Reconfiguring Perceptions: Women’s Bodies as Enraged/ing Sites of Resistance

Day 1 11am 2 hours English

Rage is primarily seen as a destructive or negative emotion. For the lack of available research on experiences of rage by non-binary/gender fluid individuals, we will try to mostly articulate rage in its gendered relations. Reception of expression of rage by men is usually seen as powerful, whereas, for women, it is regarded as selfish and destabilising. The gendered reception of rage makes anger a taboo.

In this workshop, we will primarily focus on reclaiming rage as a complex social, physiological, psychological, and emotional phenomenon. The main objective of the workshop is to convene a space to create an ideological impetus to disrupt the day-to-day representation of ‘feminine’ rage, and to use it effectively towards a path of solidarity.

Through a series of questions and exchanges, we seek to open up conversations on how one perceives their rage, and how one experiences it in relation to the larger social expectations of the neo-liberal economy that define how women must present their emotions. This would be a meaning-making exercise, one that encompasses questions of civility, sanity, and normality as framed in a heteronormative, phallocentric society that describes the global neoliberal order.

How does one become (or rather is made) civil, sane, and normal versus insane, uncivil, and abnormal with fearless expression of rage, discomfort, and pain that is one’s own and at the same time, of generations of women? What is the significance of such rage in stirring great movements and building cross-regional solidarity?

The workshop takes up these questions, narrowing them down to localised expressions and interpretations of female rage, thus, challenging the participants to think outside the colonial categories of ‘civility’ and ‘sanity’. These questions can open up a gamut of conversations and self-reflective exercises on the stigma that is imposed upon and thereby reproduced on the bodies of women in cultures with a history of colonial influence.

The key focus hence is accessing rage and working with it rather than against it; to de-stigmatise, decolonise, and reclaim the severed emotion, thereby designing a collective imagination of feminist futures.