Sustaining Movements, Sustaining Selves: Feminist Activism, Practices of Care, and Responses to Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in India

How do feminist movements addressing sexual and gender-based violence sustain themselves over time? Drawing on feminist interpretive methods and fieldwork with activists across India, I show how the visibility of certain cases — and the legal reforms they drive — can obscure the slower, quieter labor that keeps movements alive.

I develop a hierarchy of victimhood to explain whose suffering is recognized by media, law, and the state, and whose is not. Against that, I center the care practices — rest, refusal, collective support, and repair — through which activists endure work that is urgent, exhausting, and rarely sustainable on its own terms.