Feminism from the margins: How women are contesting the “othering” of Muslims through arts‐based resistance?

Abstract

AbstractThis paper captures how a women's protest offered resistance to the ethnonationalist state's exclusionary citizenship policy that seeks to disqualify Muslims from citizenship rights and entitlements in postcolonial India. Since the pre‐pandemic period, Muslim women have been contesting this ideological play of the sovereign state power through various cultural and political framing of counter‐narratives through various art forms, including poetry, poetic practices, and graffiti. We argue that this arts‐based resistance has significant implication for how grassroots feminist movements discursively mobilizes theory and practice to build feminist consciousness and solidarity among this minority community as well as create coalitions and networks with broader communities of different faiths. Poetry, poetic practice, and graffiti provide the communicative platform to voice against injustice and violence by those in power. We contribute to the debates on writing differently by integrating the poems and graffiti as an empirical source that brings forth collective experiences to engender empathy and the hope to resist structures of hegemony.