ABSTRACT
In this essay, Radha Sarma Hegde reflects on the challenges to read and interpret the cyclicality of gendered violence. The prerequisite for feminist critique has been to maintain a focus on the erasures and absences concerning gender and track the multiply constituted layers that constitute these elisions. How are structures of gendered violence enabled, reproduced and transported by changing infrastructures—a media terrain that has been receiving much attention recently. Drawing on cases that she has written about in her scholarly trajectory, Hegde reflects on the colonial archive, journalistic registers and neoliberal data inventories as infrastructural turning points that remain anchored around strategic reproduction of gendered violence. She discusses the ways in which the image of the woman from the global south has travelled through these knowledge systems through global economic and digital pathways. She revisits figurations of the woman working in an Indian call center, the migrant body reviled for its deviant sexuality and the marked and informationalized body of the Muslim woman. Her objective is to rethink critical trajectories and further globalize the reach of feminist critique within media studies. Leveraging the notion of infrastructure as a point of departure, she revisits cases and elaborate on critical flexibility, political endurance needed to confront and theorize social terrains that emerge anew with morphing scripts of violence.
