Queering Feminist Solidarities

Abstract

At the height of international visibility for #metoo, a crowdsourced list was published on Facebook that contained the names of prestigious Indian academics, accusing them of sexual harassment. The list was controversial not only in that it became a viral phenomenon (and resulted in immediate questioning of the legitimacy of internet culture for politics) but also in that these accusations did not contain information on the circumstances of the alleged crimes, so as to protect the victims’ anonymity. The list was quickly dubbed “the list of naming and shaming” and was met with its strongest criticism from within the feminist movement itself, as established feminists argued publicly against such methods and against the queer Dalit leaker of the document, Raya Sarkar. This paper examines these conflicts of solidarity as conflicts between transnational and local positionalities and argues for the possibility of digital spaces as environments that invite a queering of identity politics, constructive disagreement, and transformative justice, rather than mere conflict and its resolution through a homogenous feminist identity.

Keywords

• Postcolonialism
• Feminism
• Social Media
• Intersectionality
• Sexual Harassment