Both India and South Africa have shared the infamy of being labelled the world's 'rape capitals',... more Both India and South Africa 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, both boast long histories of resisting such violence and its location in wider cultures of patriarchy, settler colonialism and class and caste privilege.
Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks 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 this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.
In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual poli... more In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India's liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signalled the co-option and depoliticization of struggles for women's rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women's empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and non-queer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality's focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism-both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.
New Subaltern Politics presents a critical dialogue between the conceptual and analytical legacie... more New Subaltern Politics presents a critical dialogue between the conceptual and analytical legacies of Subaltern Studies and the evolving forms of hegemony and resistance in contemporary India. From the struggles of the urban poor in Gujarat to the activism of sexual subalterns in eastern India and the mobilization of artisanal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu, the essays in this volume cover a diverse range of ongoing struggles against dispossession, disenfranchisement, and stigma that are unfolding in neoliberal India.
The volume analyses the forms of collective agency that subaltern groups develop to negotiate with the workings of power from above. Foregrounding the imaginative, affective, and secular dimensions of subaltern agency, New Subaltern Politics interrogates the current relevance of Gramscian concepts of hegemony, subalternity, and the integral state in the contemporary Indian context. Bringing together path-breaking methodological and conceptual interventions in the study of subaltern politics, this volume will be invaluable to all those engaged—as academics or as activists--in the struggle against unjust societies and unequal developmental trajectories.
The following special section is a series of responses to Catherine Rottenberg's This Is Not a Fe... more The following special section is a series of responses to Catherine Rottenberg's This Is Not a Feminism Textbook (Goldsmiths University Press, 2023). This is the second book in the 'This is not a. .. textbook' series (the first being on science fiction) which describes itself as not 'a purely commercial publishing venture' but also an 'outreach initiative in support of lifelong learning, and a mode of resistance against the marginalisation of the arts, humanities and social sciences in neoliberal economies'. The book consists of a series of entries on topics including families, bodies, sex/gender, motherhood, trans, disability, class, all pitched at an introductory level and written by academic scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds
Intimacy and injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa , 2022
Citation: Roy, S., Falkof, N., & Phadke, S. (2022). Introduction: intimacy, injury and #MeToo in ... more Citation: Roy, S., Falkof, N., & Phadke, S. (2022). Introduction: intimacy, injury and #MeToo in India and South Africa. In S. Roy, N. Falkof, & S. Phadke (Eds.), Intimacy and injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (pp. 1–24). Manchester University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2j04sp7.6
Young urban Indian women have made women's rights to seek pleasure and have fun, especially in pu... more Young urban Indian women have made women's rights to seek pleasure and have fun, especially in public, central to a new repertoire of feminist resistance and also as a way of demarcating themselves from “joyless” feminisms of the past. Concerns around pleasure, fun, and joy appear far removed from the everyday lives of poor and marginalized rural women. In this contribution, the author foregrounds rural women's pleasure-seeking practices, in consumption, fun, and friendship, which were the unanticipated outcomes of their involvement with a local NGO seeking to empower poor women. These were primarily lower-caste, lower-class women who were partially included in the aspirational futures of a globalized India, through poorly paid and precarious development work. Their participation in such work—a disciplinary domain imbued with its own regulatory potentials—enabled the development of new skills, techniques, and capacities in an entirely other domain, of nonwork or fun. The fact that fun, pleasure, and self-making relied on cultures of enterprise, empowerment, and aspiration also brings into view some of the contradictions at stake in neoliberal India.
This chapter looks at a range of governmental and non-governmental discourses and practices—and t... more This chapter looks at a range of governmental and non-governmental discourses and practices—and their underlying rationalities—in the name of ‘saving’ women and upholding their rights, especially in the Global South. Such feminist governmentality—or ‘governance feminism’, as it’s come to be known—includes the use of strategies that are increasingly both punitive and paternal. In considering examples such as the regulation of early and forced marriage and public protests around sexual violence, we see how relations of empowerment can be both voluntary and coercive insofar as they seek to elicit the compliance of women but also to coerce them when they are unwilling to act in their own interests.
