Women's leadership, political movements and minority rights
Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality
- Women’s leadership has been critical to political movements, particularly in relation to minority rights.
- The Shaheen Bagh protests are an example of women reclaiming public space and leading a broad political movement, beyond women’s issues.
- Environmentalism is tied to the rise of feminist thought.
Feminist political organising and minority rights
Women’s leadership and feminist political organising have been critical to all kinds of political movements. This is particularly true in relation to minority rights. In the United States, with the contemporary Movement for Black Lives, Black feminists have been essential to the way feminists have organised and the way the political movement has re-emerged with strength in 2020. Black feminists were the origins of that political movement. We can also think of the #MeToo movement and women like Tarana Burke, a Black feminist organiser and activist scholar who has done extensive work around Black women and girls and the problem of endemic sexual violence in Black communities.
In South Asia, we can see this in political movements that help us articulate a politics of citizenship for our contemporary world in the face of a rising authoritarianism. This context has emerged as a result of the rise of the BJP, a Hindu right-wing political party that has been in power since 2014 and has led to the persecution and massive amounts of violence against Muslim minorities and other minority subjects in India today. We see the rise of this extraordinary fascist imagination, of the exclusion and the extermination of many kinds of people in the South Asian landscape.
In the space of this rise of authoritarianism, feminist thinking has helped us consider how we can organise for minority rights. In contemporary India, states have created the possibility of the minoritisation and the extermination of certain kinds of people. It’s the rise of anti-Muslimness, which has become more virulent and more violent than ever, especially in the last few years.
Shaheen Bagh protests
© Photo by DIPANJAN TIKARI
Feminists have been not only essential but the origins and the leaders of political movements that ask: what is citizenship today? What does it mean to think about justice today? What does it mean to imagine a more just world? A good example of this is the political movement of Shaheen Bagh, which emerged in late 2019, right before the rise of the global pandemic. Shaheen Bagh is an area in New Delhi where women gathered after the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act and violence of the Indian political state against Muslim minorities and against student protests. It is a political movement of largely Muslim women who sat in non-violent protest for over a hundred days to protest citizenship laws that took away citizenship from Muslims in India.
That protest was multifaceted. It was a set of women who came together and sat together. They brought their children. They sang, they spoke and they gave political speeches. And they created a venue for men to come and give political speeches. But they also created libraries. They created ways to feed the community at large. In that space of Shaheen Bagh, this extraordinary radical imagination critiques the way in which the Indian state and the federal government had imagined citizenship to exclude Muslims.
India’s Citizenship Amendment Act
The Citizenship Amendment Act, passed in 2019, was the first law in India to discriminate on the basis of religion since independence and to discriminate in terms of citizenship. It supposedly gave protection for minorities to so-called illegal immigrants: people who didn’t have access to documentation or who were forced to give extra documentation for their legal right to be in India. The Indian state used this to regulate and to persecute people in the borderlands area between Bangladesh and India, and Pakistan and India. The act said that Muslims could never have the right to documentation; they would always be illegal. And what the women in Shaheen Bagh said was that this goes against the very basis of Indian democracy – that India, which has the world’s largest democracy, has guaranteed the rights of Muslims in its Constitution.
In the protests that emerge from December 2019 onwards, you see that people are reading the preamble of the Indian Constitution, that people themselves understand democracy, and that feminists best understand democracy because they sit at the intersection. They are the ones, in fact, who experience the problem of state persecution and authoritarianism the most.
Reclaiming public space and leading political movements
© Photo by Sunil prajapati
The women in Shaheen Bagh are critical for thinking about women’s leadership in political movements that are much broader than women’s issues, because women are defying how we understand public space. In places like India, men – and especially when it comes to Muslim women, Muslim men – are really the ones who have the right to political protest. In contexts like Shaheen Bagh, but also in other political protests, we see women defying the problem of public safety and making a claim to public space themselves. It’s only the coronavirus that ends the Shaheen Bagh demonstration. And that only happens on 24 March 2020. The Indian government uses an old colonial law from the 1890s on epidemics to clear the area and shut down the protest.
Shaheen Bagh is the longest running protest against the Citizenship Act from the last several months. But women also lead political movements all over India. In the context of Kashmir, the disputed territory in the northwest region, women have been leading political movements for Kashmiri autonomy since the 1970s and 1980s. Women have been leading political movements in Assam, in the disputed territories in the northeast region of India, where the Indian state has used and invoked emergency law to lead to massive militarisation. These political protests, which have been taking place for decades, use techniques like women in the nude to protest sexual violence against women by the military in areas like Assam. So, women use all kinds of techniques – the use of the body, the use of non-violent protest, the use of coalitional politics – to imagine public space in anti-masculine ways and to retake and reclaim public space for themselves. This is the radical imagination of feminist political organising, which has a far greater reach than just a narrow realm of women’s rights.
Where is it safe to be a woman activist?
In the Movement for Black Lives in the United States, we see Black women and Black queer people taking leadership. They do so out of necessity because the social and political conditions that we live in have led to the incarceration of black men. And policing largely leads to the death not only of Black men, but Black women. There’s no space where one can be a woman of colour and a political leader, or part of a political or social movement, without it being dangerous. But in these political movements, whether it’s in the global north or in the global south, women of colour take leadership positions. They come out in mass, call themselves mothers and daughters on behalf of political movements, because they see it as a necessity, but also because women of colour are perpetually in danger.
Particularly if you’re a minoritised woman, a woman of colour, or in the context of South Asia, minoritised, poor or Dalit from the depressed classes, what’s at stake every day is your life, your body and your right to sexual autonomy. Political protest is a part of a continuum of the experience of women of colour who fight every single day for the right to be women, for the right to have political autonomy, for the right to have autonomy and sovereignty over their body. They are threatened every single day in their lives. Putting themselves on the line to be part of political protest, whether it’s the Movement for Black Lives, Shaheen Bagh, or movements for Kashmiri autonomy, isn’t surprising. It makes sense that women of colour and minoritised women are taking leadership in those positions because they know what it’s like to be threatened.
© Photo by Bhat Burhan
Feminism and environmentalism
Feminist theory and feminist activism have been critical to environmentalism since the 19th century. Even white women’s movements have thought about the condition of life outside of the human. In the 19th century, white women are deeply invested in protesting vivisection or the use of animals in animal testing. Feminism gives us the tools to think about life in a broader and more generous way. Feminists have taken leadership in environmental movements for a long time, especially in communities that are deeply affected by the problem of capitalism and the exploitation of the environment. In the United States, indigenous and Native feminists have given us the most flexible understandings of how we have to interact with the environment. Feminism gives us the tools to think about those questions because feminism (especially in the 1960s and 1970s) is fundamentally a critique of colonial capitalism and the exploitation of the environment for the purpose of surplus value.
Feminists are thus critical in theorising how we can imagine the environment differently. This is partly because feminists are the ones who have to create and imagine the environment. When we think about critiques of questions like labour and housework, women are participating in the household in practices of reproduction and domesticity that are essential for thinking about how we interact with the broader world. So, environmentalism is fundamentally tied to the rise of feminist thought itself.
In today’s political movements, young women are taking leadership in critiques about the exploitation of the environment and global warming. They are the ones saying that this is affecting our bodies, the future and the promise of what we get to have. And that’s unsurprising because environmentalism has been critical to feminist movements since the rise of feminism itself.
Discover more about
women in contemporary feminism
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Mitra, D. (2012). Critical Perspectives on SlutWalks in India. Feminist Studies, 38(1), 254-261.
