Annotations
(27/04/2023 à 17:19:53)

« The data used in this paper were collected over a period of 3 months, from May to August 2018, in the city of Mumbai. Two methods were employed—ethnographic observation and open-ended, semi-structured interviews. » (James, 2022, p. 833)

« I observed how individuals, who identified as men and women, used and related to the places they were in, and what kind of actions seemed to be permitted to different people at different venues. My interviews sought out personal experiences and critical opinions on the scene’s attempts to create a place of safety for its women. » (James, 2022, p. 833)

« Sexual harassment in stand-up comedy was already an open secret in the summer of 2018, months before specific cases became public on social media. Kajol Srinivasan, a comedian, saw it as emblematic of media industries as a whole, citing her experiences in other creative industries (personal interview July 16 2018). This opinion was validated by the fact that women came out with stories involving prominent media personalities, including eminent names in print and visual journalism, advertising, film, and television, immediately following the exposé of sexual harassment by comedians. These revelations, which some have termed India’s Me Too movement, reveal structural imbalances between men and women that exist in multiple media industries, and which the standup comedy scene has failed to interrogate. » (James, 2022, p. 836)

« From the stories shared on social media, it became clear that AIB, who regularly employed Chakraborty in their productions and arguably was the biggest name in the Mumbai scene in 2018, had been told about such behaviour multiple times by other comedians but chose to continue to work with Chakraborty (All India Bakchod 2018a). » (James, 2022, p. 836)

« Soon, stories about other comedians, specifically Jeeveshu Ahluwalia, Kanan Gill, Anurag Verma, and Arvind Subrahmanian, were told over social media. Earlier in 2017, Arunabh Kumar, the founder and CEO of comedy content production company The Viral Fever (TVF), was arrested for sexual harassment of an employee (Sharmeen Hakim 2017). » (James, 2022, p. 837)

« In since deleted tweets, Dua compared OML to a “sexist frat house” and said they had continually bailed their male comedians out of trouble in the past. Further, she revealed pay gaps between male and female comedians managed by OML, adding that the company had tokenized female comics. The role of OML themselves in maintaining unequal gender relations in the comedy circuit was further brought out when it was revealed that they regularly send young, sometimes younger than 18, female interns to bars patronized largely by men on Friday nights to sell tickets to various shows and festivals. Details of several instances of employees of OML sexually harassed by their superiors and peers in the company, starting from the very top, were revealed in the following weeks (see Surabhi Kanga, Bhanuj Kappal and Arnav Das Sharma 2018). » (James, 2022, p. 837)

« Like many other companies in what is known as the “creative industries,” the distinction between workplace and leisure is fuzzy at best in OML and stand-up comedy generally. Through practices that have come to be known as “playbor” (see Julian Kücklich 2005) and the almost complete subsumation of human time as labour-time in such industries, the sexual agency and freedom of women employed in stand-up comedy becomes one of the many areas of leisure or pleasure that increasingly becomes inseparable from “work.” » (James, 2022, p. 837)

« The various sets of labour practices that have come to characterize the “neoliberal” regime magnifies the power that male superiors hold over their female employees by extending this power beyond the formal workplace and working hours. Previous guidelines on sexual harassment won through years of women’s labour organising, are rendered inadequate through the capitalisation of leisure and is abetted by “casual” work culture which permits sexualisation of work atmosphere by blurring the lines between public work and private leisure. » (James, 2022, p. 837)

« These problems were not unknown to insiders in the scene, as became clear once various women started sharing their stories. » (James, 2022, p. 837)

Les femmes évitent certaines espaces pour se protéger

« JeeyaSethi, producer and comedian, pointed out to me that there are green rooms in many venues that women do not go to for fear of their safety and that this fear was the result of male comedians and producers making them feel unsafe in the past (personal interview June 5 2018). » (James, 2022, p. 837)

Initiatives de changement

« The first, and only, meeting that was held to discuss the committee was attended by four women, three of whom were nominated beforehand to constitute the committee. The meeting itself, according to Jeeya, soon descended into questions by male comedians about what exactly constitutes harassment, with many arguing that restrictions on speech and on interaction between comedians and between comedians and audiences could not be accepted. » (James, 2022, p. 838)

« The committee had also put forward a plan to hire a lawyer who could methodically deal with harassment charges, but such plans never came to fruition as the larger Mumbai stand-up comedy community could not agree on who should have the power to make decisions regarding future harassment allegations. » (James, 2022, p. 838)

