This paper examines how progressive rights frameworks are used as gender backlash tools to suppress feminist activism. The author engages with the events following Rehana Fathima’s political act ‘Body and Politics’, which faced strong backlash in the form of censure through law, and discourse capture. […]
Unravelling Backlash in the Journey of Legislating Sexual Offences in Uganda
This paper interrogates the reality of gender backlash in Uganda by tracing the process of legislating on the 2019 Sexual Offences Bill (SOB). We trace the early beginnings of the Bill by highlighting the motivation that guided the framing of the Bill, the role of individual actors and alliances in pushing for the gender equity reform, and the oppositional forces against the reform. Working with participatory forms of qualitative research methods, the focus on the legislative cycle of the SOB as a policy case aimed to enable us to understand what constitutes backlash, and its drivers and manifestations. […]
Caste and Gender Backlash: A Study of the #MeToo Movement in Tertiary Education in Kolkata, India
In the light of the #MeToo movement, this paper explores how the positionality (in terms of caste and class) of female university students in Kolkata, India is employed as an instrument of backlash to pushback their efforts at making progressive change with regard to sexual harassment. […]