Select Academic Citations /References / Publications
Our continued collaborative interventions towards shifting public consciousness on victim blame, street harassment, sexual/gender-based violence, the politics of fear, have been theorized by several academicians and authors over the years. In their academic and literary discourses, authors across fields- ranging from public art, South Asian feminism, digital feminist activism, ethnographic studies, urban studies, and more, have situated Blank Noises’ community-based interventions in the context of social change while simultaneously responding to and affirming the nature of its practice. Blank Noise reflects upon and responds to the critique and affirmation. These valuable deliberations inform our projects and interventions.
This section presents a summary of the publications as well as excerpts by 49 authors . These are select publications from the year 2009 to the year 2021. In case you are aware of a publication, not featured here, please reach out at actionshero@blanknoise.org The book, paper or journal can also be purchased by clicking on the source links below.
You are invited to read and reflect upon the discourse and unite to end victim blame and sexual harassment of women and all persons.
2021
“Volunteers are called “action heroes,” “sheroes,” or “theyroes”—those who actively subvert the dominant experience of being harassed to question, engage, and subvert expected ways in which gendered bodies occupy public spaces. More recent interventions engender conversations around public space. In one intervention, “Talk to Me,” volunteers ventured into a dark stretch of road that was locally termed “Rapist’s Lane.” Here they set up tables and invited passersby to stop and chat with them. Participants across socioeconomic class, caste, and gender affiliations were able to move beyond stereotypes of each other to actually converse; each interaction ended with the Blank Noise volunteer offering their guest a rose. The aim was to reshape “Rapist Lane” into “Safest Lane” through respectful conversation and interaction.”
PROFILE: Blank Noise: Street Actions and Digital Interventions Against Street Sexual Harassment In India
Editors: Hemangini Gupta
Publisher- Mine Publishing
Language- English
(2021)
Issue 9 of Magazine - Tracce Urbane dedicated to Transfeminist City
Editors: Seerena Olcuire
Publisher- Orchestras of Transformation, Italy
Language- Italian
(2021)
Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media
Author - Claudia Pederson
Publisher- Indiana University Press
Language- English
(2021)
Source here - https://iupress.org/9780253054494/gaming-utopia/
“Blank Noise and other urban feminists offer an archive of an India that is changing at a frenetic speed, one in which gendered and sexualized bodies are now increasingly thrown together in city spaces. The ways that bodies now coalesce in public spaces is unprecedented in a country in which historically most gendered and sexual relations would be organized in spaces of heteronormative familial homes. The noise of feudal familial violence is not blank, but rather is filled with the tyrannies of caste and religious prophecies that allow women’s bodies to be counted as the family property of men. The interventions staged by groups such as Blank Noise offer a public sound that fills in the unspeakable silence that often defines experiences of gender based violence in the streets and in family homes where one learns that sickening scripts of straight “romance” are a licence to rape and kill.”
Chapter 10 - Blank Noise: The Striking Sound of a Ha Ha Ha Sangha
Writer - Tara Atluri
Publisher- From Book Public Feminisms in South Asia,
Cambrdige Scholars Press
Language- English
(2021)
2020
Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm
Editors: Cameron Cartiere and Leon Tan
Publisher- Routledge, Taylor and Fracis Group
Language- English
(2020)
Source here - https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Art-in-the-Public-Realm/Cartiere-Tan/p/book/9781138325302
Race and Performance after Repetition Chapter- Performance Interventions: Natality and Carceral Feminism in Contemporary India
Author: Professor Jisha Menon
Publisher- Duke University Press
Language- English
(2020)
Source from - https://www.dukeupress.edu/race-and-performance-after-repetition
“The idea that the way a woman dresses can invite sexual harassment or rape is a familiar one. It is used in court and in the media to undermine survivors' allegations, and by perpetrators themselves to justify their actions.
The Blank Noise Project in India challenges this preconception, arguing that if this really is the case, then why do women in everyday, non-revealing clothing still have harassment stories to tell? The project interrogates the normalisation of 'eve-teasing' (the term used in India to refer to the public sexual harassment of women) as something women should either just ignore or learn to circumvent on the streets of India.”