« Men don’t want the committee. They can show you that they want it, but they don’t really want it. It’s a big show off. Otherwise, by now there would be a committee, dude. At least three comedians should have been fired as well. That should’ve happened if they were serious about it. If they wanted the scene to be safe. Look, a man even bullying a woman is . . . when there’s another guy standing there and they are taking her case, laughing about it with another man, it’s bullying. It’s disgustingly wrong. And it’s happened to me. » (James, 2022, p. 838)

Engager plus de femmes pour créer des espaces sécuritaires

« The crux of such efforts has to be, according to Sumedh, facilitating greater opportunities for women to perform on stage. Several producers I talked to were already cognizant of this need, not least because of a consistent push by women in the scene for inclusion. Jeeya, who produces the largest and most successful all-women stand-up comedy show in India, was visibly proud of the fact that her shows often have more women than men on the line-up. » (James, 2022, p. 838)

« Hoshang pointed out that the production company he works for had built its brand partly on offering women opportunities to perform. While more and more producers have been trying to reserve spots for women, they also point to the fewer number of women active in the scene as a problem that prevents them from giving out spots. » (James, 2022, p. 838)

« Rueben Kaduskar, a comedian and producer, said that he tries to produce shows with three men and three women on the line-up and had faced backlash from other male comedians who perceived the women as having taken their spots. Many other venues and producers have also produced open-mics and curated shows that feature all-women line-ups. » (James, 2022, p. 839)

« The necessity of these shows is brought out by the fact that there still exists time and space restrictions for women and there are many venues where women are uncomfortable performing or attending shows in. » (James, 2022, p. 839)

« According to Rueben, The atmosphere in any work place is very unfair to women. Here initially it was also, still is in some places. There are rooms that women are terrified of going to, to perform stand-up, because the particular producer is very sexist, he is very creepy, or a particular host, if he’s hosting that, they will not go because they know that, uh, they are uncomfortable with it. So they won’t do that show. You need to filter out these people [the sexist producers]. You need to either inform them, “listen, you need to be a decent human being, you can’t do that on stage or otherwise”. If they don’t listen to you, my only option is to not have them on my lineup, which I don’t. I speak to them once, if they listen and are willing to change themselves, that’s great, if not you will not perform at my show, I’m sorry. And also what I try to do is, to get women to host more. If women are hosting, women are automatically more comfortable [performing and as audience] (personal interview June 14 2018). » (James, 2022, p. 839)

« In AIB’s statement released in response to allegations against Utsav Chakraborty, for instance, they recognised that “by extending safe working spaces and a collaborative environment to people like Utsav, we have contributed towards a toxic environment that can be scary and unsafe for women.” (All India Bakchod 2018b) Others echoed a similar sentiment, arguing that the scene—as a collection of physical and metaphorical spaces—should become safer for women. An important factor in determining gender relations within the Mumbai stand-up comedy scene lies in who uses, and how, the spaces mobilized by the art form in the city of Mumbai » (James, 2022, p. 840)

« Exploring the now widely accepted ideas of the discursive constructedness of both gender and space (see Michel de Certeau 2011; Henri Lefebvre 1991; Doreen Massey 1994), Ranade demonstrates their mutually constitutive roles by showing how the occupation and use of space is gendered. Specifically, Ranade focuses on the “inherently embodied experience” (1520) of spaces, or how different people experience the same space differently depending on their social positions. » (James, 2022, p. 840)

Importance dans la carrière d’être de créer des espaces « safer »

« This is best illustrated in comparing how men and women in the scene use the space of venues. One particular venue in the suburb of Khar, one of the bigger names in the scene, is a popular hangout spot for comedians and producers and is a place where I often met and interviewed my participants. In my numerous trips to this venue, I found that many comedians and producers spent several hours a day there, intermittently working on new content, but also spending time with their friends and using the space as one of leisure. The venue thus became a space where work and leisure were fused, and specifically where forms of leisure, such as hanging out with other comedians and producers, became a way in which someone could advance professionally. » (James, 2022, p. 840)

