Media, Feminism and Technology in Postcolonial Contexts

This thesis is situated at the intersection of histories of feminism and the continuing coloniality of gender relations and the rise of neoliberal far right politics in media texts and feminist discourses in India. By identifying three colonial harms to women's movements - erasure, appropriation and ambiguity - it delves into the media discourses and technological affordances that are embedded with biases that inflect and/or curtail the rhetoric and practices of contemporary Indian feminist movements.

Tension emerges between rights-based and popular feminist discourses and between feminism and misogynistic counter-discourses, which is explored through a methodological combination of in-depth semi-structured interviews with feminists and a modified thematic analysis with elements of critical discourse analysis of news media focussing on three cases between 2010-2020 - Nirbhaya anti-rape protests (2012-13), MeToo India campaign (2017-18) and Shaheen Bagh CAA-NRC protests (2019-20)- to unravel the entanglement of Indian feminism with politics and technological change.

By exploring the ambiguous pathways for feminist agency through notions of self-obscurity and platform opaqueness, this thesis makes an original contribution to the literature on decolonial feminist studies through the conceptualisation of equivocal agency. Analysing the problematic triad of believability, perception of consent and victimhood introduces a new vocabulary to articulate these crucial concepts within the MeToo India movement. This thesis conceptualises SMART framing to understand why certain women's rights protests became a national campaign and highlights the residual coloniality in English news media reports.My research cautions against the rhetoric of popular feminism that could be appropriated by far right forces. Crucially, it asks the all-important question: How does the interplay of media and technology impact the narratives of gender-based violence in India?