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, where women’s sexuality is portrayed through a male gaze. Sexual images are produced and reproduced for mass consumption, turning sex and sexuality into commodities, normalising in many ways sexual harassment and violence in the real world. Given the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and sexual violence, women’s pushback in 2017 came in a digital form when #MeToo allowed for the naming and shaming of men on social media platforms. Many men in power who got away with the most egregious types of violence were on the
Even as #MeToo in India allowed so many to speak out, to name the sexual violations we face, to say enough is enough, it also raised serious dilemmas and concerns for us as feminists. I am referring here to concerns about how we as feminists were understanding and responding to issues of desire, power and consent as well as the ways in which we were engaging with each other around these issues. I am also referring more specifically to concerns that emerge from a queer feminist lens which make for a
Our current discussions on sexual harassment have become overdetermined by the #MeToo phenomenon. In India, Raya Sarkar’s List of sexual harassers in academia has defined the terms of recent feminist debates on sexual harassment in academia. 1 The List and the extensive social media discussions generated by it have shifted our gaze away from other developments in Indian higher education institutions, which in some ways anticipated and set the stage for the List. This chapter examines this ‘pre-history’ by
Introduction: #MeToo and the universe of Indian media The latter part of the twentieth century, synchronous with the women’s movement in India and the second wave of feminism in Western countries, saw the entry of large numbers of middle-class women into certain domains of work. The news media and the entertainment industry in India, for instance, have been domains of work occupied by ‘privileged’ women, in terms of class, caste and mobility. Similar to other forms of public engagement, women’s entry into
This introduction to the Film Studies special issue on Sex and the Cinema considers the special place of sex as an object of inquiry in film studies. Providing an overview of three major topic approaches and methodologies – (1) representation, spectatorship and identity politics; (2) the increasing scrutiny of pornography; and (3) new cinema history/media industries studies – this piece argues that the parameters of and changes to the research of sex, broadly defined, in film studies reflect the development of the field and discipline since the 1970s, including the increased focus on putatively ‘low’ cultural forms, on areas of film culture beyond representation and on methods beyond textual/formal analysis.
This article offers a reconstruction of the birth of Asia Argento’s star image, with specific reference to the Italian context. Through an analysis of the media discourses that circulated around the actress in the early phase of her career (from the end of the 1980s to the 2000s), we can trace the evolution of her star image from enfant prodige of Italian cinema, and youth icon, to that of the ‘anti-star’ who strongly divides public opinion, owing to her unruliness on and off-screen. The article concludes that her pre-existing association with sexual transgression inflected how her behaviour with Harvey Weinstein and Jimmy Bennett was interpreted in the Italian public sphere.
The avant garde is dead, or so the story goes for many leftists and capitalists alike. But so is postmodernism an outmoded paradigm in these times of neoliberal austerity, neocolonial militarism and ecological crisis. Rejecting ‘end of ideology’ post-politics, Vanguardia delves into the changing praxis of socially engaged art and theory in the age of the Capitalocene. Reflecting on the major events of the last decade, from anti-globalisation protest, Occupy Wall Street, the Maple Spring, Strike Debt and the Anthropocene, to the Black Lives Matter and MeToo campaigns, Vanguardia puts forward a radical leftist commitment to the revolutionary consciousness of avant-garde art and politics.
Intimacy and Injury maps the travels of the global #MeToo movement in India and South Africa. Both countries have shared the infamy of being labelled the world’s ‘rape capitals’, with high levels of everyday gender-based and sexual violence. At the same time, they boast long histories of resisting such violence and its location in wider cultures of patriarchy, settler colonialism and class and caste privilege. Northern voices and experiences have dominated debates on #MeToo, which, while originating in the US, had considerable traction elsewhere, including in the global south. In India, #MeToo revitalised longstanding feminist struggles around sexual violence, offering new tactics and repertoires. In South Africa, it drew on new cultures of opposing sexual violence that developed online and in student protest. There were also marked differences in the ways in which #MeToo travelled in both countries, pointing to older histories of power, powerlessness and resistance. The book uses the #MeToo moment to track histories of feminist organising in both countries, while also revealing how newer strategies extended or limited these struggles. Intimacy and Injury is a timely mapping of a shifting political field around gender-based violence in the global south. In proposing comparative, interdisciplinary, ethnographically rich and analytically astute reflections on #MeToo, it provides new and potentially transformative directions to scholarly debates, which are rarely brought into conversation with one another. With contributors located in South Africa and India alone, this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.
created a twitter hashtag, #MeToo, to encourage women to respond to the accusations against Harvey Weinstein by sharing their own experiences of assault and abuse ( Khomami, 2017 ). Since the Weinstein accusations – and through his trial and subsequent conviction – journalists, academics, politicians and activists have spoken of a MeToo moment, as women across many different sectors vocalise their experiences of sexual assault, abuse and harassment at the hands of
international colleagues. This, we argue, is all the more striking in light of the 2018 Oxfam scandal and resurgence of interest in preventing sexual exploitation and abuse (see GADN, 2019 ), as well as the rise of #AidToo and #AidSoWhite which saw aid workers share experiences of sexual violence and racism on social media as part of wider #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter phenomena since 2013. 3 While the term ‘the field’ – and its more extreme sibling ‘the deep field