In Singular and Plural Voice: #Metoo, Law and Solidarity (Book Section)
Title: In Singular and Plural Voice: #Metoo, Law and Solidarity
Author: Srimati Basu
Editor: Cristina Alcalde and Paula-Irene Villa
Abstract: As scholars of gender-based violence, we tend to set personal stories aside from fieldwork, though we know that our professional curiosities are profoundly shaped by such confusing or disturbing moments. However ,Srimati Basu begins here inundated by experience, remembering the many ways that our lives constitute the fields we pursue as ethnographers and feminist scholars. This chapter works through dilemmas that arise from such histories, foregrounding the vulnerability, doubt, and reflexive engagement that are critical to feminist methodology.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813195599/metoo-and-beyond/
Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Secondary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/97883
Secondary URL Description: Project Muse site
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Book Title: #MeToo and Beyond: Perspectives on a Global Movement
ISBN: 9780813195599

Asserting Vulnerability as Anti-Gender Politics: Indian Antifeminist Men’s Rights Activists’ Claims to Gendered Harm (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Asserting Vulnerability as Anti-Gender Politics: Indian Antifeminist Men’s Rights Activists’ Claims to Gendered Harm
Author: Srimati Basu
Abstract: Globally, “men’s rights” movements (MRMs) span pro-feminist men’s groups addressing harms of sex roles, a variety of alt-right type men’s organizations, alongside charitable and human-rights and environmental associations. Crucially, many of them, across the political spectrum, represent masculinity through an affective politics of abjection. The Indian MRM (like the global International Men’s Day association) leans into ideas of vulnerability, loneliness and exclusion in an assertive, aggressive mode that takes simultaneous aim at feminists (especially governance linked to feminist ideas) and women (synecdochally standing in for wives) as being at the root of their plight. It locates itself within the language of human rights and gender equity, identified as the dominant discourse of inclusion (and hence of resources) in our times. This paper demonstrates the ways that the Indian MRM inscribes vulnerability and abjection onto itself. It locates the MRM within prevailing global men’s rights discourses of health and harm, and follows the ways they highlight masculinity as debility, and men’s health as the prime crisis, providing evidence for men’s economic and social abandonment through the bodies of poor men or suicide. Drawing on such woundedness, MRAs (men’s rights activists) can deflect or justify accusations of violence, and critique law and punishment. Through close readings of an exhibition sponsored by the central MRM organization, performative public actions, and the circulation of narratives about death, the paper shows the affective momentum the movement seeks to accumulate, and the forms of resistance it champions.
Date: 10/28/2022
Primary URL: https://ceeres.uchicago.edu/news/global-anti-gender-and-anti-lgbtq-politics-historical-continuities-transnational-connections
Primary URL Description: conference web site
Conference Name: Global Anti-Gender and Anti-LGBTQ+ Politics: Historical Continuities, Transnational Connections, Contested Futures

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