ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 examines the discourse around rape in postmillennial India as it triggers the coming together of affective gendered publics. It adopts a framework at the intersection of embodiment, affect, and technology to talk about body-possibilities in digital movements and their mediated self-constitution as counterpublics. Drawing upon a Deleuzian notion of the subject as an affective or intensive entity to talk about how digitality imagines an embodied and embedded materialism, the chapter analyzes the Delhi rape case (2012) and the sexual assault case of an actor in Kerala (2017) as watershed moments to look into the ways in which rape discourses mobilize vulnerability and affect. In the analysis, the cultural script of rape in the Delhi rape discourse emerges as visibilizing the performance of both patriarchal publics and feminist counterpublics, as it forges affective assemblages. The sexual assault case of the actor (2017), the formation of Women in Cinema Collective, and the #MeToo movement similarly mobilize affective publics that are both transnationally resonant and inflected by the region. The registers of these new feminist modes effect a break from the collectively oriented feminisms of the pre-digital age while ambivalently inheriting their modalities.