The article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-in... more The article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-independence period. Given the empirical and ideological centrality of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in the terrain of Indian feminism, the article focuses on dominant feminist responses to ‘NGOization’ in the form of critiques of the alleged cooption and professionalization of the women’s movement and the loss of political autonomy, a key ideal amongst Indian feminists. As a response to these criticisms, I suggest that there is a need to go beyond the ‘NGOization paradigm’ in evaluating a new feminist landscape, especially after the Delhi rape of 2012. ‘NGOisation’ offers limited conceptual tools to make sense of the present moment if not entirely hiding from view the political possibilities that it offers for feminist reflection and (re)mobilization.
Marriage practices, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and the politics of sexuality are... more Marriage practices, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and the politics of sexuality are relatively under-researched themes in the study of Bengali communism. Historical scholarship on the revolutionary politics of the extreme left Naxalbari andolan of the late 1960s–1970s, the object of this piece of study, is no exception. The article engages with women and men's narratives on the practice of ‘revolutionary’ marriage in the movement through the prism of contemporary popular memory studies and narrative analysis. Drawing on field interviews with middle-class male and female activists, the article draws attention to the contestatory nature of marriage in the collective memory of the movement. Narrative contestations over marriage in the Naxalite movement underscore, I argue, a tension between a utopian ideal of transgressive interpersonal relations and dominant middle-class codes of sexual morality. At the same time, individual attempts to ‘compose’ (in storytelling) socially recognizable and acceptable subject positions are grounded upon the silencing and abjection of more risky memories. Given the discrepancies and contradictions within the narrative repertoire from which individuals construct their identities, these ‘marriage stories’ are a tremendous resource for investigating the politics of love, sexuality and subject-formation in middle-class Bengali society.
While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state’s devel... more While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state’s development and modernising goals in local communities, neoliberal development has greatly expanded the remit of this subjective call but without accompanying material changes. In this article, I consider the precarious category of female workers produced by an NGO in West Bengal, out of a surplus population of poor, working-class and, generally, Scheduled-Caste rural women who were themselves beneficiaries of feminist-inspired development. Ambivalently positioned within this institutional site—as volunteers and not as employees—these workers had to manage new forms of risk and precarity over existing ones. Such precarity was not only material. It was especially manifest in new sets of aspirations and new capacities to aspire sustained, nevertheless, by the unrealisable promises and potentialities of the related processes of the NGOisation of feminist activism as well as the restructuring of women’s development under neoliberalism.
Both India and South Africa have shared the infamy of being labelled the world's 'rape capitals',... more Both India and South Africa 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, both boast long histories of resisting such violence and its location in wider cultures of patriarchy, settler colonialism and class and caste privilege.
Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks 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 this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.
In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual poli... more In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India's liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signalled the co-option and depoliticization of struggles for women's rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women's empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and non-queer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality's focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism-both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.
New Subaltern Politics presents a critical dialogue between the conceptual and analytical legacie... more New Subaltern Politics presents a critical dialogue between the conceptual and analytical legacies of Subaltern Studies and the evolving forms of hegemony and resistance in contemporary India. From the struggles of the urban poor in Gujarat to the activism of sexual subalterns in eastern India and the mobilization of artisanal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu, the essays in this volume cover a diverse range of ongoing struggles against dispossession, disenfranchisement, and stigma that are unfolding in neoliberal India.
The volume analyses the forms of collective agency that subaltern groups develop to negotiate with the workings of power from above. Foregrounding the imaginative, affective, and secular dimensions of subaltern agency, New Subaltern Politics interrogates the current relevance of Gramscian concepts of hegemony, subalternity, and the integral state in the contemporary Indian context. Bringing together path-breaking methodological and conceptual interventions in the study of subaltern politics, this volume will be invaluable to all those engaged—as academics or as activists--in the struggle against unjust societies and unequal developmental trajectories.
