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The aesthetics of “everyday” violence: narratives of violence and Hindu right-wing women

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 03:16 authored by Akanksha Mehta
“Right-wing” movements see significant participation by women who espouse their exclusionary and violent politics while at the same time often contest their patriarchal spaces. Women also serve as discursive and symbolic markers that regularly form the basis of the rhetoric, ideology, actions and policies of the right-wing. However, even as women’s roles and politics within the right-wing remain diverse and important, dominant feminist scholarship has had uneasy encounters with right-wing women, labelling them as monolithic pawns/victims/subjects of patriarchy with limited or no agency. This article aims to question this notion by examining the aesthetics and visual and oral imagery appropriated, (re)constructed, transformed and mediated by right-wing women. Based on ethnographic and visual research conducted in 2013–2014 with women in the cultural nationalist Hindu right-wing project in India, I argue that right-wing women use a variety of visual and oral narratives (from images to storytelling) to negotiate with spatialities and carve out independent “feminine” discourses within the larger language of the right-wing. I also argue that these narratives are “ritualised” and performed in various spaces and styles and remain crucial to the “everyday” politics and violence of right-wing women. The “everyday” politics of right-wing women often contest, subvert and bargain with the patriarchal goals of the larger projects, rendering narratives as sites of examining agency. Using specific examples of visual and oral narratives from the aforementioned movement, this article articulates how everyday violence is shaped by the aesthetics of the nation and the body, and how these aesthetics shape everyday violence.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Critical Studies on Terrorism

ISSN

1753-9153

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

3

Volume

8

Page range

416-438

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-10-04

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-10-04

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