Can We Never Escape the Law? Digital Feminism in India
The Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group and the Future of Technology and Society Discussion Group are pleased to host Dr Monica Arango Olaya, who will present her ground-breaking work on digital feminism.
Abstract: Considering Fricker’s notion of testimonial injustice, this paper explores how gender influences credibility perceptions outside and within the law. To answer this question, I conduct a discourse analysis of 8,200 tweets from three iterations of the #MeToo movement in India from 2017 until 2021. I frame the #MeToo movement in India as digital feminism, defined as networked activism to spread feminist political ideas, provide visibility to gender-based problems and connect protest movements across places. The paper argues that digital feminism functioned as a diagnostic process of how testimonial injustice influences truth paradigms about the law and as a form of influence on legal and extralegal sites. It also argues that digital feminism can produce alternative knowledge to the law and shape behaviour. By focusing on discourses outside the law, this analysis also shows how, as a counterhegemonic movement, digital feminism traces testimonial injustice and credibility constructions in the law. It provides a case for the epistemic hierarchy of the law and how the power of social media can shift credibility paradigms, delineating a social construction of gendered harm. Ultimately, the paper argues that by intervening in public sphere discussions about sexual harassment and rape, the #MeToo movement in India exposed structural injustices of the legal system based on a socially situated preconception of trustworthiness. In doing so, digital feminism altered the credibility economy of gendered harm and might have produced a repository of gendered stereotypes useful to assess the law’s justice.
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