{"id":22023,"date":"2021-09-15T09:27:50","date_gmt":"2021-09-15T03:57:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/?p=22023"},"modified":"2021-09-14T20:23:46","modified_gmt":"2021-09-14T14:53:46","slug":"metoo-india-the-limits-of-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/metoo-india-the-limits-of-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"#MeToo India: The limits of analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This article was originally published here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

6th July 2021<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Nayantara<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Nayantara Ranganathan <\/a><\/p>\n

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Nayantara is a researcher and lawyer working on the politics and culture of technologies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

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In this paper, we study tweets with the hashtag #metooindia, towards understanding the #metoo phenomenon as it has unfolded\/unfolds in India. This study by Nayantara Ranganathan (researcher and lawyer working on the politics and culture of technologies) with support from data-analyst Piyush Aggarwal, was commissioned by All Women Count-Take Back The Tech! (AWC-TBTT!) project <\/a>at the Association for Progressive Communications Women\u2019s Rights Programme (APC WRP). Through quantitative methods, we examine the possibilities, limits and contradictions of studying a movement through a dataset of tweets centred around a phrase.<\/p>\n

The hashtag #metooindia and the public and private conversations that it sparked assembled widespread righteous anger around the prevalence of rape culture and misogyny in India. People\u2019s disillusionment with the \u201cdue process\u201d of law opened up a collective space for personal testimony and validation. But such a collective eruption quickly called forth many other reckonings: of complicity, of punitive justice, of a lack of significant participation beyond upper caste Hindu women\u2019s lives and professional worlds and so on.<\/p>\n

As much of the phenomenon unravelled on social media, the movement is also inextricably tied up with the nature and function of specific corporate American companies like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc. This study proceeds with the understanding that the design and affordances in the current platforms are intentional and not inevitable, and have shaped the public around #metoo, while acknowledging that users nevertheless often navigate platforms subversively and with personal agency; the intentions of users cannot be overdetermined by platforms. The study also tries to locate #metooindia within a time and place, and not simply as a satellite of an abstract global #metoo movement.<\/p>\n

This study proceeds with the understanding that the design and affordances in the current platforms are intentional and not inevitable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

#metooindia: a short history<\/h2>\n

The phrase and hashtag #metoo called attention to the structural problem of sexual harassment and abuse. The phrase itself has its roots at least as far back as 2006, with African-American activist Tarana Burke using it towards breaking the silence and isolation around racialised sexual harassment and abuse. More than a decade later in 2017, Alyssa Milano, a Hollywood actress, urged people to use \u201cme too\u201d to call attention to the prevalence of harassment and abuse in the film industry. Since then, the hashtag #metoo has gone viral, and grown and spread to challenge the limits of legal and procedural frameworks of redress for sexual harassment and abuse across the world. The extension of the generalised #metoo campaign to local-historical contexts has also been visible in how people have adopted country associations (e.g. #metooindia, #metooethiopia, #metookenya etc.) to frame their activism.<\/p>\n

While fights against sexual harassment and abuse have their own histories of activism across the world, #metoo seemed to find resonance, convened old and new voices, and brought dark secrets of entire industries to light. Through testimony and personal narrative, the hashtag seemed to spread across the world and emerge within different cultural and geographic contexts. Through the momentum of the hashtag, people sought to disrupt a culture of tolerance around harassment and abuse. Its successes and failures have been fiercely discussed in public and private spaces, and to some extent, have challenged the understanding of the neatly divided realms of public and private.<\/p>\n

Initially, the movement centred around experiences of harassment within workplaces and industries: film, sport, journalism and so on. Over time, through its wider appropriation, the hashtag also came to be used to testify and narrate everyday experiences beyond formal institutions and fields. As elsewhere, #metooindia was captured by the voices of upper-class, upper-caste working women while propagating easy binaries of oppressor-oppressed. However, already existing campaigns and movements against sexual harassment sought to use the momentum to talk about the failures of formal mechanisms to address routine harassment in, for example, garment factories and within domestic work.<\/p>\n

