In November, psychologist and social media influencer Divija Bhasin started the ‘Proud Randi Movement’ online, encouraging women and girls in India to take back the meaning of a misogynistic Hindi slur by adding it to a hashtag to their bios. Bhasin said in a reel: “If we stop finding this word insulting, men will lose the power to use it as an insult.”
The Proud R movement has had interesting offline predecessors when it comes to the reclamation of certain words. The Slutwalks of the early 2010s come to mind, of course. The first Slutwalk was in Toronto, in response to a police officer shaming women for their clothing. More were organised internationally; in India they were held in Bhopal, Delhi and Kolkata. The United States saw a “pussyhat movement” during which protestors wore pink hats to the 2017 Women’s March, with the accessory serving as a rejoinder to President Donald Trump’s widely-reported statement on women: “grab them by the p***y.”
Bhasin’s current project is a virtual manifestation on the same lines, highlighting words that are used in sexually violent ways and repossessing them as the basis of activism. But online presence itself carries risks, and this campaign increases risks for some participants. Multiple FIRs have been lodged against her on charges of inciting minors to adapt abusive language and potentially influencing them towards sex work.
Interestingly, both conservative and liberal factions have taken issue with the Proud R movement. Bhasin has been critiqued regarding how the slur originated in specific caste and class locations, raising questions about its weightage to people of privileged positionalities.
The slur may be widely used against all women but it more precisely denigrates sex workers, who are likely for various systemic reasons to be of marginalised backgrounds. Bhasin acknowledges the word’s history in her original reel, and indicates rightly that the clients should be stigmatised, not the service providers.
As to whether defanging the R-word creates intersectional solidarities depends on broader individual choices. Chances are that a person who is more deeply invested in feminist living will find the R-word deleterious because she is ideologically allied with sex workers’ issues, and not because she finds it offensive to be called one.
That the word is in Hindi, and isn’t weaponised pan-India, has also been a point of contention. But perhaps a more productive take would be to see that the fact there is no one terrible insult that cuts across all languages and cultures is not a bad thing. The misogyny is long-steeped, but not monolithic.
The reclamation of sexually violent and highly gendered words is a part of known feminist practice. Shock is deployed purposefully, and sometimes effectively. The discourse that arises from the shock may be the most valuable part of such methods, which isn’t to say that this kind of provocation isn’t also problematic.
What such provocation forces is (re)acknowledgment of misogyny, and its pervasive and assorted layers. It exists not only in ghastly crimes. It’s in the everyday — on the Internet and in the home, on public transport and in schools and offices. It’s certainly in small words that have the power to detonate.