« However, it was also clear the not everyone used the space in the same way. Far more men used the venue in this way than women did. In my observation, men who spent several hours at this venue would be joined by women for a specific time interval, such as in time to perform at a show or to work on a specific project. While some women did use the space in ways similar to men, it was clear that the latter vastly outnumbered the former in this regard. In these gendered differences in the use of space, a point made by several scholars (Shilpa Phadke 2005, 2007; Ranade 2007) become apparent—that women are forced to construct “respectability” within particular spaces by asserting a legitimate use of that space. Thus, for women working in stand-up comedy, using those spaces largely for well-defined professional reasons, such as for a scheduled show or a specific project, becomes a way in which they assert their right to use these spaces without the threat of violence. » (James, 2022, p. 840)

« However, as has been made clear from recent revelations, these spaces were in fact scarcely spaces of physical safety. Like many other spaces—such as the home—that are supposed to be “safe” because they keep out those seen as threats, comedy venues are spaces were women have been regularly harassed. They are spaces where women cannot take risks, because to do so would be “illegitimate” and therefore to be deemed “available,” “loose,” or an acceptable target of violence. Notwithstanding the credible threat that individuals belonging to right wing groups pose to women in comedy, the branding of comedy venues as safe spaces only masks the reality that the vast majority of gendered violence takes place in intimate and familiar spaces. The revelations made in October 2018 affirm this through the pattern of spaces that were abused by male comedians and producers—comedy venues, virtual private spaces such as private messaging platforms, and in private or personal relationships. » (James, 2022, p. 841)

Intersectionnalité (?)

« Though this visibility, on both sides of the right wing-liberal divide, is couched in terms of women’s empowerment, it is clear that these spaces do not provide safety to all women. As the safety of new middle-class women is predicated on the exclusion of Dalit and other lower-caste bodies, they exclude women belonging to these social groups as well. A particular kind of femininity—one that is “empowered” through being vocal and is also sexually desirable and available—has become a characteristic associated with the new middle class and therefore part of the global Indian identity. The “undesirable” lower caste and working-class characteristics, on the other hand, are coded as a virulent male threat to the safety of these spaces. Thus, we see working in the spaces of stand-up comedy the phenomenon Sharmila Rege described as “masculinisation of Dalithood and savarnisation of womanhood” (1998, 42). Further, the safety offered by stand-up comedy proceeds by marking the work of new middle-class women as legitimate and respectable as long as those expressions are made within the privatized spaces of the comedy club, and in the process continues to uphold dominant gender norms that label female assertion in the public sphere as disorderly and dangerous. Non-respectable women—those not belonging to the new middle class—are therefore as much a source of danger and pollution as their male counterparts. What all this indicates is that the global Indian identity, for the construction and assertion of which stand-up comedy is one site, is decidedly upper-caste. » (James, 2022, page 842-843)

Enjeux de caste

« The ways in which stand-up comedy has addressed gender relations in Indian society are therefore circumscribed by caste. The entirely legitimate demand of a safe working place for women in comedy (and now in several other media industries) thus fails to translate into a larger social movement that makes the same demand for millions of working women in Mumbai who do not belong to the new middle class. Instead, it appears as a call to honour the initial promise of these spaces—the safety from sexual harassment that was thought to be guaranteed by excluding Dalit and other bodies deemed dangerous. This demand appears even more difficult to make in virtual space, as women find themselves targets of abusive and threatening comments and messages. Once again, as the recent revelations made clear, women in comedy are victims in this space primarily of their male counterparts and other male members of the new middle class. » (James, 2022, p. 843)

Internet

« However, the Internet has emerged as yet another dangerous geography where swarthy mobs are assumed to lie in wait and from whom upper caste, new middle-class women have to be protected. » (James, 2022, page 843-844)

« The Internet thus becomes an extension of the physical geography of stand-up comedy » (James, 2022, p. 844)

« In short, the class interests of the new middle class, which is most evident in the intersection of gender and caste in stand-up comedy, determines the extent of progressiveness that is visible in the art form. As these interests ultimately lie in maintaining and profiting from the global flows of capital, its interventions in emancipatory politics will necessarily be determined by the logic of accumulation. » (James, 2022, p. 844)

« What are also sold are the bodies of the audience, including the upper-caste woman whose presence, use, and enjoyment of these spaces brands them global, the jouissance and libido of the urbane youth whose presence make these venues attractive, the absence of certain other people, such as Dalits or other lower castes, and the various social constructs such as “safety” this implies, and, in general, the habitus of the global Indian. The “global” thus becomes a commodity whose transaction is valuable to the new middle class to the extent that it reproduces their relatively privileged position in global flows of media. » (James, 2022, p. 844)