The following special section is a series of responses to Catherine Rottenberg's This Is Not a Fe... more The following special section is a series of responses to Catherine Rottenberg's This Is Not a Feminism Textbook (Goldsmiths University Press, 2023). This is the second book in the 'This is not a. .. textbook' series (the first being on science fiction) which describes itself as not 'a purely commercial publishing venture' but also an 'outreach initiative in support of lifelong learning, and a mode of resistance against the marginalisation of the arts, humanities and social sciences in neoliberal economies'. The book consists of a series of entries on topics including families, bodies, sex/gender, motherhood, trans, disability, class, all pitched at an introductory level and written by academic scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds
Intimacy and injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa , 2022
Citation: Roy, S., Falkof, N., & Phadke, S. (2022). Introduction: intimacy, injury and #MeToo in ... more Citation: Roy, S., Falkof, N., & Phadke, S. (2022). Introduction: intimacy, injury and #MeToo in India and South Africa. In S. Roy, N. Falkof, & S. Phadke (Eds.), Intimacy and injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (pp. 1–24). Manchester University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2j04sp7.6
Young urban Indian women have made women's rights to seek pleasure and have fun, especially in pu... more Young urban Indian women have made women's rights to seek pleasure and have fun, especially in public, central to a new repertoire of feminist resistance and also as a way of demarcating themselves from “joyless” feminisms of the past. Concerns around pleasure, fun, and joy appear far removed from the everyday lives of poor and marginalized rural women. In this contribution, the author foregrounds rural women's pleasure-seeking practices, in consumption, fun, and friendship, which were the unanticipated outcomes of their involvement with a local NGO seeking to empower poor women. These were primarily lower-caste, lower-class women who were partially included in the aspirational futures of a globalized India, through poorly paid and precarious development work. Their participation in such work—a disciplinary domain imbued with its own regulatory potentials—enabled the development of new skills, techniques, and capacities in an entirely other domain, of nonwork or fun. The fact that fun, pleasure, and self-making relied on cultures of enterprise, empowerment, and aspiration also brings into view some of the contradictions at stake in neoliberal India.
This chapter looks at a range of governmental and non-governmental discourses and practices—and t... more This chapter looks at a range of governmental and non-governmental discourses and practices—and their underlying rationalities—in the name of ‘saving’ women and upholding their rights, especially in the Global South. Such feminist governmentality—or ‘governance feminism’, as it’s come to be known—includes the use of strategies that are increasingly both punitive and paternal. In considering examples such as the regulation of early and forced marriage and public protests around sexual violence, we see how relations of empowerment can be both voluntary and coercive insofar as they seek to elicit the compliance of women but also to coerce them when they are unwilling to act in their own interests.
The article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-in... more The article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-independence period. Given the empirical and ideological centrality of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in the terrain of Indian feminism, the article focuses on dominant feminist responses to ‘NGOization’ in the form of critiques of the alleged cooption and professionalization of the women’s movement and the loss of political autonomy, a key ideal amongst Indian feminists. As a response to these criticisms, I suggest that there is a need to go beyond the ‘NGOization paradigm’ in evaluating a new feminist landscape, especially after the Delhi rape of 2012. ‘NGOisation’ offers limited conceptual tools to make sense of the present moment if not entirely hiding from view the political possibilities that it offers for feminist reflection and (re)mobilization.
Marriage practices, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and the politics of sexuality are... more Marriage practices, the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and the politics of sexuality are relatively under-researched themes in the study of Bengali communism. Historical scholarship on the revolutionary politics of the extreme left Naxalbari andolan of the late 1960s–1970s, the object of this piece of study, is no exception. The article engages with women and men's narratives on the practice of ‘revolutionary’ marriage in the movement through the prism of contemporary popular memory studies and narrative analysis. Drawing on field interviews with middle-class male and female activists, the article draws attention to the contestatory nature of marriage in the collective memory of the movement. Narrative contestations over marriage in the Naxalite movement underscore, I argue, a tension between a utopian ideal of transgressive interpersonal relations and dominant middle-class codes of sexual morality. At the same time, individual attempts to ‘compose’ (in storytelling) socially recognizable and acceptable subject positions are grounded upon the silencing and abjection of more risky memories. Given the discrepancies and contradictions within the narrative repertoire from which individuals construct their identities, these ‘marriage stories’ are a tremendous resource for investigating the politics of love, sexuality and subject-formation in middle-class Bengali society.
