Haryanvi Jaat Girls’ Affective Resistance as Micro-modal Feminist Activism

In this article we explore how young Haryanvi Jaat women in urban India enact affective everyday forms of feminist resistance within patriarchal regimes that regulate sanctioned girlhood. Drawing on qualitative interviews with self-identified girls aged 18 to 24, we theorize what we refer to as relational transgression as a feminist practice enacted through the two micro-modal tactics that we call rigid timidity and girl time. These affective strategies transform compliance, silence, and waiting into means of negotiating gendered control and generating spaces of autonomy. By foregrounding less legible modes of resistance, we expand feminist conceptualizations of activism beyond public, organized protest to include relational acts through which girls imagine and sustain intergenerational feminist futures

Feminism · Feminist philosophy · Foregrounding · Girl · Narrative · Negotiation · Resistance (ecology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender, Feminism, and Media · South Asian Cinema and Culture