The #MeToo Phenomenon on Indian Social Media: Moving Onward from the American #MeToo

Asian Journal of Media and Communication E-ISSN: 2579-6119, P-ISSN: 2579-6100 Volume 6, Number 1, 2022 The #MeToo Phenomenon on Indian Social Media: Moving Onward from the American #MeToo Ila Ahlawat Department of Professional Communication, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada Abstract. This article sought to reflect upon the online #MeToo movement in India, as it began to unfold, especially October 2018 onwards. The focus lied upon the role of social media, mainly Twitter, in originating, sustaining and popularizing the movement both online as well as giving it a momentum in the real world, especially through mainstream news media. This article made a concerted attempt at examining technology and its interaction with gendered forms of social media communication. Through empirical and theoretical analyses, concepts such as trolling, anonymity and digital heterogeneity vis-a-vis social media feminist activism have been examined, as have been the structural shortcomings pertaining to class, caste, sexuality and race. It sought to assert that social media carried an effective potential in countering the neoliberal male discourse of selectively granting women agency and visibility in media spaces. Article Info Article History Received: 6 May 2022 Revised: 28 September 2022 Accepted: 29 September 2022 Keywords: #MeToo movement; India; social media activism; social media technologies; gendered performance Copyright © 2022 Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licences/by-sa/4.0/) 19 Volume 6, Number 1, 2022, 19-38 Introduction: Coming Out The year 2018 saw the onset of a popular #MeToo movement in India when an almostforgotten Bollywood actress, Tanushree Dutta came to India in October after having lived in the USA for a decade. She gave a sound bite to the media that she faced sexual harassment at the hands of Nana Patekar, a popular Bollywood actor, during the shoot of a film in 2008, in which her career as an actress went downhill (Starkey et al., 2019, p. 439). This incident served as a larger social stimulation, leading to a deluge of other allegations by women from the movie industry, news media, politics, entertainment and other sectors about their respective experiences of sexual harassment at the hands of powerful men in their professions. For the rest of the year, the issue caught much media attention and ‘predatory men’ were named and shamed in public like never before in the country. The #MeToo movement in India was notably inspired from the #MeToo movement in the USA that momentously unfolded in the year 2017. Susan Fowler, a former engineer at Uber and one of the major names associated with initiating the American #MeToo movement, posted an online blog narrating her encounters with sexual harassment during her tenure at Uber (439). As will also be apparent through this article, the Indian #MeToo was most characterized by a “a convergence of social media hashtagging and news media discussion” (Guha, 2015, p. 155), deemed as one of the necessary recipes of success for online feminist activism by Pallavi Guha. Adrija Dey had argued how social media has created for Indian women, grappling with a rigid patriarchy and significantly hostile legal institutions, not only an alternative space for sharing their experiences but also a platform where women can get solidarity and support (Dey, 2018, p. 135). Starkey et al, while discussing the global ramifications of #MeToo, had similarly contended how the notion of collective identity becomes a central concept if one has to understand the impact of #MeToo, given the impact of social media on collective action (Starkey et al., 2019, p. 438). Their argument was that engagement within a social media community is liberating for women digital users and also grants them a feeling of belongingness and a sense of collective identity, and that #MeToo movement has succeeded in ushering in an enduring debate and distemper to the question of women’s safety and liberty in the workplace (440). This article sought to follow this argument, and centered around the research question of how the online Indian #MeToo movement has also greatly served to grant agency and visibility to women, while also presenting the structural shortcomings incipient in an online feminist movement and its potential limitations in the real world. 20 Ila Ahlawat, The #MeToo Phenomenon on Indian Social Media: Moving Onward from the American #MeToo Of course, Starkey et al have also pointed out the cultural limitations of this movement in the non-Western world, wherein visibility and unfettered agency is relatively harder to access, most particularly among women who are not a part of the “privileged career elites” (440). QZ India has reported how the digital gender gap among internet users in India was far more extreme than the global divide, and that only 29% of internet users in India were women, mostly confined to the strata of the urban user-base. Cultural barriers and deepseated patriarchal traditions in the Indian society in general, and in rural India in particular, were cited as major reasons behind this gender gap (Bhattacharya, 2017) In addition, even when we are to talk of the more privileged, urban class of women in India, the victims of sexual harassment face a major uphill task of facing shaming, trolling, harassment and retribution at the hands of a patriarchy-driven society and the information system, including social media and other forms of media, as well as the institutions of justice, as also expounded through the empirical examples cited in this article. Furthermore, it has been pointed out how India ranks very high in the power- distance cultural dimensions, which essentially implies that “the national culture emphasizes hierarchy and top-down communication, reflected in organizations that are hierarchical and centralized” (441). This contention implies that someone like Tanushree Dutta in India must have faced even more resistance from “formal and digital hierarchies” (452) than Susan Fowler in USA (of course, not to discredit her struggles against embedded patriarchal ideologies in America). On similar lines, Rachel Loney-Howes pointed out how social, racial and economic privilege erve as important determining factors about voice and visibility accorded to victims online. She says, “While widespread access to digital communication technologies enabled victim-survivors to engage with the #MeToo movement on a global scale, it was a certain type of privilege that ‘broke’ the silence” (Loney-Howes, 2019, p. 30). Sreeparna Chattopadhyay’s article for BBC lamented how the #MeToo movement largely comprised the educated, urban and privileged women and how the women working in informal sectors of the Indian society, such as domestic helps, have not found any agency or redressal to their experience (...truncated)