SASNET Annual Lecture with Sutanuka Banerjee: "When Women Roar: Transnational Feminism and Digital Activism in South Asia”

Digital feminism or cyberfeminism, an avant-garde phase of feminist activism, is a growing phenomenon in the Western countries as well as in South Asia, which is being shaped by various social, cultural and political factors. Recognized as the Fourth-wave feminism, it concentrates on violence against women, bolstered by the patriarchal ideology in different regions across the world and includes the voices of women who have mustered the courage to roar back. 

In this SASNET Annual Lecture, Dr. Sutanuka Banerjee will trace the emergence of Digital Feminism in South Asian regions, in relation to global campaigns and local initiatives, and analyze how these have become a part of the movements in public domain. She will highlight the string of protests generated by online networks which focus on women experiencing various forms of violence and the resistance to counter such incidents. 

Lately, the tragic death of an Indian female doctor on duty at R G Kar Hospital, Kolkata, India raised furore on social media channels and activists encouraged common people to join in and organize rallies and sit on dharna to challenge the culture of silence. Taking this episode as the departure point, Dr. Sutanuka Banerjee will examine how women cry out loudly in public about the systematic discrimination faced by them. It also foregrounds the ways in which women are using digital media platforms to challenge the gender stereotypes and gender inequalities in their everyday lives. 

She will also emphasize how the online campaigns are establishing networks notwithstanding time and place, by interrogating and understanding the interrelationship between online activism and offline protests and its significance in conceptualizing transnational feminism. 

Speaker Bio

Dr. Sutanuka Banerjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Durgapur in India. She obtained her PhD from Aalborg University, Denmark and was a recipient of Erasmus Mundus Scholarship. Her research areas focus on Gender Studies, Popular Culture and South Asian Literature. She has presented several papers in international conferences in India and abroad and published research papers in journals like Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Journal of International Women’s Studies, SIC- a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, Asiatic, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies among others. She has contributed to edited volumes by the publishers of national and international repute. She has also organized various workshops on gender and culture and delivered lectures on pertinent issues.

Attendance

The SASNET Annual Lecture is a hybrid event, available to attend both in-person at Lund University and online via Zoom.

For online attendence, please register here before the event. Upon registration, you will receive an email with the Zoom link to the event.