Colloquium Series - "I’ve Heard I’m Characterless”: Scandal, Social Media, and Mediated Talk Back in Rural India

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 women’s 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.

This talk explores how young women in rural Himalayan India use social media to redirect public scandals around their sexuality. In particular, I trace 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 political speech and action.

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