Betraying Big Brother by Leta Hong Fincher

He is shown as a militaristic, macho man greeting thousands of soldiers. Propaganda images depict Xi as a father figure who takes care of the “nation-family” as a patriarch. Patriarchal authoritarianism in China works by constructing a hypermasculine image of President Xi Jinping. Although Fincher’s focus is China, the patriarchal authoritarianism of Modi government is visible in the recent arrests and elsewhere.

Under patriarchal authoritarianism, subordination of women is a fundamental element of the authoritarian state. Further, these activists were imprisoned in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, putting them at a serious health risk.īut “India is not China”, as many like to say – India is a democracy and China a dictatorship – so how can the above two cases be compared? For such people, and for others who do not see the patriarchy of the Modi government clearly, Fincher’s concept of “patriarchal authoritarianism” in Betraying Big Brother will be useful. Some of these women include Gulfisha Fatima, a Muslim community leader Safoora Zargar, a university student and member of the Jamia Coordination Committee who was three months pregnant at the time of arrest Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, founders of the Pinjra Tod campaign which protests sexism on college campuses and beyond. Starting in April 2020, the Indian government started arresting the diffused female leadership of the anti-CAA movement, generally accusing them of inciting violence and even of terrorism. While the focus of the anti-CAA protest was around questions of citizenship, the monumental role women played in it makes it a milestone in the feminist movement in India.

This around-the-clock occupation was in opposition to the passing of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which has been called fundamentally discriminatory and anti-Muslim by the UN human rights office. Their arrest, however, did the opposite of crushing what was then a nascent feminist movement – it inspired feminist activists to organise wider protests.įrom December 2019 to March 2020, thousands of peaceful protestors, mainly led by women, occupied hundreds of public spaces across India such as Shaheen Bagh. The Chinese government arrested the group, later known as the “Feminist Five”, for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. The five activists were handing out stickers against sexual harassment on subways and buses to commemorate International Women’s Day. In Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, academic and journalist Leta Hong Fincher describes how the arrest of five women by the Chinese government in March 2015 became an important turning point in the feminist movement in China.

Betraying Big Brother by Leta Hong Fincher