Backlash at Close Quarters: Rethinking Feminist Politics from South Asia

Backlash as a defining contemporary political condition has received considerable academic and activist attention, particularly from feminist and queer scholars studying the rollback of feminist and queer gains globally. While there is growing consensus around the urgency of theorizing and resisting backlash, there is less agreement on what precisely gender backlash is, how it works, and whether it is, in fact, a useful framework through which to understand and address the ways in which women’s rights are under siege. This article contributes to ongoing debates on how to productively conceptualize gender backlash in a manner that sufficiently accounts for both transnational continuities and local specificities by attending to how it is experienced by those at the forefront of (en)countering backlash in the Global South. Responding to calls for conceptual diversity, we embrace ethnographic imperatives from postcolonial anthropology that view concepts and experience as mutually vulnerable. By theorizing gender backlash in South Asia based on the experiences of activists from sixteen women’s rights movements in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, the article tracks local vocabularies of backlash to offer a reimagining of the concept in ways that expressly attend to intimate, relational registers. In doing so, we follow Veena Das in theorizing backlash as both structure and event, tracing the absorption of spectacular violence into the everyday, offering pathways through the conceptual, political, and empirical challenges confronting contemporary scholarship on backlash. Finally, we offer reflections on what attending to vernaculars of backlash in South Asia might teach us about strategies to counter contemporary attacks on women and their rights transnationally.