Vortragsreihe "Kunst - Forschung - Geschlecht"

Paridhi Gupta
Mittwoch, 6. Dezember 2023
18:00 - 20:00 Uhr
via ZOOM (ask for the Link at gleichstellung@uni-ak.ac.at)


© Paridhi Gupta

A group of women students in Delhi sing the song about breaking the chains of bondage as they protest against gender discriminatory housing rules within their university, decades prior to this, a collective of left-aligned women hide padlocks and chains under their dresses to protest against a new government policy that staggered the law religiously against marital rights for women of the Muslim religion. A continent away in another decade, another group of women chain themselves to the parliament gates in London as part of the movement for voting rights for women. The objects appear again and again in women’s protest, used in myriad ways as metaphors for oppression and liberty. However, what is the connection between them, or why should we elucidate on these connections? In this lecture, I explore the case studies from India to showcase travelling metaphors within social justice movements, and how these vocabularies interlink movements scattered across time and space. Visual vocabularies are those imageries that are either used in combination with slogans or words within the protest demonstration to make claims or are conjured up and become enveloped in movement conversations. The nexus of the body, utterances, and visual productions gives us the complex of visual vocabularies. Thus, the analysis explores how the protest is embodied and spoken through its visual constructions.

Paridhi Gupta has a doctorate in Gender Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India and then joined University of Zurich as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social and Empirical Cultural Anthropology. Her interests include visual ethnographies, feminist protest cultures, inclusive pedagogy, and human-computer interaction.