The Blank Noise Project, India
Publisher- Tactical Technology Collective
Language- English
Source from - https://informationactivism.org/en/blank-noise-project-india.html
Summary
Can fun be a serious politics in feminist struggles? That is the question that animates this paper. While claims for the economic and political participation of women have gained increasing legitimacy, the demand for fun may often be seen not just as frivolous, but also as undermining the seriousness of the feminist project itself. The paper engages with three feminist campaigns, two in India and one in Pakistan, that assert women’s rights to occupy the public for fun. The paper refutes critiques that suggest that feminist campaigns to claim public space in the city are illustrative of neo-liberal subjecthood and reflect the birth of new entrepreneurial selves. It also reflects on contemporary feminist debates in India around what counts as feminist, arguing that claims for fun might in fact be central to a feminist politics in the twenty-first century
“Blank Noise also initiated Meet to Sleep, a campaign that invites women to sleep inparks as a way of claiming space. Women take mats and water or nothing at all and nap on park lawns and benches. The Why Loiter Movement has also participated in this project. I have joined this campaign twice, once with my seventy-year-old mother and then five-year-old daughter. As you nap in the park, the security guard will ask you to leave, and the idea is to engage him in conversation: ‘Who has instructed you to ask people not to sleep? Why do you think people can’t sleep in a park? Do you think does it hurts anyone?’ By this time a small crowd has gathered. Everyone has an opinion. Some support you. Some cite law and order. There is a discussion. You talk of people’s rights. Someone might say how much the city has changed and become anti-people. By this time, you have taken a photograph of yourself sleeping or somebody else has. Later you can post it online where there will be more conversation. Much of Blank Noise operates in this way, encouraging conversations both as part of the performance as well as afterwards, online—and, in fact, the online posts are yet another performance, whose photographs must be curated just right.”
Defending Frivolous Fun: Feminist Acts of Claiming Public Spaces in South Asia
Author: Shilpa Phadke
Publisher- South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies
Language- English
(2020)
2019
Summary
This article examines the performative digital practices of India’s feminist campaign group Blank Noise, with a focus on their 2016 project #WalkAlone. The event sought to explore and challenge embodied notions of female safety and visibility in night-time urban public spaces, by inviting women to walk alone in a place of their choosing between 9pm and midnight. In doing so, Blank Noise called on participants to ‘walk alone, together’, utilising digital documentation tools and media platforms to network these dispersed embodied acts. Drawing on my participation in #WalkAlone from the remote position of the UK alongside online documentation of the project, I examine how these tools established ‘digital proximities’ between participants, transforming our solitary acts into collective embodied action. I argue that Blank Noise’s project extends Butler’s notion of ‘plural performativity’ (2015) into a digital public sphere, by constructing a mode of embodied assembly within media spaces. Here, digital proximities between dispersed participants forged a concerted enactment from the private and personal actions of individual women, walking on the stage of the nocturnal city.
“However, emerging from the Indian context and operating in direct relationship to other feminist critical spatial practices within India (such as Why Loiter), Walk Alone was particularly informed by the notion of female in/visibility performed in Indian cities. Reflecting on this typically gendered nature of non-productive loitering in Indian urban spaces, particularly at night, one participant in Blank Noise’s 2016 Walk Alone event described how her solo walk in Mumbai led her to a shop with a group of around ten men congregated outside. She commented that, ‘I didn't feel threatened, it just struck me how I'd never see a group of women like that’ (Patheja, 2016b: n.p.). Another participant noted the few encounters she had with women on her walk in Mumbai, and wrote afterwards that: The places were so dominated by the presence of men that the absence of women was perceptibly felt. At Five gardens, there was an open air gymnasium in one corner of a large maidan and it was packed with men working out at close to midnight. No women here. (Ibid.) She continued by reflecting that: This experiment to access the night in my city alone was challenging but also quite a learning experience. Afterwards, I felt slightly elated, my mind full of the possibilities of what a new city of the future could look like if more women accessed public space in the city and accessed the night in particular. How different my walk could have been if instead of just men, I had also met many other women loitering/walking alone. It would have made it a more inclusive city! (Ibid.) While Walk Alone, much like Why Loiter events, enacted a utopian performance of unaccompanied female presence in ‘risky’ urban spaces, what is also central to Blank Noise’s activist campaigns and particularly prominent in this event is the way that – as Lieder argues – they operate performatively at the level of personal experience (Lieder, 2018: 151-152). It is for this reason that the autobiographical nature of Blank Noise’s politics is central to their campaigns.”
Together, alone? Performance, protest and digital proximities in India’s Blank Noise feminist campaign
Author: Rebecca Savory Fuller
Publisher- International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media
Language- English
(2019)
Source from - https://research.aub.ac.uk/id/eprint/135/1/Together%20alone_%20Savory%20Fuller%20AOM.pdf
Summary
When we work or play through digital technologies – we also live in them. Communities form, conversations and social movements emerge spontaneously and through careful offline planning. While we have used disembodied communication and transportation technologies in the past – and still do – we have never before actually synchronously inhabited these communicative spaces, routes and networks in quite the way we do now. Digital Diasporas engages conversations across a selection of contemporary (gendered) Indian identified networks online: “Desis” creating place through labour and affective network formation in secondlife, Indian (diasporic) women engaged in digital domesticity, to Indian digital feminists engaged in debate and dialogue through Twitter.
Through particular conversations and ethnographic journeys and linking back to personal and South Asian histories of Internet mediation, Gajjala and her co-authors reveal how affect and gendered digital labour combine in the formation of global socio-economic environment.