While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state’s devel... more While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state’s development and modernising goals in local communities, neoliberal development has greatly expanded the remit of this subjective call but without accompanying material changes. In this article, I consider the precarious category of female workers produced by an NGO in West Bengal, out of a surplus population of poor, working-class and, generally, Scheduled-Caste rural women who were themselves beneficiaries of feminist-inspired development. Ambivalently positioned within this institutional site—as volunteers and not as employees—these workers had to manage new forms of risk and precarity over existing ones. Such precarity was not only material. It was especially manifest in new sets of aspirations and new capacities to aspire sustained, nevertheless, by the unrealisable promises and potentialities of the related processes of the NGOisation of feminist activism as well as the restructuring of women’s development under neoliberalism.
In the wake of #MeToo, the time is ripe to revisit the history of Indian feminism, in particular ... more In the wake of #MeToo, the time is ripe to revisit the history of Indian feminism, in particular the idea of “waves.” Throughout this history, we see how Indian feminism has emerged as an object of internal contestation, with disputes about issues becoming grounds to question and redefine feminism itself.
How is it that feminist strategies of empowerment and government can come to operate in a regulat... more How is it that feminist strategies of empowerment and government can come to operate in a regulatory and coercive manner? While this question has been considered in light of the recent carceral turn involving feminist interventions into violence against women, it has not been explicated in the context of women’s economic empowerment. This is in spite of increased evidence of nonstate actors, including feminist NGOs, operating coercively toward their target populations, namely poor women of the global South. Beyond the empirical evidence, our conceptual schemes also remain inadequate to capture the multiple workings of feminist governmentalities, rooted in sources of power that we tend to keep separate. A closer reading of governmentality, or “the conduct of conduct,” also provides a better sense of its flip side, namely counter-conduct, or the resistance that the governed might pose to the “will to empower.” The article probes the interrelated question of feminist conduct and counter-conduct in the unique instance of the governance of early marriage undertaken by a developmental NGO in eastern India. The NGO’s campaign to curb early marriage brings into relief the dovetailing of different rationalities and techniques of government and types of power in ways that are currently underappreciated in analyses of feminism’s imbrication in power. Marriage in this case serves to mark the limits of feminist governance—at the hands of different actors, discourses, and interests—in embodying and working against women’s agency. It additionally shows that while subaltern women’s counter-conducts can destabilize dominant governmental rationalities and their underlying relations of power, they do not necessarily constitute a more progressive politics.
This article explores the politics and ethics of scale in reading women’s movements in the Global... more This article explores the politics and ethics of scale in reading women’s movements in the Global South—how they have always been simultaneousy regional, national and transnational in scale (materially if not imaginatively) and read through the twin lens of the global and the local. The first part of the essay underscores the constitutive internationalism in the history of feminism. From the ‘second wave’ of the women’s liberation movement, attempts at recognizing the internationalism in ‘global feminism’ have poorly served feminists in the ‘third world’. In more recent times, transnationalization has become the dominant signifier of women’s movements with renewed attempts at capturing the shifting scales of feminist politics in ‘transnational feminism’. Recent processes of transnationalization and NGOization bespeak an ontology of relatedness and a scalar epistemology as has been mobilized in recent writings in postcolonial sociology. The second part of the essay uses the mass protests around the rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in 2012 as a way of thinking through the changing scales and sites of contemporary feminist protest in the Global South. I use the spatial concept of the assemblage to emphasize the multi-scalar dimensions of this protest especially through the determining influence of the media. Such a ‘protest assemblage’ produced endless possibilities of mobilization in the name of women but not always in clearly recognizable ‘feminist’ ways.
