This talk explores how young women in rural Himalayan India use social media to redirect public scandals around their sexuality. In particular, Dr Govindarajan traces how their creative digital production allows them to “talk back” to a village audience in ways that open up the possibility of new forms of speech and action.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr Radhika Govindarajan
Radhika Govindrajan is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas. She is currently working on a book that draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Uttarakhand to explore how public scandals around sexuality serve as key occasions for people to theorize “the village” in ways that illuminate entanglements of caste, religion, gender, property, and the state in rural India.