“Preconceived social frames in the context of contemporary gendered Indian digital social media spaces, coming to us through mainstream, middle- and upper-class/caste Indian social histories, are the idea of the ghar as women's space and the bahir as men's space. Yet, as Jasmeen Patheja's narration of her more than fifteen years of activist work through Blank Noise reveals, it is possible to see that digital activism is secondary to yet a natural everyday tool that is interwoven with the offline campaigns she has worked on.Thus, in the case of movements that engage the digital, we see that activists are strategic in how these tools are used-they do not consider only digital interaction as sufficient for their activist organizing, neither do they see the digital as unnecessary. Digital tools are used as relevant and necessary.”
Digital Diasporas : Labor and Affect in Gendered Indian Digital Publics
Author: Radhika Gajjala
Publisher- Rowman & Littlefield International
Language- English
(2019)
Source from - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332180516_Digital_Diasporas_Labor_and_Affect_in_Gendered_Indian_Digital_Publics
“The nature of interventions designed by Blank Noise has been evolving. The starting point was rage, anger, loneliness, frustration. I learned to see the systemic in the personal and that continues as we build “I Never Ask For It,” a collective mission through which we collect “garment testimonies” from people, who share what they were wearing when they experienced sexual violence. Each garment is memory, witness and voice to someone’s experience. We are working towards 10,000 garment testimonials in 2023. For too long we were made to believe that personal incidents of violence were “one-offs” or isolated. Why is the word femicide used mostly in a single region of the world, when it refers to something that happens around the whole world?” - Jasmeen Patheja
Questions of Trust and Fear In Conversation about Blank Noise
Author: Ayesha Vemuri
Publisher- Articulation Magazine
Language- English
(2019)
Source from - http://www.articulationmagazine.com/questions-of-trust-and-fear/
Summary
Rest/Unrest: Notes on Loitering is an inquiry into loitering– within public as well as in private.
The streets hold the possibility of being a hegemonic site where power is exerted, expressed, and challenged, thus,making it a fertile ground of study where anonymity meets identity. The thesis looks at public and social spaces as contact zones that contain within them motifs that are intertwined with aspects within society that produce and reproduce those patterns into other domains such as work and leisure. The text focuses its lens on loitering, or hanging about while supposedly doing nothing, as a singular tool of resis-tance for collectives as well as for individuals. The argument for this is illustrated through the interweaving of three primary domains – loitering in India and Pakistan by women's collectives who are choosing the path of inaction to activate spaces denied to women, non-work within art as a challenge to hyper-production and the refusal of work/anti-work within art and society. By drawing connections within these topics, Rest/Unrest: Notes on Loitering investigates the fragile relationship between bodily autonomy, art and labour through pleasure politics as a form of resistance. Within the canon of dissent and personal autonomy, the text puts forth the proposal to reimagine how we have come to view loitering, and seek to reframe its position within society.
“Bangalore-based feminist action group, Blank Noise, acknowledge this possibility of cross-mutation occuring between bodies and environment by having more women seen in public in order to remove the anomaly of their presence within these shared spatial realms. In the process, hoping to turn the streets from transient and transitional non places18 to a place of rest and engagement, of leisure and of experience. In doing so, their intension is to train public spaces to be less hostile to women’s bodies. Public avenues such as parks, for instance, have been a place for men to lounge in as they take time out from their daily grind to connect and to rest, but the same spaces have been almost entirely out of access to women unless, they are in company of their families or larger groups.”
Rest/Unrest : Notes on Loitering (Student Paper)
Author: Shubhangi Singh
Publisher- Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture
Language- English
(2019)
Source from - https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/41441
“Blank Noise has functioned for the last 15 years as a sort of laboratory, with hundreds of members contributing to communal reflections that have inspired and helped refine Patheja’s scores. Winning the Visible Award will allow Blank Noise to develop the infrastructure to move on to large-scale public consciousness-raising: starting with the realization of the India Gate installation. India, and especially its megacities, is characterized by an excess of visual stimuli so much so that one needs to make a grand gesture to make an impact. Gathering garments from an immense network across the country, Blank Noise would set off a conversation in Delhi that would reverberate across India and the world.
Blank Noise forces us to ask ourselves: Where would I go if I could walk without fear? What would I see if I kept my head raised?”
Care Force
Author: Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein
Publisher- Curator Lab
Language- English
(2019)
Source from- https://curatorlab.se/pia-chakraverti-wurthwein
Hashtag Chapter- #Person
Author: Elizabeth Losh
Publisher- Bloomsbury Academic
Language- English
(2019)
Source from- https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/hashtag-9781501344275/
2018
“As Jasmeen Patheja, founder of Blank Noise, puts it: “because of our shared vision in some spaces or because we know we exist, there is a sense of a global community… and that has only happened through the presence of web. It’s more than knowing that X exists, it’s sharing and standing there in solidarity with X” (personal communication, December 21, 2015). This reveals an important function of online communities – their ability to foster a sense of belonging among people who do not (or hardly) know each other offline (Wellman and Gulia 1999, p. 341). This sense of collective belonging and identification can help to reduce feel ings of isolation experienced by movement participants (Schuster 2013, p. 17), and help to bolster their motivation.”
