Talk to me: towards a politics of transnational feminist solidarity.
The 2012 gangrape of a young woman in Delhi, known as the Nirbhaya case, became an international media event that cast public spaces in India as unsafe, and situated sexual violence as a problem characterized by class difference and lack of development. This dominant media discourse reiterated long-...
| Published in: | Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography Vol. 29; no. 1; pp. 1 - 26 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Jan 2022
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=154499079&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 154499079 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 0966369X GPC jtl: Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography issn: 0966369X maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jan 2022 vid: 29 iid: 1 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 154499079 10.1080/0966369X.2020.1841121 ppf: 1 ppct: 25 formats: tig: atl: Talk to me: towards a politics of transnational feminist solidarity. aug: au: Vemuri, Ayesha affil: Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada su: Young women Diaspora Public spaces Solidarity Class differences Feminists Artist collectives Delhi (India) India Bengaluru (India) sug: subj: Delhi (India) India Bengaluru (India) Young women Diaspora Public spaces Solidarity Class differences Feminists Artist collectives keyword: Blank Noise feminist activism Nirbhaya case public space transnational solidarity ab: The 2012 gangrape of a young woman in Delhi, known as the Nirbhaya case, became an international media event that cast public spaces in India as unsafe, and situated sexual violence as a problem characterized by class difference and lack of development. This dominant media discourse reiterated long-standing neocolonial, classist and casteist tropes that signified a failure of transnational solidarity. At this time, Talk to Me, a public art intervention by the Bangalore-based feminist artist collective, Blank Noise, went viral on social media. The project took place near the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology on a lane along which many women experience molestation and harassment. Students from Srishti engaged strangers – typically migrant and displaced men from the lower classes – in a conversation over tea and a snack. In this article, I analyse Talk to Me as an intervention that offered a counternarrative and countervisual to the dominant, fear-based characterization of public spaces in India. Talk to Me encouraged participants, through a process of dialogue and conversation, to identify and overcome their internalized biases about the lower-class, migrant men who are often constructed as sexual threats to upper-class women. These conversations, I argue, were designed to break down ingrained biases and internalized prejudice, and to attempt to create compassion and solidarity across the barriers of class, education, language, and gender. The intervention offers a model of building solidarity that is not passive or automatic, but rather requires the difficult and often uncomfortable labour of self-reflection and introspection. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2022 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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