Not to blame, but still responsible: Negotiating social representations of neoliberal feminism amongst urban middle-class Indians

Abstract

Indian gender advocacy has been criticised for promoting individualistic neoliberal solutions to issues requiring structural change. Such solutions are most accessible to middle-class women and their dominance in gender advocacy is attributed to the middle-class viewership of campaigns. Few studies have researched how this intended audience responds to such messages. As patriarchy benefits men, it is also important to understand how gender intersects with social class to shape responses. Accordingly, this research explores the reception of neoliberal feminist ideals in Indian gender advocacy amongst an urban middle-class audience of 25 participants, comprising of 13 women and 12 men in Bengaluru, India. The theoretical and methodological framework is the social representations theory. Participants viewed three campaign videos and undertook semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was employed to explore their perceptions of the causes and solutions to the issues portrayed in the campaigns, leading to three themes being identified. In the theme of ‘individuals’, participants held women responsible for resisting oppression. In the theme of ‘culture’, participants viewed culture as a cause of patriarchy, with cultural change seen as a solution. In the theme of ‘institutions’, participants discussed institutional sexism but were pessimistic about institutional reform. These findings suggest that whilst patriarchy is blamed on cultural norms and institutional failure, solutions are often conceived in terms of self-transformation of individual women. These results are situated in social representations' theoretical premise of themata and positioning to analyse how social locations like gender, class and regional identity were mobilised by participants to contest or maintain a neoliberal feminist ideology. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.