The issue of who counts as a feminist is much less
important than creating coalitions based on the practices that different women use in various
locations to counter the scattered hegemonies that affect their lives.
A scalar analysis can, then, foreground significant aspects of feminist protest that are
otherwise left out of homogenizing representations of womens movements and transnational alliances (Chowdhury 2011, p. 8). It firstly brings to the fore the highly
heterogeneous nature of such struggles and movements in the face of their inevitable
homogenization and essentialization when contrasted with the West (as per a NorthSouth binary employed by Connell). It tempers the tendency to over privilege imperial
power and influence or to presume that knowledge and power flow unidirectionally from
the North to the South. It represents, finally, a plurality of feminist voices in multilayered power relations that shape both the North-South as well as South-South contexts
(Chowdhury 2011, p. 7). Inter- as well as intra-movement tensions, as Chowdhury calls
them, also become more evident in a multi-scalar analysis against the tendency to
represent social movements, including womens movements, as unified wholes, containable in and as determined by fields of protests. Emerging from these constellations and
contestations of voices operating at various scales are also unexpected moments of
solidarity and new feminist epistemologies.
Rethinking feminism as a form of theory and praxis that circulates and travels (see Davis
and Evans 2013) does not simply disrupt a series of binaries that leave historical power

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relations and inequalities untouched, namely, the centre and the periphery, the local and
the global, the national and transnational and the self and other. It opens up the
possibility to develop imaginative and actual relationships of solidarity that neither
obfuscate nor remain paralyzed by those relations of difference, distance and inequality
within and through which feminism has always travelled and come to be situated. Such
activist relations have historically informed the production of feminist knowledge in the
best instantiation of knowledge as a form of power and practice (thereby undermining
conventional theory-activism binaries; Fernandes 2013). The relationship between power and knowledge that has been at the heart of transnational feminism should equally be
at heart of any attempt to retheorize gender, not from a Southern perspective that
exists in a vacuum, but in a highly complex and deeply interconnected and interdependent world.

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