The Global Anti-Street Harassment Movement: Digitally-Enabled Feminist Activism
Author: Karen Desborough
Publisher- Mediating Misogyny: Gender, Technology and Harassment
Language- English
(2018)
Source from- https://www.amazon.in/Mediating-Misogyny-Gender-Technology-Harassment/dp/3319729160
2017
“Blank Noise is a public art project (which is engaged mostly in digital as a space for activism)
that challenges the stereotyped “eve- teasing”, and street sexual harassment of faced by women mostly in urban areas. What particularly interested me was the blog Jasmeen Patheja the founder created around twelve years ago, and a particular event in which Jasmeen clicked photographs of men engaged in eve teasing with her and put up on the blog.”
The Materiality of Screen; Emergence of Kiss Image in Visual Discourse (Student Paper)
Author: Anu Karippal
Publisher- Azim Premji University
Language- English
(2017)
“Speaking of combining the practices of feminism and art, Jasmeen Patheja (b.1979) asks, “What makes a feminist artist? Is it purely defined by what the artist works on, or is it also about how one organises work methodologies and practices, i.e. building participatory and collaborative processes with a self-organising structure”. She adds, “I learnt about the feminist movement through feminist art practices. They are plural. Something Suzanne Lacy created in 1977, for example, continues to hold resonance even today.” Shakuntala Kulkarni (b.1950) suggests that politics and the practice might not be so seamless, acknowledging the effort involved in “taking a feminist position in my work and at the same time not losing the focus on aesthetic concerns in it”.”
Risking Politics, Practicing Art: The Precarity of Feminism
Author: Shilpa Phadke
Publisher- The Art News Magazine of India- Volume XX, Issue 1
Language- English
(2016)
Source from- https://www.academia.edu/20916751/Risking_Politics_Practising_Art_The_Precarity_of_Feminism
Summary
In December 2012, the brutal gang rape of a young woman in a moving bus in New Delhi resulted in widespread protests across India. Now known as the Nirbhaya case, this incident generated a mass media furor around the globe, bringing intensified attention to sexual violence in India, as well as revealing orientalist and neocolonial perceptions about gender violence in India. In this thesis, I analyse three campaigns that went viral on social media following the Nirbhaya incident. The Abused Goddesses advertising campaign uses images of battered Hindu goddesses to create awareness about domestic violence. Priya’s Shakti is an augmented reality comic book that presents a rape survivor as a ‘superhero’ who embarks on a journey to overturn rape culture and victim blaming. Finally, Talk to Me is a site-specific performative art project that addresses the fear that defines the experience of many women in India’s public spaces, by using the tools of dialogue and community building across borders of class, caste, gender, and language. I view the discourse surrounding these three campaigns through the conceptual lens of transnational feminist solidarity, as articulated in the work of postcolonial feminists such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Jacqui Alexander, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan.
“Through their embodied experiences of different interventions such as loitering, sleeping in public spaces, and speaking with strangers, the members of Blank Noise create moments of disruption in public spaces wherein women claim public spaces as their own. On the one hand, this individualized vision of change can be seen as a model of empowerment that arises out of the affordances of neoliberal politics, which may account in some ways for its transnational success. This discourse of feminist empowerment holds valence in the Global North, situated as it is in individual agency, and reflecting in many ways the discourses of feminist activism in developed nations. However, these actions are most often collective in nature, and moreover seek to build alliances with other communities and social groups. This complicates the reading of individualized social change, presenting a discourse of collective action in which the cumulative work of each volunteer is essential to the larger social change they seek to create. While the work of the Blank Noise collective has also traveled transnationally, it is specifically within communities of feminists and activist-scholars where the work has been most celebrated. This campaign thus stands apart from the previous two in delineating action that is situated within a larger history of feminist activism, and also draws alliances with other communities as an integral part of its own work.”
After Nirbhaya: Anti-Sexual Violence Activism and Politics of Transnational Social Media Campaigns
Author: Ayesha Vemuri
Publisher- McGill University
Language- English
(2016)
Source from- https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/ns0648550
2015
Summary
This article examines how feminist activists, women’s organizations, and journalists in India connected with each other through Twitter following the gang rape incident in New Delhi in December 2012. First, the investigation draws on a set of +15 million tweets specifically focused on rape and gang rape. These tweets, which appeared between 16 January 2013 and 16 January 2014, were collected and analysed with the DMI Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset. Second, to gain further insight into how Twitter enables and shapes civil society connections, the article builds on 15 semi-structured interviews with Indian feminist activists and journalists, who actively participated in Twitter communication on the gang rape incident. The analysis of the Twitter and interview data reveals how the platform allows these actors to make ad hoc connections around particular protest issues and events. These connections alter both activist and journalist practices, and ultimately facilitate the current transformation of public discourse on gender violence. Twitter helps to keep this issue consistently on the front burner. In this sense, a significant shift from the past has occurred, when media coverage typically died out after an incident ceased to be news. Yet, our study also suggests that connectivity is tempered by Twitter’s limited Indian user base, and users’ focus on the “crime of the day.”
