ABSTRACT
Social media activism presents citizens, especially the marginalized, with an opportunity to form and sustain collective identities in a mediated space through the course of a social movement. This chapter uses #DalitLivesMatter as a case study to examine Dalit women’s online participation and visibility. Our content analyses of Twitter conversations and news articles in the mainstream media show that although sexual abuse and forced cremation of Dalit women in 2020 spurred #DalitLivesMatter, it largely became a space for Dalit men to raise their concerns. For centuries, Dalit women have been victims of triple violence (caste, class, and gender), which is used to maintain the existing caste and gender disparities. Dalit women’s suppression in the form of domestic violence, verbal abuse, denial of education, security, and safety have hardly received any attention or space in the news media. Their absence from the social media space for social and economic reasons, including the digital divide, adds the fourth dimension to their exclusion. By incorporating insights from deeper subjective aspects of the caste system and literature on intersectionality, this study finds further marginalization of Dalit women’s voices in the hashtag era.
