Uncovering Right-Wing Digital Enclaves and Reactionary Politics: A Feminist Multi-Method Examination of a Transplatform Campaign

ABSTRACT

In October 2021, an advertisement for a fairness cream by the Indian company Dabur ignited a fierce controversy, unveiling deeply ingrained ideologies of lesbophobia, misogyny, colorism, casteism, and Hindu victimhood. The ad, featuring a lesbian couple performing the Hindu ritual of Karwa Chauth after using the skin whitening cream, sparked criticism for its attempt to integrate same-sex couples into mainstream Hindu society through skin tone modification and heteronormative religious rituals. This paper highlights a critical feminist approach to the use of data analytics tools. The data we examined closely in this manner helped us uncover transplatform strategies employed in the production of homophilous affective right-wing digital enclaves. The data from Twitter provided us an entry point. This work reveals a transplatform campaign supporting right-wing reactionary politics, uncovering networks spreading misogyny, lesbophobia, casteism, colorism, and a sense of Hindu victimhood.

KEYWORDS:

• Lesbophobia
• Karwa Chauth
• casteism
• colorism
• right-wing digital enclaves
• critical feminist methods

Acknowledgments

The team would like to acknowledge the patient feedback from the special issue guest editors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The data engaged in this paper predates Elon’s Twitter/X takeover. We accessed this social networked data through the academic API access, originally designed to provide approved academic projects with access to Twitter data, but no longer operational. Access to this data is now monetized in a way that make, it impossible for the average humanities/social sciences academic.

2. Karva Chauth is an annual one-day Hindu festival during which married women fast from sunrise to moonrise to pray for the health and long life of their husbands. Unmarried women also participate, praying to find an ideal life partner.

3. In October 2023 the Indian Supreme court ruled against same-sex marriages.

4. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer.

5. We become aware of, yet again, the dangers of these platformed black-box publics where such events occur, but cannot be easily accessed by low resourced researchers or activists seeking to use data archives to intervene in policy making. With no access to these archives, we live with the illusion of ephemerality, even though such small data clusters are neither ephemeral nor insignificant. We argue for the ongoing relevance of our previous digital archived data, which informs our larger work as a team, because it allows us to revisit historical data, enabling us to explore how cultural manifestations in digital publics have evolved over time.

6. This script was created by Bryan Tarpley of Texas A&M University.

7. A “Sargi” is prepared by a mother-in-law for her daughter-in-law as a blessing this day. The women observe what is known as a “nirjala vrat” (ritual without water – or food) on this day and a sargi is the only thing they are allowed eat throughout the day. An ideal sargi is a thali (plate), which consists of sweets and savories. One can find dry fruits, coconuts, and other fruits, along with gifts of saris and jewelry.

8. The Telegram channel that was publicly accessible basically just regularly shared the link to the latest YouTube video. We have no access to the closed WhatsApp groups or Telegram groups that we suspect contain discussion.

9. An ego network is a network that consists of a central node and the nodes directly connected to it. Gephi offers an ego network filter through which we can select any node in the dataset and visualize the nodes connected to it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Radhika Gajjala

Radhika Gajjala is Professor at Bowling Green State University and Managing Editor of Fembot Collective. Her recent books include: Digital diasporas: Labor and Affect in Gendered Indian Digital Publics (2019).; Online Philanthropy in the Global North and South: Connecting, Microfinancing, and Gaming for Change (2017).

Ololade Margaret Faniyi

Ololade Faniyi is an African feminist activist-scholar and Ph.D. student in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Emory University. Her research adopts a feminist data lens and participatory digital ethnographic approach to the study of Nigerian feminist/queer social-political activism, African feminist digital cultures, and alternative political communication. Her work is also situated around digital humanities, and the intersection of technology, coloniality, and decolonial futures. She is an African advisor for the young feminist funding organization, FRIDA, and a graduate fellow for the Atlanta Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence network. Her sole and collaborative works have been published in Communication, Culture and Critique, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and peer-reviewed book chapters, including the edited anthology Stories of Feminist Protest and Resistance: Digital Performative Assemblies. Ololade has been interviewed across radios, organizations, and scholarship in Nigeria and outside, where she shares insights on Nigerian gender relations, feminist activism, African decolonial futures, and digital cultures, and has been featured in The Republic, OkayAfrica, NPR (Goats & Soda) and Culture Review, among others.

Debipreeta Rahut

Debipreeta Rahut (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the School of Media & Communication, Bowling Green State University, USA. Her research interests situate in the critical cultural paradigm with a focus on feminist studies, gender and media, social media movements, intercultural communication and digital humanities.

Trisha Ayn Bonham

Trisha Ayn Bonham is a PhD candidate in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her research includes feminist studies, Indigenous studies, temporal sovereignty, tribal sovereignty, and violence against women of color/MMIW. She is currently writing her dissertation, “Traces of Tsali: The Haunting Embodiment of Historical Trauma in the Oral History, Tourism, and Resilience of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.”