“An especially important theme in the interviews, which corresponds with the findings of Ahmed and Jaidka (2013), was that Twitter appears to substantially lower the barrier for people in India to become involved in activism and to be drawn into activist communication. For example, Jasmeen Patheja from Blank Noise, a community public art project that seeks to confront street harassment, told us about a tweetathon she ran after the Delhi gang rape, in which people from different professions were invited to make a pledge to keep the streets safe for women. Many of these people had never been involved in activism; for them Twitter provided an easy entry into the campaign for public safety.Social media connectivity, however, not only lowers the barrier to entry into activism, but also lowers the cost of setting up an activist project or organization. “
Connecting Activists and Journalist: Twitter Communication in the Aftermath of the 2012 Delhi Rape
Author: Thomas Poell ad Sudha Rajagopalan
Publisher- Journalism Studies
Language- English
(2015)
Summary
This thesis concerns Indian middle class men’s fear of violence in public spaces. It attempts to broaden the perspective of the implications of fear of violence. Both the public and academic discourses on violence in public spaces in India are centred on the notion of the female victim. In this thesis I argue that we need to open up a strict binary understanding of only women as vulnerable and affected by the fear of crime in public spaces. I discuss the gendered implications of different types of violence, and how different identity categories, beyond and across gender, have an impact on middle class men’s fear. In addition to this I assess how the fear for others’ safety and the masculine ideal of being a protector has an impact on men’s personal fear of violence. To understand how fear of violence in public spaces is affecting lives in India, it is necessary to not restrict ourselves to only women’s narratives. This thesis is an attempt at putting men’s fear of violence on the agenda, and hopefully it contributes to a widening of the understanding of fear of violence in public spaces.
”Understanding the fear of sexual violence as a specifically feminine fear is problematic, because men can also be victims of sexual violence. Though the heteronormative middle class man in India might not fear this, there are categories of men who are particularly vulnerable to it, and where the fear of sexual violence might be high. Men who have sex with men and transgendered individuals are examples of men who might be more vulnerable to sexual violence. Different spaces might also be a factor that makes menmore vulnerable to sexual violence; prisons might be one such space.”
Villain, Victim, Hero or Creep: The fear of violence amongst middle class men in urban India (Student Paper)
Author: Amalie Meling Vikse
Publisher- University of Oslo
Language- English
(2015)
Review of New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities Author: Pooja Juyal
Publisher- Asian Journal of Women Studies
Language- English
(2015)
Source from- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/12259276.2015.1029228
2014
“The landmark judgment delivered by the Delhi High Court on 2nd July 2009 for reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and its reinstatement on 11th December, 2013 seemed to spearhead search for alternative spaces for performances. This paper aims at mapping and studying some LGBT protest performances emerging post recriminalisation of homosexuality under Section 377. Events and performances including LGBT pride parade, gay for a day (on facebook) and Global day of Rage have stirred public conscience and are known for the level of performativity and feminist/queer strategies like parody and camp. Considering the events during this period the categorization of the performances as feminist/queer itself is problematised. This paper aims to identify potential common ground wherein the feminism-queer divide breaks to produce alternative performance spaces. The case studies are historicized and considered through impact of state surveillance, the market, globalization, culture and changing feminist/queer ideology in the above mentioned case studies.”
Performing Pride/ Performing Protest: LGBT Activism Post
Recriminalizing of Section 377 (Refers to Blank Noise’s practice) Author: Priyam Ghosh
Publisher- Rupkatha Journal
Language- English
(2014)
Source from- https://rupkatha.com/post-recriminalizing-of-section-377-extract/
“Unlike Gomes and Shah, who use SNS for resistant acts, Jasmeen Patheja, co-founder of Blanknoise, a campaign against sexual harassment, uses Facebook as a public platform to launch events and mobilise people onto the streets. “It is a back and forth process,” says Patheja, adding, “while working with this medium (SNS), we realised we were engaging in sustained public dialogue.” One of their most popular events, ‘I never ask for it’, asked members to put up status messages on their Facebook page about their experiences of sexual harassment without mentioning it directly. At the end of the message, they would add ‘I never ask for it’. This act of dissent aimed at expressing dissatisfaction with the male gaze went viral, with even men responding to it. This campaign was considered successful in the sense that it had some effect on male attitudes to female sexuality, at least amongst those men who responded positively to the cause.”
Activism via Social Networking: A Case Study of Urban Indian Women Facebook Users Author: Paula Ray
Publisher- The University of Auckland
Language- English
(2014)
“The discourse on sexual violence in India is highly gendered and plays on a victim-villain dichotomy where the violators can only be men and the victims, only women. This becomes visual in the RTR archive on various levels. First of all, when men are mentioned without being villains in cases of sexual violence it tends to be as potential protectors of women. The Nirbhaya case had two victims, a man and a woman. In an article collected in RTR a lawyer involved in the case justified the violence with claiming that the man was responsible for what happened. But it was not the violence the male victim had experienced he was guilty of, but the fact that he had brought a woman out after dark. As we see generally in the RTR archive, restricting women is seen as the solution to the problem of sexual violence.”
