Speak-out movements from the margins: An intersectional and spatial understanding of sexual violence in India

Using the conceptual framework of intersectionality and space to understand the region-specific nature of sexual oppression and resistance, I examine the politics of scale (Smith, 1992) of Dignity March, a speak-out movement from the margins of rural India. The two-month-long cross-country journey occurred at the same time as #MeToo India but was excluded from the mainstream discourse that situated the problem of sexual violence in a few bad men, a rather androcentric approach to a feminist movement. On the other hand, Dignity march foregrounded the centrality of the caste-class-gender intersectionality to structural sexual oppressions in India and how it plays out in various peripheral geographies. This paper is based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews of sexual violence survivors from mostly caste-oppressed and gender-non-conforming communities who were part of the movement. Drawing mainly from bell hooks’ (1989, 1990) theorising on the margins, I demonstrate how from their situated locations in the margins of spaces and caste-class-gender identities, the communities of resistance built by the survivors pave the way for creating spaces of radical openness across multiple scales. I foreground the many abolitionist practices of transformative justice (Gilmore 2022) that emerge from the communities of resistance imbued with an understanding of intersectional, lived experience from the margins. I argue that the grassroots movement holds crucial lessons for abolitionist or non-reformist reforms (Kaba, 2021) at the scale of the State, reforms that centre the marginalised survivor and their communities. The paper is an attempt to reimagine transnational solidarities in the fight against sexual violence and root it in an understanding of resistance movements from the margins of identities and spaces in the geo-political South.