#MeToo beyond the Global North

A collection of essays explores the nuanced dynamics of the MeToo movement in India and South Africa, delving into questions of origin, evolution, and the appropriation of the narrative

Intimacy and Injury

Authors: Nick Falkof, Shilpa Phadke, and Srila Roy

Publisher: Zubaan

Pages: 372  

Price: Rs 975

How do we talk about the origin, evolution and afterlife of the #MeToo movement? When academics and activists narrate its history, where do the loudest voices come from and who gets muffled and silenced in the bargain? What can be done to ensure that knowledge production about feminist organising is interdisciplinary, multi-vocal and inclusive?

If these questions interest you, read Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa. This book is edited by Nicky Falkof, Shilpa Phadke and Srila Roy. It grew out of a workshop in 2019 that “aimed to nurture a new generation of feminist scholars in India and South Africa”. Dr Falkof is an associate professor in the media studies department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and Dr Roy is a professor of sociology at the same university. Dr Phadke is a professor at the School of Media and Cultural Studies at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Sciences.

It is rare to come across a volume that brings together perspectives on sexual violence from two post-colonial states like India and South Africa that cannot be “easily dismissed as locations of poverty” because of their development trajectories but also have a “shared reputation as ‘rape capitals’ of the world”. In the chapter “South Africa’s own ‘Delhi moment’: News coverage of the murders of Jyoti Singh and Anene Booysen”, journalist Nechama Brodie examines how the Nirbhaya rape case in Delhi and the public protests after that struck a chord in South African media and society because of the country’s struggles with sexual violence.

The editors of this volume are keen to challenge the arrogant notion that feminist interventions originate in the Global North, and are uncritically adopted by people in the Global South who lack homegrown histories of resistance. The chapters show that feminists rarely speak in one voice; they address the issue of sexual violence through multiple approaches grounded in local contexts and informed by “transnationally circulating tools”.

One wonders what Tarana Burke, the Black American activist who wrote  Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (2021) might make of these arguments. Ms Burke, who founded the MeToo movement to help other Black girls and women heal from the shame and silence around sexual violence, has written about how jarring it was for her to see the #MeToo trending on social media.

Ms Burke was shocked and hurt that the work she had done and the language she had developed was being used by people outside the community without consulting her. “Y’all know if these white women start using this hashtag, and it gets popular, they will never believe that a Black woman in her 40s from the Bronx has been building a movement for the same purposes, using those exact words, for years now,” she wrote.

This fear of appropriation is based on a long legacy of racial discrimination in the United States. Rupali Bansode, a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology, picks up on this thread in her chapter titled “Moments of Erasure of the Testimonies of Sexual Violence against Dalit women”. Dr Bansode points out that the movement founded by Ms Burke was not in the media spotlight until 2017, when a white actor-producer named Alyssa Milano used the slogan as a hashtag and a call for women to share stories of sexual harassment.

Dr Bansode draws attention to the fact that “despite the long history of black feminist movements in the US, the question of who spoke and who was heard was deeply informed by race”. Such hierarchies exist in other cultures too. Critiques of the #MeToo movement in India — articulated in chapters written by Disha Mullick (co-founder of Chambal Media) and Jaya Sharma (queer feminist who writes on sexuality and politics through a psychoanalytic lens) highlight how the movement relegated experiences of trans women, rural women, Dalit women, queer women and Muslim women to the margins, and offered a flat and simplistic view of how power works in different social settings and intimate spaces. Scholar and columnist Jamil F Khan’s essay “Gay boys don’t cry when we’re raped: Queer Shame and Secrecy” examines the nexus between patriarchy and heteronormativity, which deprives gay men of a language to name the violence they experience let alone seek support.

In an essay titled “When Will the State Be #MeToo’d?”, Jyotsna Siddharth, who is the founder of Project Anti-Caste Love and Dalit Feminism Archive, writes, “Even as it was limited to upper-caste, upper-class, cis women, the #MeToo discourse also shrank the focus on sexual violence, abuse and caste-based violence to the individual accused without reflecting on larger institutions, especially the role of the state.” This essay dares to widen the category of who is seen as the perpetrator, and shows the limits of cancel culture, where justice is sought through social media, where individuals are taken out of their “sociality” and “singled out for public censure without creating a deeper sense of context, degree and intensity of sexual violations”.

One of the most interesting chapters is the one written by Dr Phadke. Titled “Rebuilding Precarious Solidarities: A Feminist Debate in Internet Time”, it opens up about the rifts that the #MeToo movement created in India between feminists of different generations — those who favoured due process and the rule of law, and those who were fed up with institutional mechanisms and preferred naming and shaming instead. Dr Phadke writes with a heavy heart, but also the hope that ruptures are not final.