Fear of Blame in Urban Spaces: Analysing the role of justification in the discourse on sexual violence (Student Paper) Author: Amalie Meling Vikse
Publisher- University of Oslo
Language- English
(2014)
Summary
Ten years after the first Reclaim the Night marches in the late 1970s began to galvanize women around the right to move freely in public and private space without fear of violence, a local governance-based movement to promote women’s safety developed in European and Canadian cities and was later diffused to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This movement drew on urban planning and design as a means to promote women’s empowerment. This paper traces the collective history of this loosely coordinated movement of community advocates, local politicians (femocrats) and researchers, among others. Focusing on three case studies, we mark the advancements of theoretical frameworks and practical tools as the women’s safety movement internationalized and reflect on achievements and challenges.
“Activists in cities of the South reintroduced the centrality of cultural expression in the struggle against violence against women, as had earlier been displayed in Reclaim the Night marches. For instance, Raising Voices from Uganda generates murals, radio shows and games in their efforts to publicize positive anti-violence images; many Latin American initiatives include artistic installations as part of individual and community “healing processes”;and Blank Noise from India uses street theatre, stickers on subways and websites to question attitudes about street harassment.”
Partnerships for women's safety in the city: "four legs for a good table" Author:Carolyn Whitzman, Caroline Andrew and Kalpana Vishwanathan
Publisher- Sage Publications
Language- English
(2014)
Source from- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956247814537580
Tatort und Schauplatz: Reprasentation und Rezeption Sexueller Gewalt Gegenuber Fraun in der zeitgenoissischen Kunst (The crime scene and the venue. Representation and reception of sexual violence against women in contemporary art) Author: Alexandra Verena Mackel
Publisher- Universitat Munchen
Language- German
(2014)
2013
Mapping Gender: Bodies and Sexualities in Contemporary Art Across the Global South Author:Susan Hapgood
Publisher- School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Language- English
(2013)
“As Patheja completed projects, she found that she needed to find different ways to overcome stigma and people’s aversion even to describing unpleasant interactions with aggressive men as sexual abuse. Themes began to emerge, which had to do with anxieties about the body and particularly changes in the body. She argued that “blame, shame, and guilt are at the core of the silence and discomfort around the issue.” Blank Noise was devoted to “building testimonials, creating vocabulary, and creating a safe space for people to be able to talk about their experiences.”
Human Rights and Social Media in India: Blank Noise
Authors -Elizabeth Losh
Publisher- Connected Learning Alliance
Language- English
(2013)
Source from- https://clalliance.org/blog/human-rights-and-social-media-in-india-blank-noise/
Summary
Following sexual assaults on women in public spaces in cities, discussions tend to frame the issue in terms of women’s safety in the streets rather than their right to access public space. The overarching narrative appears to be that cities are violent spaces that women are better off not accessing at all. This paper attempts to make a case for women and others accessing a city which is perceived as hostile, and to do so without being censured. It argues that loitering offers the possibility of rewriting the city as a more inclusive, diverse and pleasurable one.
“The Blank Noise project’s recent initiative, “Talk to Me”, reflects on the question of how to make cities friendlier. One evening they set up five tables and two chairs on a street in Bangalore where sexual harassment often takes place. Volunteers sat at these tables and invited strangers to talk with them.The idea was to build a dialogue across gender and class divides. This initiative offers one way of thinking about the politics of public space. Such initiatives valuable though they are in furthering our engagement with the ideologies of space cannot but be occasional performances and are thus out of the everyday. However the idea of setting up sitting spaces is one that has been proved to invite more people to hang out in public space. What if more streets had such spaces inviting all kinds of people to sit, chat and hang out? I would argue that the creation of more spaces to hang out, thus legitimising this “loitering” would transform streets making them busier, occupied by a variety of different groups and therefore friendlier.”
Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities: Refections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space Author:Shilpa Phadke
Publisher- Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Language- English
(2013)
Source from- https://www.jstor.org/stable/23528480
2012
“Blank Noise seeks to break down the gender identities prescribed by nationalistic ideologies and interprets the Indian urban environment as a site where these ideas are contested. While traditional identity cultural models have placed women in the private sphere, at the same time urban spaces signify modernization and women are claiming their right to public representation. As women gain agency in urban environments, sexual violence and street harassment function as a form of social control in an attempt to maintain “Indian” cultural norms.”
