Digital feminism in India: sexual harassment digital complaints, the transformation of grievances and legal consciousness

Thesis

The interplay between gender, law and digital technologies is central to engineering social change. This thesis maps and analyses the architecture of digital and legal accountability of sexual harassment complaints in the context of the #MeToo movement in India. It conducts a discourse analysis of 8,200 Twitter posts across three moments of #MeTooIndia between 2017 and 2021. In doing so, it uses qualitative and quantitative methods to construct a ‘netography’ of bottom-up accounts of online sexual harassment complaints and their responses.

Methodologically, the thesis takes a grounded feminist approach to knowledge by drawing on women’s digital sexual harassment complaints as sources for knowledge production. It sets out three main arguments. First, the thesis conceptualises online complaining in relation to the concept of digital feminism and argues that the movement, in its individual dimension, transformed individual complaints into collective ones, impacting dispute resolution. This was made possible through what the thesis argues is digital capital, a form of social capital ascribed to Twitter dynamics, which allowed a form of accountability ‘outside the law’ but in its shadow. Second, it argues that this feature of the movement transformed a crowdsourcing exercise into a form of governance. The movement acted as a diagnostic process exposing the causes and consequences of sexual harassment. It also produced a collective memory with cultural and social effects, altering the costs of not repudiating sexual harassment practices in specific sites and generating spaces for legal reform. Finally, the thesis argues that digital feminism, through collective legal consciousness, worked to decentre and re-centre the role of the law as a polyvocal movement. Ultimately, the thesis provides an account of how digital feminism generated new accountability paradigms, produced collective legal consciousness and acted as a governance tool, socially constructing women’s rights.

Authors: Arango Olaya, M

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-vmea7bo7e
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: feminism and law; digital capital; sexual harassment; digital feminism; the #metoo movement
• Subjects: Social change; Social movements; Legal consciousness; Law; Socio-legal studies; Feminism; Sexual harassment