CSAS Lecture Series | Practicing Vulnerability -- Men's Rights Activists, Embodiment and Appropriation

One of the primary strategies through which the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM) in India seeks to challenge the reform of laws of marriage and gender-based violence established through feminist mobilization, is to claim recognition within global discourses of human rights and gender equity, aligning with the messages of a range of groups across the political spectrum. This paper explores how these alignments draw on images of feminism as modernity and menace, and normative masculinity as bewilderment, abandonment and alienation, appropriating the identities of marginalized men and feminized weakness to their advantage. I draw upon my ethnographic fieldwork with Men’s Rights Activists across Indian cities to identify some of the contradictions about gendered and intersectional power within such representations and their connection to MRM movement strategies. I argue that Men’s Rights Activists’ practices of projecting vengeance and claiming vulnerability in legal and political realms are premised upon inversions of discourses of power, elisions of gender, caste and class, and conflations of feminism and the State.

Srimati Basu is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Anthropology, and a member of the Committee on Social Theory and the Asia Center Affiliates. She has an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Ohio State University in Cultural Studies/ Anthropology/ Women's Studies, and her teaching, research and community work interests include Legal Anthropology, Women in Development, Feminist Jurisprudence, South Asia, Feminist Theory and Methodology, Work, Property and Violence Against Women. Following an ethnographic study of feminist legal reform, marriage, courts, mediation, rape and domestic violence law, she conducted fieldwork on men's rights activits, marriage and domestic violence, the subject of her 2013-14 Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship in India and now a monograph in process.