Constituting Anti-Racist Feminism for Today's World.

What are the new ways of constituting anti-racist feminism? Based on our data on the different media depictions of sexual violence in India and the activism and actions generated in the United States to save Indian women, we offer two arguments for constituting anti-racist feminism today. First, we argue that while racism is typically studied within countries, it is important to develop theoretical frameworks that are able to question the processes that utilize over-imagined gender hierarchies in other places to sustain racial hierarchies within countries. Thus the US based media depictions-compared to those in India—present sexual assault as an outcome of non-modern culture in India. The constant visibility of sexual violence in India in the media occurs alongside the near invisibility of sexual violence against women of color in the US. Consequently US is implicitly presented as a safe space for women compared to other unsafe places. Second, we show how affective sociologies of race are used to sustain racist activist/scholarly/policy agendas even as activists declare themselves to be feminists with anti-racist agendas. Erasures of histories of activism and scholarship on violence against women in India, and reuse of  some older colonial tropes, shape these affective sociologies of race. 

feminists are part of the cultural assemblages that lead activists, and scholars to want to save women over there. We argue that anti-racist feminism has to start from a position of awareness and knowledge about the subject of activism. Such scholarship and activism should be historically grounded, be informed by activism, agendas and scholarship already produced in other countries and by scholars from the groups that are the subject of discussion. Most of all, anti-racist feminism has to continue to examine privileges and marginalization locally and transnationally in order to be relevant in todays world.