On Sexual Violence: Indian Artists and Public Engagement Author:Hannah Kennedy
Publisher- University of Connecticut
Language- English
(2012)
“Most street interventions, which are collaboratively planned through emails and online discussions, evince a carnival-like quality and a certain political theatricality, and borrow techniques from the global ‘take back the night’ movement. For example, in Y RU looking at me Blank Noise members stand in silence at traffic intersections with red reflective tape on their bodies that spells out the phrase. Once the traffic lights turn green, members disperse into the crowd, hand- ing out leaflets on street sexual harassment. The intervention is ‘gay triumphant, and at the same time, mocking and deriding’ (Bakhtin 1984: 11–12) of the gendered status quo of the street, and Blank Noise hopes to disrupt the idea of ‘woman as image’ and ‘man as bearer of the look’ (Mulvey 1992: 27).”
Offline issues, online lives?: The emerging cyberlife of feminist politics in urban India Author:Trishima Mitra-Kahn, Srila Roy
Publisher- New South Asian Feminisms, London: Zed Books. Pp 108-130.
Language- English
(2012)
Source from- https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/new-south-asian-feminisms-9781780321899/
2011
Summary
Sexual harassment is a global issue. In India, we often refer to it as eve-teasing. In a recent case in Mumbai, two young men, Keenan Santos (24) and Reuben Fernandez (29) were stabbed on 20 Oct 2011 while confronting some unknown men eve-teasing their female friends. Santos and Fernandez had to lose their lives in refusing to accept this misbehaviour and making their point about ‘zero tolerance’ to sexual harassment. This commentary attempts to reflect on the current situation of sexual harassment in Mumbai city.
“Sadasiva Bhagat thinks, ‘Media professionals must all get together and seriously address this issue in a way that may lead to a change in people’s mindset.’ Artists too, have responded to the issue of sexual harassment in virtual for a such as the Blank Noise project. Wenews describes it thus, ‘Blank Noise, an India-based blog run by three women in three different cities, encourages reader participation in documenting accounts of ‘eve-teasing,’ the Indian equivalent of street harassment. It is also a resource for coordinating protests and meetings. The blog has helped muster support for projects such as the ‘Did You Ask for It’ art installation in which readers donate articles of clothing worn on days they were harassed, ranging any where from baggy flannel button-ups to floor-length skirts to pairs of jeans. The work is an attempt to challenge the misconception that harassment is the result of revealing clothing. Beyond its networking capacities, the blogosphere serves the movement against street harassment with a certain eye-for-an-eye type of vigilantism. Here, the anonymous gaze is female and women become private perpetrators who publicly objectify harassers.’"
"I did not ask for it" Sexual Harassment Impressions from Mumbai Author:Indira Gartenberg and Lakshmi Priya
Publisher- ESocialSciences
Language- English
(2011)
Source from- https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id4574.html
Summary
Communication Rights is a key issue in contemporary societies, especially in a country like India, which faces major communication deficits. Negotiating Communication Rights explores some of the most important aspects of communication rights movements in India.
Beginning with the theoretical aspects of communication rights, the book deals with five case studies related to significant movements of our times, namely, the Right to Information, Free and Open Source Software, Women and Media, Community Radio, and Citizen Journalism. It also analyses the complexity of specific rights issues in India, such as women’s rights, citizen activism and the role of media.
The book explores the processes through which ordinary citizens have developed spaces for self-expression—a concept synonymous with media democratisation. The author argues for the need for streamlining of communication rights movements in India and for an India-specific framework for communication rights.
“Blank Noise reflects in some ways a newer form of feminist action in India.”
“One of the significant aspects of Blank Noise is that the objective is not only to create awareness and fight back but also reclaim the space for women in the commons. The streets, shops, pubs, parks during day time and night. The reason that women have to get back before it is dark is that it is not safe. How to make the commons safe for all is a key concern for Blank Noise.”
Negotiating Communication Rights: Case Studies from India Author:Pradip Nanin Thomas
Publisher-Sage Publications
Language- English
(2011)
Source from- https://www.amazon.in/Negotiating-Communication-Rights-Studies-India-ebook/dp/B06ZZ1SXHL
2010
“Over six years later, there are Blank Noise chapters all over India, with members who engage in forms of public performance and street action, with guidance from Patheja. Patheja also oversees many online and offline projects, including ones targeting men and silent spectators, and the ‘‘I Never Ask for It’’ campaign. Women in India who wear jeans and other nontraditional clothing are blamed for causing eve teasing. At one point in her life, Patheja had internalized this belief and changed the way she dressed to wear traditional Indian clothes. But she was still harassed. To combat such harmful and false victim-blaming, she is collecting clothing for a ‘‘I Never Ask for It’’ campaign to visually demonstrate the range of clothing women are wearing when men eve tease them. As of October 2009, she had collected over 200 articles of clothing and she hopes to have 1,000 articles before she exhibits them.”
