Feminist Epistemology and the Web-based Text: Reflections on Raya Sarkar’s List
Raginee Sarmah
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 3
Abstract
Raya Sarkar’s list of ‘alleged sexual harassers’ in the academia, without names and personal narratives, is a text which frames a new turn in our understanding of feminist politics. The ‘List’ (with a capital l) is not an ordinary inventory but a potent text which transforms the diurnal activity of list making. In the length of a year, the List has begun to acquire a form of canonicity given the excess of literature being produced on it and the conflicting readings it sustains. The List can be observed as a cultural text with contextual adaptations being curated, with variance in context, modality, and location. In a short span of time several new lists have been created and circulated on basis of which the essay argues that if the act of listing can be seen as an act of reordering, is it a worldview that is being reordered? Does the List as a text allow the ‘concealment,’ if not the ‘death’ of its ‘author’? What contexts limit this text and what contexts does it transcend? These are a few enquiries which will inform the textual interrogation of these web-based processes with a specific focus on the List, and it is in the gaps of information that this paper seeks to find sites of critical analysis.
Keywords: Sexual Harassment, University Spaces, List, Reordering, Author, Canonicity, Caste
Raginee Sarmah (ragineenidhi@gmail.com) is an undergraduate student of English from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. Her areas of interest include Postcolonial Literatures, Literary and Culture Theory, and Indian Literature in English. She is fascinated by how literature intersects and interacts with the milieu of identity politics. She is also interested in mapping how university spaces grapple with the emerging questions of ‘difference’ and participates in feminist campus politics.