This chapter explores the scalar dimensions and politics of transnational women’s movements in th... more This chapter explores the scalar dimensions and politics of transnational women’s movements in the Global South—how they are simultaneously regional, national, and transnational, even as scholars have tended to view them through the optics of the global or the local alone. The chapter turns to the mass protests around the rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in 2012 as a case to think through the changing scales and sites of contemporary feminist protest. Roy uses the concept of the assemblage to emphasize the multiscalar dimensions of this protest and its travels and capacity to interpellate new subjects and create transnational meaning. Such a protest assemblage produced endless possibilities of mobilization in the name of women, in ways that were deeply contested, even by feminists.
In an excerpt from the book 'Indian Democracy Origins, Trajectories, Contestations' , two feminis... more In an excerpt from the book 'Indian Democracy Origins, Trajectories, Contestations' , two feminist sociologists-Raka Ray and Srila Roy-discuss the trajectory of feminist politics in India over the last several decades.
This encyclopedia entry underscores the politics and ethics of scale in reading women’s movements... more This encyclopedia entry underscores the politics and ethics of scale in reading women’s movements in the global south – how they have always been simultaneously regional, national and transnational in scale (materially if not always imaginatively) and consequently, read through the twin lens of the global and the local. Questions of scale that emphasise points of connection, proximity and intimacy – rather than separation, distance and distinctness – might even come to displace an opposition between the local and the global as conventionally conceived in terms of a series of binaries that ultimately reproduce unequal power relations.
Introduction to the volume on New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing hegemony and resistance i... more Introduction to the volume on New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing hegemony and resistance in contemporary India edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy
In this course, we look at different ways in which " development " has been theorised, understood... more In this course, we look at different ways in which " development " has been theorised, understood and put into practice. In the first half, we look at critiques of mainstream development focusing in particular on development as a form of discourse and a relation of power that is gendered, racialized, and sexualised in particular ways. These, in turn, inform the micropolitical functioning of development at the scale of the everyday and quotidian, which we explore through the sites and structures of NGOs, microfinance, and corporatized development besides looking at how the development sector interfaces with human rights, especially through a focus on sexual rights and sexuality more broadly.
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Books by srila roy
Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks 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 this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.
the activism of sexual subalterns in eastern India and the mobilization of artisanal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu, the
essays in this volume cover a diverse range of ongoing struggles against dispossession, disenfranchisement, and stigma that are
unfolding in neoliberal India.
The volume analyses the forms of collective agency that subaltern groups develop to negotiate with the workings of power
from above. Foregrounding the imaginative, affective, and secular dimensions of subaltern agency, New Subaltern Politics
interrogates the current relevance of Gramscian concepts of hegemony, subalternity, and the integral state in the contemporary Indian context. Bringing together path-breaking methodological and conceptual interventions in the study
of subaltern politics, this volume will be invaluable to all those engaged—as academics or as activists--in the struggle
against unjust societies and unequal developmental trajectories.
Papers by srila roy
Through the lens of the #MeToo moment, the book tracks 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 this book builds transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.
the activism of sexual subalterns in eastern India and the mobilization of artisanal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu, the
essays in this volume cover a diverse range of ongoing struggles against dispossession, disenfranchisement, and stigma that are
unfolding in neoliberal India.
The volume analyses the forms of collective agency that subaltern groups develop to negotiate with the workings of power
from above. Foregrounding the imaginative, affective, and secular dimensions of subaltern agency, New Subaltern Politics
interrogates the current relevance of Gramscian concepts of hegemony, subalternity, and the integral state in the contemporary Indian context. Bringing together path-breaking methodological and conceptual interventions in the study
of subaltern politics, this volume will be invaluable to all those engaged—as academics or as activists--in the struggle
against unjust societies and unequal developmental trajectories.