Stop Street Harassment : Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming for Women. Author: Holly Kearl
Publisher-Praeger
Language- English
(2010)
Source from- https://products.abc-clio.com/ABC-CLIOCorporate/product.aspx?pc=A2949C
“The Implications of Street Harassment This type of degradation has been trivialized and women don’t talk about it. This continues to perpetuate the silence and we become socialized to ignore it. It is much more than just an annoyance we should just learn to live with. Any form of sexual harassment is about power and control. To understand street harassment we have to analyze the complex relationship between gender and power. It is important to remember public sexual harassment has much larger reaching effects than just the isolated incidents. When an individual experiences repeated incidents of street harassment, it can have a major affects on their sense of safety, self esteem, how they view their own self worth, and it can even have a negative affect onone’s interpersonal relationships.Fighting Street Harassment. Egypt Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights: Research report on prevalence Rallies and marchesInternational conferences Creating education toolkits for teachers Lobbying for laws.India Members of Blank Noise in India challenge the notion that public places are for men and are collecting clothing women were harassed wearing as part of their “I Never Ask for It Campaign”. Lebanon & Mauritius Lebanese activists have created an anti-harassment heroine, Salwa, and havecartoons to educate youth about sexual harassment In Mauritius, activists produced a report on streetharassment, held discussion groups, met with stake holders, and held educational concerts on the topic.”
Stop Street Harassment and Holla Back! Author:Shannon Lynberg & Holly Kearl
Publisher-National Conference for College Women Student Leaders
Language- English
(2010)
Summary
The new forms of youth activism in the 21st century, due to the global societies “shift into a network society” (Castells, 2009) have been an emerging topic in both academic and policy-making circles. Debates around the benefits and limitations of these new forms, usually associated with new media technologies and transnationalism, have risen, but the paper argues that they are premature given the gaps in the existing perspectives used to study the phenomena. The paper seeks to gain a better understanding of contemporary youth movements in the Global South by focusing on a youth standpoint and anchoring the research on the case study of Blank Noise, a collective addressing street sexual harassment in urban India. The analysis delved into the way youth approach social change and organize themselves as a movement, guided by the four elements of social movements (Offe, 2008): issue, mode of action, values, and Actors.
“BN’s main goal and impact are at the personal, individual level of people who are a part of the collective facilitated through performance-based interventions on the streets and collaborative projects as well as discussions on the web. Having empowerment as an aim likens BN to feminist collectives, both having the ideology of personal changes being political changes.”
Beyond the Digital: Understanding contemporary forms of youth activism. The case of Blank Noise in India Author:Maesy Angelina
Publisher-Erasmus: International Institute of Social Studies
Language- English
(2010)
Source from- https://www.blanknoise.org/blog.blanknoise.org//2010/12/beyond-digital-series-maesy-angelina.html
Konst i der offentliga rummet i Indien Author:Tamara Malmestrom de Laval
Publisher-Museum of Sketches, Lund, Sweden
Language- Swedish
(2010
Summary
The definitive assessment of contemporary Indian art Khoj International Artists Workshop was established in 1997. Based on a model of learning by exchange, the initiative has impacted contemporary art practice in a fundamental manner. To celebrate ten years of its existence, Khoj brings together an unusual collection of critical essays by distinguished writers and the work and interviews of 101 artists who have been connected with Khoj over the years.
The Khoj Book
Authors / editors -Pooja Sood
Publisher-Collins India
Language- English
(2010)
Source from- https://www.amazon.in/Khoj-Book-Contemporary-Indian-Art/dp/B0072I0THC
2009
“ The Pub Bharo action, i.e. a pub crawl, made a similar claim of space as the Chaddi Campaign, when it involved the claims of identity and of representation when embodying the depraved moral in space urging women “drinking and cigarette smoking” to access pubs and bars. One blog post tells that “It does not matter if you are actually not a pub-goer or not even much of a drinker. Let us raise a toast (it can be juice) to Indian women”. A toast is raised to all Indian women in a place that, traditionally, is restricted to men, and by making this entrance goes from being a victim to a fighter resisting “moral policing”, in an ambivalent space in the intersection between publicity and privacy (Phadke 2005; Tonkiss 2005; McCann 1999).
A Footnote: A ”victim”, but not a passive silent victim, which is clear from the narratives and the initiatives such as Blank Noise.”
Producing Public Space: Take Back the Night, Pub Crawls and Pink Underwear
Authors / Editors - Irmelin Joelson and Abby Peterson
Publisher- Goteborgs Universitet Sociologiska Institutionen
Language- English
(2009)
“Whatever is done must be accompanied by advocacy that keeps the focus on sex discrimination rather than affronts to modesty, or chivalric protection. [...]. In India, the Blank Noise Project stages public protests to educate people about public harassment. For example, a large group went to a market where men stood around leaning on a railing looking at passersby and harassing women. The women reclaimed the space, and silently surrounded a fellow who was harassing a woman. Blank Noise uses its internet to publicize actions and to fight traditional interpretations of street harassment. For example, in order to counter the view that women bring on harassment themselves by wearing skimpy clothing, Blank Noise asked women to send in the clothes they were wearing when they were harassed. They included chadors and traditional clothing, as well as western garb.”
Sexual Harassment in Public Spaces
Authors / editors - Margaret A. Crouch
Publisher-Social Philosophy Today
Language English
(2009)
Source from- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273692976_Sexual_Harassment_in_Public_Places
