Srila Roy is associate professor of sociology and heads development studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
She is the author of the book, Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (Oxford, 2012), editor of New South Asian Feminisms (Zed, 2012) and co-editor of New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualising Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford 2015).
She is currently writing a book on feminist and queer politics in India, and co-editing a volume of essays on #MeToo in India and South Africa. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she leads a five year collaborative project between India and Southern Africa called Governing Intimacies.
Srila is also the editor of a number of academic journals and a regular contributor to a variety of media outlets on issues of gender and sexuality in the global south, with her work featuring on Al Jazeera, OpenDemocracy, the Wire and Dissent.
Srila’s piece in Living While Feminist is called Challenging Sexual Harassment in the University: Disarming Feminism and it examines the way that we tell stories about sexual harassment in a university setting, what gets talked about, and what gets silenced. In that piece, Srila writes,
What would it mean to tell a different story of tackling sexual harassment on campus? A story of institutional resources and commitment; of independent offices to deal with complaints alone, to counsel and care; and of feminist leadership. Where it would be obvious that intervention must mean transformation … this could be a story of feminist success. But feminist success is invariably its failure. In the garnering of actual institutional capacity and power lies the undoing of feminist resistance and its promise of an alternative future.
So today I’ll be talking to Srila about that piece, feminism in institutions and many other topics.
