Dr. Giti Chandra is the first lecturer in the RIKK – Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference 2018 autumn term lecture series. Her lecture is titled: “The Anonymous Feminist: Agency, Trauma, and Personhood in the #MeToo Movement” and will take place on Thursday, 6 September, from 12.00-13.00, at the National Museum of Iceland lecture hall.

One of the more controversial aspects of the MeToo movement has been the production of lists naming perpetrators. The people contributing to these lists have as often preferred to remain anonymous as not. These unnamed people are seen either as weak and malicious, hiding behind their anonymity in order to wage vendettas against the named perpetrators, or as weak and faceless, defined by and forever trapped in their victimhood. Contextualising this discussion within trauma studies, this presentation will look at the implications of this anonymity for notions of agency and victimhood, and offer alternative, more inclusively feminist, ways of thinking of anonymity and personhood.

Dr. Giti Chandra is currently an Affiliated Scholar, UNU-GEST, teaching in the University of Iceland. She has been Associate Professor at the Dept. of English, St Stephen’s College, Delhi. She has taught in and been a fellow at Rutgers University, New Jersey, from where she did her Doctoral work on Women and Violence. She is the author of “Narrating Violence, Constructing Collective Identities: To witness these wrongs unspeakable” (Macmillan UK/US: 2009). Her current works in progress include a book length study titled “In Visible Texts: Hidden and Spectacularised Violence in Colonial India and Africa” and an edited volume on the MeToo movement. Dr Chandra has served as Chairperson of the College Complaints Committee Against Sexual Harassment in St Stephen’s College, Adviser to the Gender Sensitization Committee, and as the External Expert on the Sexual Harassment Complaints Committee at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication.

The lecture is in English, open to everyone and admission is free.

The event is on Facebook!

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The RIKK lecture series during the autumn term 2018 is dedicated to women’s revolution against harassment and violence, and the attending responses, research and activism, in an endeavor to analyze the incentives, nature and consequences of the MeToo movement from different viewpoints.

RIKK lecture series in the autumn semester 2018 is held in collaboration with The National Museum of Iceland.