Current Research Focus & Future Research Interests
For the past decade, I have been interested in developing a deeper understanding of Indian news media’s contributions and influence in strengthening the formation of the Hindu Brahminical masculine identity and its justification of the violence committed towards women and girls. As an artist, scholar, and activist, I utilize my scholarly knowledge to not only build artistic representations but to build on interdisciplinary creative modes of communicating thematic ideas in daily-life scenarios. Art, therefore, exists in everyday interactions, and these social communions become an artistic platform for building awareness and critical thought through a feminist-womanist lens. To highlight my research both within the fields of Gender Studies and Art, the research statement is organized as follows: The first section discusses my research on the representation of implicit and explicit rhetorical tropes on patriarchal masculinities within Indian news media. The second section discusses my artistic practice, as a public performance artist and art[activist].
A Critical Study on Representations of Acid Crimes in Indian News Media
Current Work:
My dissertation, “A Battleground of Scars: Acid Violence against Women and Girls in Indian News Media” examines mainstream Indian news sources to theorize representations of acid attacks against women and girls. This study asks: How does the Indian news media convey messages about Indian masculinity, and, by extension, femininity, and male honor, through its coverage of acid violence? I address this question by cataloging articles and televised segments about acid violence published in six national news sources in India between 2018 and 2021. The reason for selecting this time frame is based on two observations and statistics revealed by the National Crime Record Bureau—2018 marks Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commitment to making India a conservative Hindu nation if elected in 2019. The promises of a Hindutva nation resulted in a spike in crimes committed against women and girls. And secondly, with the strict lockdown mandates placed throughout 2020 and 2021 across India, cases of women being forcibly fed and attacked with acid had risen.
Many scholars have looked at acid violence in the past two decades, but there is no focused research on the rhetorical tropes media engages in when reporting on acid attacks, as many of these tropes are implicit. Through close textual and visual analysis, I analyze how media invokes and maintains ancient traditional codes of Hindu Brahmanical masculinity and conceptions of patriarchal honor that control women’s social, economic, and physical movement. In doing so, the study simultaneously explores the ways in which the media represents women’s transgressions that challenge the gendered norms shaped by these codes of patriarchal conduct.
My observations indicate that the Indian news media continues to downplay the crime of acid violence implicitly and explicitly while also shifting blame away from perpetrators in ways that can help justify the crime committed and also promote the crime. From the void in survivor narratives to the lack of discussions on toxic masculinity and growing misogyny within India’s most powerful governmental institutions since 2014, Indian news prevails in sensationalized news reporting. Media often reports gendered crimes as isolated occurrences rather than a systemic issue, and as suggested by India’s pioneering journalist Karan Thapar, there is much that can be discovered in Indian news media tactics based on what is not reported than seeing what is reported. Hence, the purpose of this study is to constructively examine the more implicit forms of rhetoric on masculinity and honor that are constructed within a patriarchal framework leading to, what I argue is a normalization of misogyny in news media and the legitimization of crimes committed against women and girls.
Upcoming Work on Acid Violence and Gendered Injustices in India:
My work on acid violence in South Asia began in 2004 when the first mass reports on acid violence emerged in Bangladesh. For the following 6-years I was committed to working with numerous Bangladeshi and Indian NGOs to establish the cause of such horrific premeditated forms of violence. Joining hands with other Bangladesh activists and journalists, our collective efforts gained the attention of international academic institutions and NGOs. Though Bangladesh was already seeing a 15-20% decline in reports of acid attacks upon my joining the initiative in 2014, it was largely during 2010 that Bangladesh began seeing a drastic decline in reported cases of acid attacks, and to this day, these numbers are continuing to decline.— 24 reported cases between 2019- 2020 (ASF 2020 Annual Report). With the help of international funds, Bangladeshi NGOs and televised media introduced gender-sensitizing courses through TV shows, advertisements, and other forms of infotainment. It is because of such efforts made in the past proving that through media reformation, violence against women and girls has the potential to reduce. This leads me to believe that the current study on acid violence has the potential in addressing legal and social initiatives in reforming news reporting tactics on gender violence and acid violence in India. During the most recent lecture issued at Centurian University in Odisha- India (one of the few states in India with high cases of acid attacks), Ph.D. scholars from Gender Studies and Media Studies engaged in lengthy discussions on the critical nature of the work but also the immense challenges that lie ahead. However, I would continue to argue that alongside initiatives to support survivors, we also need to introduce new methods of inquiry into and critiquing systemic violence. Hence, this research not only critiques representations of acid attacks in news media but also provides a framework for demanding new policies in the media industry and developing educational and legal initiatives that challenge the masculinist legacies of India’s cultural past.
