Hashtag activism and feminisms: a study on the Sabarimala temple entry in India

Feminism in India has been evolving in recent decades, with acknowledgment of intersectionality, the dynamic interrelationship between caste, class, religious and regional identities in media representations of women. New communication technologies, social media spaces and hashtag activism give context to this. But it has also resulted in the evolution of a prominent variant of feminist thoughts among others - right-wing feminism. Adopting components of decolonial theories and positioning itself as indigenous and nationalist, the Sabarimala agitation, and #ReadytoWait campaign on social media is an apt example of this. This paper explores this idea, using the hashtag to analyse the rising popularity of right-wing conservative feminism in contemporary India. The paper, using a mixed methods approach, employs netnography, sentiment analysis of select hashtags and responses on the online voices of protests around the Sabarimala temple entry issue by Savarna women across the political spectrum. The study found, via sentiment analysis, primarily negative feelings about the trends, hashtags, and opinions on the Sabarimala verdict in the examined online conversations. It also found that Sabarimala, as part of the new nation building project, seems to foreground the ideology of disciplining female bodies to fit in the new discursive practices of Hindutva nationalism.