Intimacy and injury

Posted by Becca Parkinson - Wednesday, 4 May 2022

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India and South Africa, while radically different in so many ways, share the dubious distinction of being described as the ‘rape capitals’ of the world. It is true that both countries feature persistently high rates of sexual and gendered violence, and that life for (especially poorer black and brown) women and queers in these places can be extraordinarily precarious. It is also true that – unlike in many other locations in the global south – India and South Africa play enough of a role in the global imaginary that their most shocking instances of GBV receive garish and spectacularised coverage in worldwide media. In this way, very real crises of violence and security that characterise these locations become flattened into one-dimensional assumptions about the barbarity of the south. Rather than amplifying the voices of activists and survivors or interrogating the existence of these forms of violence, their antecedents, contexts, consequences and relation to contemporary late capitalist geopolitics, global media coverage instead presents violence against women and queers as tragic but inevitable, an inherent and unquestioned part of life outside the wealthy and apparently ‘civilised’ west.

Rather than amplifying the voices of activists and survivors or interrogating the existence of these forms of violence […] global media coverage instead presents violence against women and queers as tragic but inevitable, an inherent and unquestioned part of life outside the wealthy and apparently ‘civilised’ west.

Like the masculine entitlement to violence that underpins its existence, #MeToo in the west has been the subject of much contestation and negotiation. Complicated conversations about consent, pleasure and intimacy, about punishment and responsibility, have taken centre stage in the aftermath of probably the most influential feminist moment of recent years. #MeToo in South Africa and India – such as it is or was – has not been afforded this same level of scrutiny, mirroring the way in which grey zones and contradictions are so often expunged from representations of the global south. As editors we aim to present a far more complicated picture of the troubled intersectionalities of violence and resistance in these locations. Using the #MeToo movement as its starting point, we argue that feminisms in the global north have often undermined or simply ignored the agency of women and queers in the south, whose multiples resistances to GBV are significant, long-standing and vibrant, despite their invisibility to the feminist establishments that set global agendas and that have provided much of the impetus behind #MeToo’s seismic social upheavals.

#MeToo in South Africa and India – such as it is or was – has not been afforded this same level of scrutiny, mirroring the way in which grey zones and contradictions are so often expunged from representations of the global south.

Intimacy and injury book cover
Intimacy and injury

Intimacy & injury draws together the work of activists, journalists and scholars from a range of disciplines, from postdocs to professors, all writing in and from India and South Africa. In doing so it shines a light on some of the largely unseen landscapes of gendered violence in these countries. Contributors contextualise and historicise the presence of #MeToo in these countries in terms of their pre-existing histories of violence and resistance, showing (hardly for the first time!) that feminism did not suddenly arrive in South Africa and India with the arrival of the #MeToo movement’s specific terminologies. Rather, they show that #MeToo’s successes drew on existing social forms, while its periodic failure to land related to its illiteracy about local struggles and histories. Other authors highlight the troubling silences within #MeToo and related activism, its erasure of male victims of GBV, of Dalits in India, of queer people, of sex workers: a failure of intersectional thinking that has been a feature of Indian and South African feminisms long before the term was popularised. Some chapters examine the powerful prevalence of GBV and sexual harassment in institutional locations like the university and the state, where violent misogyny and patriarchal dominance are rehearsed, entrenched and even legislated. Still others consider the affect and aesthetics of Indian and South African responses and resistance to GBV, the powerful cultural and creative work that builds communities of practice and of care in the face of the ongoing onslaught of gendered violence in these countries.

In focusing its lens on the manifestations and absences of #MeToo in these postcolonial contexts, Intimacy & injury opens the way for a new feminist theorising of the global south. In asking its sometimes unanswerable set of questions, and in curating its sometimes contradictory texts and case studies, it places contexts and events into conversation with each other in a way that deepens our understandings of feminist, gender and violence in South Africa and India and thus in the global south more broadly. The book takes aim at tired colonial tropes that present southern women as powerless and non-agential, and works alongside much contemporary literature to further unsettle white western feminism’s messianic self-perception. 


Nicky Falkof is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, and co-edited Intimacy and injury along with Srila Roy and Shilpa Phadke.

Intimacy and injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa is available to pre-order now.

The volume is part of our new series, Governing Intimacies in the Global South, which also includes Nicky’s new book, Worrier state: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa.

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