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ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to reflect on the ways in which a non-metropolitan academic feminist community engages with digital media to reimagine the discipline of Women’s Studies, and consequently feminist politics. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Women’s Studies Centre at a university in Tamil Nadu, India, this paper moves away from the framework of the digital as simply enabling or empowering, and instead seeks to examine these digital cultures as shaped by the particularities of their geographic coordinates, and as part of a larger media environment which is characterised as much by continuities as it is by innovations. In doing so, it attempts to understand feminisms as media phenomena that are actively shaped by and shaping media technologies and discourses. It argues that Women’s Studies scholars in these locations, operating from hybrid geographical and digital places, enable the possibility of decentring feminist scholarship and thus allow for a reframing of the digital. To do this, it focuses on three distinct areas of engagement—the co-creation of knowledge in Tamil language Wikipedia, interactions on social media platforms, and their engagements with little magazines in their online avatars.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to the students and faculty members of a particular Women’s Studies Centre in Tiruchirappalli. Thanks also to Dr. Asha Achuthan, Prof. Shilpa Phadke, Ms. Neena Barnes, two anonymous peer reviewers at the Feminist Scholarship Division of the International Communication Association’s Annual Conference in 2018, and the two anonymous Feminist Media Studies peer reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback on this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Names of research participants have been changed to protect their privacy.
2. The Master of Philosophy programme is a research programme that often precedes the Doctor of Philosophy programme and aims to train postgraduate students in research. However, with the contested National Education Policy, 2020 proposing the discontinuation of the programme, many universities across the country have stopped offering it.
3. Referring to the persecuted Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora.
4. For more on the question of language, literary fiction, and localization of feminist articulations, see (Nithila Kanagasabai Citation2020).
5. Referring to the political ideologies and anti-caste assertions of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, an Indian economist, social reformer and political leader, who headed the committee drafting the Constitution of India.
6. Referring to the ideologies of Periyar EV Ramasamy, who was a rationalist anti-caste leader and led the non-Brahmin movement in South India.
7. A reference to these centres’ focus on State-mandated community service programmes that are referred as Extension Activities within Indian higher education.
8. In India, the government has had a huge impact on the history of institutionalisation of Women’s Studies within the university framework. WS as an intervention took shape in the mid-1970s, a watershed moment being the publication of the Towards Equality report in 1974 (Anandhi and Swaminathan Citation2006; Mary E John Citation2008; Rekha Pappu Citation2008). John (Citation2008) calls attention to the fact that there is an increasing tendency of centralisation and control by state agencies within WS—a case in point being the attempt by the state to rename Women’s Studies Centres in universities as “Women and Family Studies Centres” in 2003. Regarding nomenclature, there is the long-standing debate between proponents of “Women’s Studies” who claim that the usage of the term “woman,” politicises the study of gendered relations; and those that claim that “gender” is a more inclusive term and must be employed. While the state allows the university to decide on the name of the department, for the purpose of government documents, they will be referred to as Women’s Studies Centres. There are over 160 WSCs across the country. Since 2017, WS has been affected by prolonged fund cuts. It is only due to the consistent efforts of the Centres in tandem with regional and national associations that financial support from by the state continues, albeit severely reduced.
9. While Facebook was a popular social media platform in this location at the time of fieldwork, at least amongst those familiar with the English language, it was replaced by TikTok a few years later. This follows the larger trend in India, where at its peak in 2020, TikTok had 200 million users. In June 2020, TikTok along with 58 other Chinese-owned apps was banned, leading to the rise of Instagram Reels, which in 2022 reportedly had 200 million users in India. Meta identified the country as “the lighthouse country for Reels” globally. Facebook, however, continues to have a huge presence in India. When Meta launched Facebook Reels in August 2022, the feature was first tested in India.
10. Most of them hail from castes deemed to be Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes—categories officially designated by the state to refer to groups of people among the most disadvantaged in the caste hierarchy.
12. In the following paragraph, I refer to internet penetration statistics pre-COVID 19, since this corresponds best with the time of fieldwork. However, according to the Nielsen Bharat 2.0 report, between 2019 and 2022 there has been a 45% growth in “active internet users” in rural India. The female users’ growth in the last 2 years is a whopping 61% as compared to male users who grew at 24%. Also, 1 in every 3 female internet users in rural India, are actively using the internet. See Nielsen’s Bharat 2.0 Study reveals a 45% growth in Active Internet Users in rural India since 2019 | Nielsen.
13. While caste-patriarchy has denied women from dominant castes access to public space under the garb of protectionism, it has also shaped the relationship that women from the “lower” castes have with public space by historically hypervisibilising them in ways that deny their agency.
14. See Payal Arora’s The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West (Citation2019) for a critique of a developmental perspective that governs both technological projects in, and academic projects on the Global South.
15. Wikipedia now exists in over 300 languages and has more than fifty-nine million articles as of July 2022. The Tamil language edition of Wikipedia was established in September 2003. As of 4 July 2022, the Tamil Wikipedia is the 60th largest Wikipedia and the second largest Wikipedia among Indian languages by article count.
17. Wikipedia “presumes” a topic suitable for a stand-alone article only if “it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
18. Here I draw on Ben Light’s (Citation2014, 17) conception of “disconnective practice” which “involves potential modes of disengagement with the connective affordances of SNSs (Social Networking Sites) in relationship to a particular site, within a particular site, between and amongst different sites and in relation to the physical world.” Responding to the large body of work on SNSs that focus on connectivity, Light argues that considering disconnections as mundane practices rather than as anomalies is generative in understanding interactions with social media.
19. A peaceful demonstration.
20. Tamil word for older sister often used to refer to senior students on campus.
21. For translations of the Tamil poets mentioned here, see Maithri, M., Salma, Kutti Revathi, and Sukirtharani (Citation2012). Wild Girls Wicked Words (ed. L. Holmström). Chennai: Sangam House/Kalachuvadu Publications.
22. For a detailed account of the role Tamil little magazines in the formulation of localised feminisms, see Kanagasabai Citation2020.
23. See Kumaran Rajagopal (Citation2014) who argues for little magazines as alternative sites of knowledge production and scholarship, and Barathi R.A.K (Citation1971) for a historical perspective on the role of little magazines within modern Tamil literature.
24. In India, a household-based Employment-Unemployment Survey was first done for the year 1972–73 and, it found that in 1972–1973, 8.3% of the population that wanted to work, could not get a job.
25. See https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/Little-magazines-blossom-online/articleshow/47952146.cms. Accessed June 18, 2022.
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Nithila Kanagasabai
Nithila Kanagasabai is an Assistant Professor at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her areas of interest include: feminist media studies, feminist pedagogy, journalism studies, academic mobilities, research cultures, and digital media.