About the Talk
Viral videos’ has become an onlife mode of public shaming of women in Imphal Valley. I explore this practice as coexisting with the history of the women’s movement and a deep-seated misogyny that, along with militarisation, spawns a vigilantism centered around hegemonic gendered ideas of transgression. This enables violations of ‘transgressive’ women by groups acting in the name of the community, rendering women as objects to be shamed into submission. Social media is incorporated into acts of public shaming, recording, and dissemination for deterrence, humiliation, and identification of ‘immoral’ members of the community, eventually mobilizing affective outrage through online circulation. Such a context makes it possible for these actions – public shaming and assault of women by vigilante groups and documentation of these acts for online consumption – to be deployed in the ongoing conflict in Manipur.
About the Speaker
Dr Soibam Haripriya is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, and a Faculty Member of the Ethnography Lab. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Texas at Austin, 2022-2023. She was an FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University, Belgium, 2019-2021, and a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, 2018-2019. Dr Haripriya’s research lies at the intersection of gender studies, violence studies, Northeast India, and digital ethnography. Her work engages feminist ethnography, conflict studies, and experimental writing methods.
