ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter broadly locates the theoretical and historical coordinates against which the research might be situated. Looking at the postmillennial digital moment in post-1990s India as the threshold of new modes of women’s digital dissent, the chapter sketches the preliminary notes towards theorizing the texture of this new politics of action. The chapter locates the mode of postmillennial networked feminist politics in terms of complexly shaping “affective publics” of women’s activism, where “female precariats” – women as complexly gendered subjects experiencing conditions of “gender precarity” in heterogenous, intersectional ways – come together in floating assemblages that are fluid, tentative, coalitional, and non-representational. Emergent technologies, especially the digital, offer sites where women could articulate a popular mode of gendered dissent that is liminal, embodied, and grounded in their everyday experiences. The chapter further places these novel forms of performative feminist networks in relation to a genealogy of past women-centric mobilizations in India, looking at how these “affective digital feminisms” both break with and continue the residual and emergent practices within feminisms in India. The chapter foregrounds an analysis of digital feminist archives and their discursive medialities as a potential method to examine these emergent modes of activism at work in contemporary India.
