Intimacy and Injury: In the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa

This book, a timely mapping of a shifting political field around gender-based violence in the global south, brings together academics and activists from South Africa and India who explore not only the disturbing prevalence of high levels of sexual violence but also the long histories of resistance to it. Using the lens of the #MeToo movement, the authors track the histories of feminist organising in both countries, while also revealing how newer strategies both extended and limited these struggles. In proposing comparative, interdisciplinary, ethnographically rich and analytically astute reflections on #MeToo, this book points to new and potentially transformative directions to scholarly debates and transnational feminist knowledge and solidarity in and across the global south.

NICKY FALKOF is an associate professor in the Media Studies department at the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg. Her books include The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa (2016), Anxious Joburg: The Inner lives of a Global South City (2020) and Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa (2022). Her research is concerned with race, anxiety and the media in the urban global south.

SHILPA PHADKE is a professor at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is co-author of the critically acclaimed book, Why Loiter: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (2011), and co-director of the film, Under the Open Sky (2016). She has published both academically and in mainstream media on gender and public space, ethnographies of feminism, feminist pedagogy, risk and the city, middle-class sexualities, and the new spaces of consumption, and feminist parenting. She is currently editing an anthology on friendship and its possibilities in South Asia.

SRILA ROY is professor of Sociology and Head of Development Studies at the University of Witswatersrand, South Africa. She is author of Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (2012), editor of New South Asian Feminisms (2012), and co-editor of New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualising Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (2015). Her book on queer feminist politics in liberalized India is forthcoming. At Wits, she leads the Governing Intimacies project, which promotes new scholarship on gender and sexuality in South Asia and India, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.