In a recent monograph titled “The Construction of Patriarchal Attitudes Through the Use of Violence: The Influence of Ancient Indian and Colonial History in Establishing Contemporary Messaging on Acid Violence,” I reference theoretical arguments made by Indian scholars such as Uma Chakravarti and Veena Talwar Oldenburg. This study explores the numerous ways in which colonial/imperial demands and laws played a critical role in the cultivation of new forms of Hindu-Brahminical masculinities that justified particular forms of violence related to the disfigurement of the female body. I look further back into ancient Vedic scriptures, tantric art, and Buddhist codes of conduct that supported such forms of violence against women and girls. The manuscript was published in 2022.
Challenging Discomforts Through the Inclusion of Diversity in Public Spaces
Site-Specific Performance Art
Current Work:
A daughter to a single mother in India, I grew up with all the necessary comforts, but since all privileges were rationed, the three dolls that accompanied my childhood, to this day remain one of my most prized memories. A single child to an extremely busy mother, my fair-skinned, blonde-haired dolls were the best of companions. It is these memories that lead me to start the site-specific performance series titled The Barbie Revolution (2010- 2016). On November 4, 2009, thousands of young Iranians poured onto the streets of Tehran to protest the fraudulent election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. What was striking was the number of women present and appalling to see hundreds become victims of sexual harassment and assault. The same year, Pardis Mahdavi released her book titled Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution, based on the frightful experiences of thousands of women living under Islamic moral policing. Enraged with global dilemmas and discourses around women’s choices to veil or unveil, and the overarching contemptuous feelings about Muslims globally, The Barbie Revolution became an artistic effort to highlight and challenge such discourses among American families. Newly purchased Barbie dolls from stores across San Francisco, Atlanta, and Dallas were reclothed in exquisite silk burqas, decorated in Swarovski crystals, only to be placed back in their original boxes and store shelves from where they were once purchased. Enamored by the colorful luxuriousness of Muslim barbies on display, children of different ethnic, class, racial, and cultural backgrounds gathered to collect their favorite—Parisian Barbie, Veterinarian Barbie, The Statue of Liberty Barbie, a Rock Star Barbie, or an Olympian Barbie. The Barbie Revolution series is a set of artworks aimed at an audience to engage in discussions around cultural diversity, nationality, inclusion, and transnationalism, among the more commonly discussed topics on race, class, gender, sex, and modesty.
Upcoming Art Work for 2023- 2024:
In 2018 I became a stepparent to our daughter who resides in the United Kingdom with her mother. To this day, I love her as my own, but alien to me were concepts of long-distance parenting and parental alienation. A 2021 research suggests that over 58,000 children across the United States are court-ordered into the custody of an abusive parent each year, and in the United Kingdom 1 in 8 children suffer from at least one of the many mental health disorders caused due to parental alienation. As a parent of an alienated child, this study is very personal and controversial, as many scholars of family and child psychology have argued for the lack of attention this growing phenomenon is getting. As a scholar in the field of Violence Studies, I stand by other scholars who recognize and argue that parental alienation is a form of domestic abuse and child abuse and has generated minimal scholarly research within the field of Family Violence studies and Family Courts globally. Based on the data collected between 2022 – 2024, I would like to create a series of family portrait paintings including children in the lives of alienated parents/ families. Alternatively, to spread greater awareness of parental alienation and child abuse, I am interested in generating a set of small billboards and advertisements exhibiting the severity of the phenomena. As it is common for many children living with alienating parents to not understand the psychology of alienation, this practice is becoming far more common in today’s day and age with separated parents living across the globe, leaving children in the hands of parents who often are the culprits of childhood and adulthood traumas. These are not easy discussions, but I hope to shed some light on this crisis.