Introduction: Gender Panics in the Global South

In 2012, in Delhi, a young woman was returning one night from the cinema with her male friend. They unknowingly boarded a private bus that had been seized by a group of young men. Seeing a woman out, after dark, with a man who was clearly not her family member, the men proceeded to beat her companion, holding him back while they raped and tortured her with an iron bar. They then threw both the woman and her companion off the bus and onto the side of the road. Thirteen days later, after having been medevacked to Singapore to undergo treatment, the woman died of her wounds. The events sparked an immediate response internationally and across the country as people poured into the streets to protest, and women's groups from across the political spectrum advocated for stricter rape laws (Chamberlain and Bhabani 2017). Debates flared over loosening morals in "modern" India, with comments critical not only of the assailants' behavior but of the woman's as well.

The Delhi rape was clearly a horrific instance of gender-based violence. What we wish to underscore here, however, are the broader social tensions that sparked this episode. The victim, Jyoti Singh Pandey, came from a family with rural roots. Her father had left the countryside and moved to the city where he worked as a baggage handler at the airport; he had sold his land in order to pay for his children's education, for his two sons as well as his daughter. At the time of her death, Pandey worked at an IBM call center by night to put herself through medical college. Like Pandey, the men who attacked her also came from a working class, rural background. But whereas Pandey had been able to achieve upward social mobility, first through school and then her work at a call center, the men had been excluded from such opportunities (see Amrute 2015, Dutta and Sircar 2013, Roychowdhury 2013). Understood in this context, the attack on Pandey appears to be part of a broader backlash against mobile, socially and economically independent women that has become visible in many parts of the global south in the last decade. Based on fieldwork carried out between 2011 and 2017, the essays in this special collection examine similar, though far less violent, episodes of gendered backlash in India, Uganda, and South Africa.

In this introduction, we interpret these cases as a response, a generation later, to recent transformations in the global economy that appear to have made new economic opportunities uniquely available to women. We argue that women's seemingly disproportionate access to economic opportunities and other resources has destabilized normative gender hierarchies. This destabilization has in turn provoked panics that both reflect and reinforce affective investments in provider masculinity—the ideal that men control the acquisition and distribution of resources, including the resources women provide through sex, care, and domestic labor. Both an ideology and a social institution, provider masculinity is rooted in the contractual premise of the modern nation-state according to which the patriarch gives allegiance to the state in exchange for dominion over his property, including his family (Engels 1884, Pateman 1988). Provider masculinity shapes not only gendered subjectivities and household relations but also broader social phenomena. It is a key example of the way that gender hierarchies ground other forms of social hierarchy—not least racial hierarchy—that are taken to be as natural as the sexual difference that guarantees patriarchal power over women (Scott 1986; see also Bjork-James 2020). Consequently, "gender panics," a term we define more fully below, expose anxieties not only about shifting masculinities but also about the changing distribution of power in social life. Such panics link crises over the reproduction of the patriarchal family to crises over the reproduction of the nation. Building on these ideas, our conclusion considers how gender panics appear to have animated the recent rise of right-wing populisms in the global south and beyond.

From Sex Panics to Gender Panics

In the broader literature, it has become common to analyze surges...