Durba Mitra - Women's leadership, political movements 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.

About Durba Mitra

"I’m the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University.

I am a scholar of the history of sexuality and epistemology in South Asia and the comparative colonial and post-colonial world."

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.

Key Points

• 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.