Media, feminism and technology in postcolonial contexts

This thesis offers an important intervention in the study of feminism, media and technology by tracing how colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary gender discourse. It introduces the theorisation of colonial harms – erasure, appropriation and ambiguity – as interconnected with patriarchy and persisting as structural forms of violence in postcolonial societies, like India. Through a methodological combination of archival research, in-depth semi-structured interviews with Indian feminists and a modified form of thematic analysis incorporating elements of critical discourse analysis of news media, this thesis examines three key moments between 2010 and 2020: The Nirbhaya anti-rape protests, the MeToo India campaign and the Shaheen Bagh CAA-NRC protests. These case studies throw a critical lens on the tensions between rights-based and popular feminism, as well as the entanglement of feminist discourses with misogynistic counter-discourses, state politics and technological affordances. This thesis makes five conceptual contributions to feminist scholarship. First, it theorises colonial harms and shows how they continue to structure media narratives, feminist practice and women’s political agency. Second, it introduces the SMART Framing Model to explain why certain gender-based violence stories and protests achieve national visibility while others are silenced. Third, it develops appraised believability to interrogate how trust in women’s disclosures is unevenly distributed across class, caste and religion. Fourth, it re-conceptualises consent as perception rather than an act, exposing the inadequate binaries of legal consent in addressing coercion and power imbalance within the MeToo India movement. Finally, and most significantly, it theorises equivocal agency – a framework for understanding how marginalised women navigate surveillance, misogyny and platform opaqueness through strategic ambiguity, cautious visibility and affective labour. By exposing how popular feminism is selectively appropriated by neo-liberal and far right politics, this thesis cautions against reductive, media-driven feminist rhetoric that risks undermining the goals of rights-based feminism. It ultimately asks: what does India’s 21st-century feminism look like, and how do media and technology shape its possibilities and limits?