What issues, which women, whose solutions: a social representations approach to the content and reception of women's rights campaigns in India

India has a long tradition of feminist activism and gender advocacy that aims to address deep-rooted patriarchal practices. However, the specific issues prioritized by different waves of feminism have fluctuated over the decades in accordance with socio-political and historical circumstances. Critiques have been directed at more recent waves for being dominated by neoliberal tropes that assume singularity in the experiences of women in accordance with middle-class ideals and put forth solutions inaccessible to the majority of women. While digital campaigning is argued to have brought in a new wave of feminism in India, little is known regarding what issues are prioritized by this wave of campaigning, what solutions are constructed as optimal to these issues, which women they aim to help, or how audiences might respond to these campaigns. This would be a particularly ripe time for such studies, given the plethora of digital campaigns launched by a variety of different organizations dedicated to gender justice in the country, in the years before and after India was labelled the most dangerous country in the world for women by a 2018 Thomas Reuters perception poll. Furthermore, given the diversity in the experiences of India’s hundreds of millions of women, it is important to understand the extent to which digital gender advocacy in India maintains or challenges the criticized neoliberal ideals that homogenize women.

The three sub-studies in this thesis are thus dedicated to the task of exploring the content and reception of digital gender advocacy campaigns in India, disseminated through the medium of YouTube. The social representations theory is utilized as the main theoretical framework that approaches the broad question of women’s emancipation as a system of socially constructed meanings and symbols located within wider social, cultural, and historical circumstances. Methodologically, the sub-studies employ a range of different materials, data collection techniques, and qualitative analytical approaches in conjunction with tools of the social representations theory.

Study I draws on a sample of 250 videos from three different organizations representing an Indian government ministry, an international non-governmental organization, and a local non-governmental organization to provide a broad overview of the issues prioritized in these different organizations’ campaigns and how the representations of these issues uphold neoliberal ideals of womanhood, adapted to India’s socio-historical conditions. Using analytical concepts of the social representations theory in conjunction with content and thematic analysis, it identifies two hegemonic social representations, the first anchoring and objectifying sexual harassment as an urban middle-class issue and the second depicting early marriage, gender-biased sex selection, and female education as rural issues, with solutions to all these different issues mostly placed on individuals and rarely on institutions. Meanwhile, Study II focuses on a small sample of eight videos produced by the Indian government ministry and the international non-governmental organization, which were exceptionally dedicated to promoting institutional change by reforming the Indian police in tackling gender-based violence. Tools of the social representations theory were integrated with narrative analysis to explore how the role of the police was represented in such campaigns. While the campaign of the government ministry glorified the Indian police and reproduced traditional gender roles within law enforcement, the campaign of the international non-governmental organization critiqued the police, highlighting how the organizations’ identities and relationships with state institutions influenced their advocacy. Yet, despite the premise of institutional reform, these campaigns still do not depart from neoliberal ideals by placing the burden of change on individual women. Finally, Study III explores how an urban middle-class audience consisting of 25 professionals employed in the information technology sector in India, who can be considered a realistic target audience for the advocacy campaigns, react to three campaign videos representing the hegemonic neoliberal ideals identified in Studies I and II. The sample consisted of 13 women and 12 men and employed reflexive thematic analysis and a discursive approach to social representations to highlight how the hegemonic understandings are negotiated in accordance with participants’ own positions, such as class and gender, serving identity-related functions.

As a whole, the studies suggest the dominance of neoliberal ideals in the content and reception of Indian gender advocacy campaigns, characterized by an emphasis on solutions calling for individual responsibility and a dearth of demands for institutional change and collective action. The hegemony of such ideals functions to preserve social hierarchies that position the educated, urban middle-classes as the vanguards of progress and attribute patriarchy to uneducated, rural, and working-class populations in India. However, there was also evidence of alternative understandings that went beyond neoliberal tropes to envision a greater accountability of institutions, to highlight the complicity of the elite in perpetuating patriarchy, and to illustrate the limitations of self-transformation as a solution to structural oppression. The existence of such alternatives may have the potential to destabilize hegemonic meanings and bring about social change in the future. When considered holistically, the studies thus shed light on hegemonic, emancipated and polemic meanings, ideas, images, and narratives of women and women’s issues in multimodal digital Indian gender advocacy campaigning, and how these understandings are in turn re-presented by a reception audience