Description
This article examines misogynistic memes as expressions of digital participatory cultures that are increasingly becoming the central sites of virulent and volatile political discourse within the context of the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in India. In late 2021 and early 2022, Muslim women particularly journalists, activists, and public intellectuals were targeted through doctored images and dehumanizing memes that placed them up for mock ‘auction’ on open-source platforms such as GitHub, under the banner of Bulli Bai and Sulli Deals. These memes, often circulated via Twitter, are not incidental artefacts of internet trolling but affective and aesthetic imaginaries that help in understanding anti-feminist backlash against the gendered and racialized figure of the Muslim woman from the Hindu- far right perspective. The article offers two core contributions. First, it proposes the idea of ‘mimetic misogyny’ to theorize how gendered violence is not merely reflected but produced through the visual circulation of memes. Unlike conventional hate speech, these memes evade legal scrutiny by cloaking violence in humour, irony and plausible deniability. Second, it rethinks the notion of the ‘other’ in digital politics by showing how Muslim women are constituted not only as political threats but as affective nodes through which majoritarian fantasies of control and humiliation are played out. It argues that the Muslim women, in this context, become affective targets of nationalist panic- figures that are to be simultaneously silenced and spectacularized. The article underscores how the alt-right memetic political discourse in India, is not merely a cultural ephemera, but part of a larger assemblage of online violence that is shaping the contours of contemporary authoritarianism in the Global South.
