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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
This paper closely examines the networked feminist activism at play in the South Asian country of Bangladesh, by paying close attention to a movement that uses Facebook as a platform for protest and tactical resistance against recent media trials of female celebrities and political figures within the country’s socio-cultural context. This paper explores the ‘Rater Rani’ (translated roughly into English as ‘the night queen’) campaign in Facebook initiated by the ‘Meye’ (or ‘Girl’ in English) network – a Bangladeshi feminist grassroots organizing platform that works towards the equity of genders in Bangladesh through storytelling and design thinking across digital and physical spaces. The ‘Rater Rani’ movement is a feminist intervention that calls for the affective and networked reclamation of a slandering term ‘rater rani’ as a resistance against a pejorative media trial of actress Porimoni who got arrested and harassed by both the law enforcing agency and the media for her possession of liquor and drugs while being a ‘woman’. Building on the ‘affective economy’ framework of Sara Ahmed, I explore in this paper how the appropriation and the affective reclaiming of the derogatory term by these feminist activists, works as an intervention against gender-based stereotyping and moral policing of society. Using the concepts of parasitic resistance by Anna Watkins Fisher, and tactical media by Rita Raley, this paper argues that through the re-appropriation and tactical mobilization of a slandering term used towards women, the affective and networked community in Facebook opens up alternative ways of resistance which I call playing against the system of paternalistic moral policing, media trial, and heteropatriarchal oppression and gender-based inequality that runs rampant in the Bangladeshi society.
Keywords: Feminist networks, Affective reclamation, Media trial, Feminist tactics, Gender-based inequality
Playing against the System: Affective and Networked Reclamation of ‘Rater-Rani’ by Bangladeshi Feminist Networks in Facebook
This paper closely examines the networked feminist activism at play in the South Asian country of Bangladesh, by paying close attention to a movement that uses Facebook as a platform for protest and tactical resistance against recent media trials of female celebrities and political figures within the country’s socio-cultural context. This paper explores the ‘Rater Rani’ (translated roughly into English as ‘the night queen’) campaign in Facebook initiated by the ‘Meye’ (or ‘Girl’ in English) network – a Bangladeshi feminist grassroots organizing platform that works towards the equity of genders in Bangladesh through storytelling and design thinking across digital and physical spaces. The ‘Rater Rani’ movement is a feminist intervention that calls for the affective and networked reclamation of a slandering term ‘rater rani’ as a resistance against a pejorative media trial of actress Porimoni who got arrested and harassed by both the law enforcing agency and the media for her possession of liquor and drugs while being a ‘woman’. Building on the ‘affective economy’ framework of Sara Ahmed, I explore in this paper how the appropriation and the affective reclaiming of the derogatory term by these feminist activists, works as an intervention against gender-based stereotyping and moral policing of society. Using the concepts of parasitic resistance by Anna Watkins Fisher, and tactical media by Rita Raley, this paper argues that through the re-appropriation and tactical mobilization of a slandering term used towards women, the affective and networked community in Facebook opens up alternative ways of resistance which I call playing against the system of paternalistic moral policing, media trial, and heteropatriarchal oppression and gender-based inequality that runs rampant in the Bangladeshi society.
Keywords: Feminist networks, Affective reclamation, Media trial, Feminist tactics, Gender-based inequality
Bio
Nusrat Zahan Chowdhury is a Ph.D. student in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. She also holds the position of Assistant Professor (on leave) in the Department of English, Bangladesh University of Professionals. She received her Master’s in Applied Linguistics and ELT, and Bachelor’s in English Language and Literature from the Department of English, Jahangirnagar University. Her research interests lie in the areas of critical media studies, teaching, and pedagogy, children’s digital media, feminist networks, feminist theories, ecocriticism, and ecolinguistics.