#METOO IN INDIA: MISOGYNY AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE MEN’S RIGHTS MOVEMENT ON TWITTER

Background
The #MeToo movement in India, as a manifestation of the global #MeToo has invested in the empowerment of Indian women since its inception in October 2017. The digital movement sent reverberations across the country in unprecedented ways and took off on a massive scale in October 2018 (Mathur 2018). The movement constructed around the central hashtag, #MeTooIndia, has successfully created a much-needed discourse on sexual abuse, and harassment at the intersection of sex, power and politics on Twitter. The digital public sphere has facilitated feminist experiences of ‘coming-out’ with personal stories and experiences for the urban Indian woman. 
Research Problem

Cyberspaces in the South are complex and have a different set of constraints from the North, particularly for women and other marginalized collectives. In the discussion of the cyber-South, Gajjala and Oh pose the most important questions: “Will women of the South be allowed or able to use technologies under the conditions that are contextually empowering to them? Within which internet-based contexts can the women of the South truly be heard (2012, 8) or seek to be independent? “Hierarchies of power are deeply embedded in Internet culture as a form of invisible control” (15) of digital feminist spaces of the Global South. Furthermore, the issue of who speaks for whom (Spivak 1988) becomes even more important owing to lack of access, resources, voluntary participation, and representation of a significantly large population.

This is apparent in the discourse surrounding the #MeTooIndia movement where heteropatriarchal and masculinist Hindutva activists organize campaigns of harassment and misogyny against women through a call for men’s rights activism that infiltrates the Indian digital feminist movement. Digital platforms in India are becoming increasingly violent, misogynistic, and sexist spaces that enable the congregation of far-right communities that further the everyday offline trauma that women face in the Global South. The presence of hate speech, violence, and masculine toxicity directed towards women acts as a deterrent in participation of women online and in their coming-out in public without anonymity. In addition, this creates unsafe spaces for women and other gendered minorities to recount their experiences with sexual abuse. As feminist activism is becoming increasingly visible on social media platforms; as feminist communities expand and are re-imagined through the use of new media (Mendes et al. 2019, 1), it must be noted that digital culture can be an incredibly complex and toxic space for gendered bodies that are constantly vilified, and objectified. In the context of #MeTooIndia, participants recede into toxic behaviour and vilify the movement for its fake cases, and accusations, or trivialize it for its lack of legal process. 

According to authors Vickery and Everback, “mediated misogyny” (2018) oftentimes deliberately infiltrates feminist movements to incite violence, hate, and toxicity within the movement and directed towards members. Serisier’s work on rape culture also engages with the emergent culture of speaking out effectively about sexual abuse and rape using online platforms, while underscoring that the act of speaking out can be attributed to certain privileged voices (2007). Under what conditions are we as a collective authorized to speak out, who is receiving, listening, and verifying are important questions that any digital feminist movement needs to consider (2007). 
Research Question
This paper explores the emergence of a misogynistic Men’s Rights Movement surrounding the #MeToo in India on the social media platform Twitter that leads to gendered exclusion and silencing of feminist collectives in the name of free speech. Using discourse analysis, inductive coding, and close-reading of the corpus of tweets, the research asks the following questions – Does the discourse surrounding #MeTooIndia demonstrate mediated hate speech, violence against women, misogyny, and an emerging men’s rights activism? If so, what is the language of violence against women? How do the far-right heteropatriarchal societies on social media employ assertions of independence in their call for men’s rights activism? How are feminist digital movements affected by the hijacking and appropriation by men’s rights activists. 
Relevance

Although feminist social activism, particularly in the Global South, benefits from Internet culture, and its ability to enable the construction of safe feminist subaltern counterpublics (Fraser 1991) for self-expression, congregation and interaction, Indian women, particularly from marginalized communities, who employ the hashtag #MeTooIndia to participate in the discourse surrounding sexual abuse in India are left feeling unsafe, alienated, isolated, and silenced on social media platforms. The study of the emergence of men’s rights activism and misogyny in this context is significant because the discourse around #MeTooIndia, ‘hijacked’ and targeted by men’s rights activists, oftentimes drowns the feminist voice within the movement, leads to the effective erasure of feminist struggles, and creates barriers in participation on digital spaces. In keeping with the theme of the conference, this study also speaks to the congregation of far-right heteropatriarchal societies on social media that employ assertions of independence, and free speech to not merely engage in harassment campaigns against supporters of #MeToo, but also in their call for men’s rights activism in India. 

Method

10,000 unique tweets were collected and filtered through Twitter Web API between October 1
st
, 2018 and October 3rd, 2019 surrounding the #MeToo movement in India. All tweets were collected in the English language to maintain methodological consistency, and retweets were excluded from the sample dataset. Hashtags employed as filters include #metooindia, #indiametoo, #LoSHA, #womanhood+#metooindia, #womanhood+#indiametoo, #sisterhood+#metooindia, and #sisterhood+#indiametoo. Hashtags specifically used in the Indian context have been selected. All tweets are manually annotated and labelled for the specific criterion (below) that is marked on a binary scale of 0/1 where ‘Yes’ denotes 1, and ‘No’ denotes 0 - 

Does this tweet indicate misogyny, violence against women, hate speech or advocation for men’s rights activism?

In addition to the inductive coding method, this research employs the critical discourse analysis framework as well as close-reading of tweets to further understand how feminist spaces are dominated by a call for men’s rights activism, how heteropatriarchal societies employ assertions of independence on Twitter, and how digital feminist movements are impacted by the hijacking of their spaces in the Indian context. As this research is ongoing, the specific number of tweets that indicate misogyny and the emergence of men’s rights activism are pending. 

Bibliography
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Fraser, Nancy. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of 
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Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller. 2019.
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