As elsewhere, #metooindia was captured by the voices of upper-class, upper-caste working women while propagating easy binaries of oppressor-oppressed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The questions raised by #metoo as a feminist strategy to address sexual harassment are several: What happens after<\/em> the testimonies and naming? What kinds of solidarities has #metoo been able to forge and what faultlines have become clearer? As many postcolonial feminists have argued, \u201cwomen\u201d is not a homogenous category, and often does not capture intersectional experiences along the lines of caste, sexuality, class or disability. Other criticisms of the movement point to its centring of identity politics and heterosexuality in a totalising manner,1<\/a> its \u201cindividualist methodology\u201d that does not resonate with structural forms of inequality2<\/a> and so on.<\/p>\n

Dataset<\/h2>\n

Our starting point with the study was the hashtag #metooindia on Twitter.<\/p>\n

At the time of data collection (June 2020), we decided to collect all tweets with the hashtag, dating back to the beginning of 2017. The dataset was collected on 22 June 2020. The tweets were collected by trawling Twitter\u2019s advanced search.3<\/a>We discarded the possibility of collecting data from the Twitter API. This would only allow collection of tweets of the seven days before the time of collection, using their free plan. Twitter\u2019s advanced search allows Twitter users (account needed) to collect strings for specific periods.<\/p>\n

This collection yielded 21GB of tweet data. For every tweet containing the hashtag #metooindia, we collected all the fields of information available about the tweets.<\/p>\n

Analysis<\/h2>\n

Our analysis begins with the data made available by Twitter: content of tweets, number of retweets, likes and replies to the tweets and some information about the tweeting accounts like username and number of followers. Even as these fields of information may not always be the most important facets of conversations, we undertook a basic exercise in quantitatively interpreting text and language, and drawing conclusions from their volume.<\/p>\n

Dominant narratives and personalities<\/h2>\n

The hashtag #metooindia is a site of convergence for people narrating their testimonies, people threatened by stories, news reportage, memes, academic publications and opinions. Co-located hashtags, or those most commonly appearing alongside #metooindia, reveal popular interpretations of the strategy and its arrival in the Indian public sphere. People tweet about #metooindia on a spectrum of allegiance: in positive terms (#metoomovement), more ambivalently (#metoocontroversy, #metoodebate) and often negatively (#metooliars). Other hashtags capture some of the themes underpinning the moment: a shift or change in business-as-usual (#TimesUp).<\/p>\n

Names of perpetrators and survivors populate the dataset. Easily quantifiable artifacts like hashtags show that tweets with perpetrators and survivor names are anchors in reportage and discourse. However, unsurprisingly, these markers are dominated by \u201chigh profile\u201d cases of politicians, entertainment personalities, etc. #MJAkbar, former member of parliament and cabinet minister, #AlokNath, an actor famous for playing a righteous and religious patriarch, #TanushreeDutta, a Bollywood actress, #SeemaSapra, a lawyer are all top hashtags appearing alongside #metooindia. Apart from the influential list of names, tweet data confirms some of the tendencies noted by critics about #metoo: that it has come to focus attention on individuals, even while uniting many voices attesting to the experience of harassment.<\/p>\n

Much like Hollywood\u2019s prominence within the American #metoo discourse, testimonies around Bollywood dominate conversation in volume. #Bollywood appears not only as one of the top hashtags, but most top tweets are also around Bollywood personalities. One possible reason is the high uptake by entertainment and gossip news sites of stories involving celebrities from the industry. Other industries like #journalism, disciplines like science and technology (#metooSTEM), and workplaces (#SupremeInjustice referring to the Supreme Court) are also visible in the tweets. There are likely many tweets around harassment in other industries and fields, but they are not rendered legible through hashtags data.<\/p>\n