ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 draws upon specific instances of gendered affective dissent from postmillennial India such as the feminichi debate (2017) and the Kiss of Love (2014) in order to trace the affective currents that mark the cyberwork of contemporary digital feminists. Feminist digital labour in contemporary India resorts to affective practices and redeployments that make use of the digital infrastructure, such as the reclamation of derogatory slurs, the appropriation of scandal as a mode to mobilize publics, the staging of female rage, the use of profanity to perform resistance, the articulation of everyday dissent, and protest modes that emulate the mediality of the digital. The chapter locates these instances, which cause the coming together of moral publics and dissenting publics, against a specific postmillennial moment marked by an unhinging of feminist politics in the age of neoliberalization on the one hand, and the rise of neoconservatism on the other. As this complex moment becomes defined by the masculinization and refeudalization of the public sphere, cyberhatred, moral panic, and neoconservative exhortations to exorcise the feminist digital “devil”, this new language of little feminisms that is popular and affective offers a shift in feminist practice.
