Playing against the System: Affective and Networked Reclamation of ‘Rater-Rani’ by Bangladeshi Feminist Networks in Facebook

This paper closely examines the networked feminist activism at play in the South Asian country of Bangladesh, by paying close attention to a movement that uses Facebook as a platform for protest and tactical resistance against recent media trials of female celebrities and political figures within the country’s socio-cultural context. This paper explores the ‘Rater Rani’ (translated roughly into English as ‘the night queen’) campaign in Facebook initiated by the ‘Meye’ (or ‘Girl’ in English) network – a Bangladeshi feminist grassroots organizing platform that works towards the equity of genders in Bangladesh through storytelling and design thinking across digital and physical spaces. The ‘Rater Rani’ movement is a feminist intervention that calls for the affective and networked reclamation of a slandering term ‘rater rani’ as a resistance against a pejorative media trial of actress Porimoni who got arrested and harassed by both the law enforcing agency and the media for her possession of liquor and drugs while being a ‘woman’. Building on the ‘affective economy’ framework of Sara Ahmed, I explore in this paper how the appropriation and the affective reclaiming of the derogatory term by these feminist activists, works as an intervention against gender-based stereotyping and moral policing of society. Using the concepts of parasitic resistance by Anna Watkins Fisher, and tactical media by Rita Raley, this paper argues that through the re-appropriation and tactical mobilization of a slandering term used towards women, the affective and networked community in Facebook opens up alternative ways of resistance which I call playing against the system of paternalistic moral policing, media trial, and heteropatriarchal oppression and gender-based inequality that runs rampant in the Bangladeshi society.Keywords: Feminist networks, Affective reclamation, Media trial, Feminist tactics, Gender-based inequalit