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This paper investigates the evolving landscape of feminist digital activism in India by analysing Instagram posts from three major Indian feminist pages: SheThePeople, ThatDesiFeminist, and Feminism in India. The study asks how digital feminist practices on Instagram construct, contest, and reframe dominant cultural discourses around gender, power, and identity. Employing a multimodal qualitative methodology, it integrates Cultural Discourse Studies (CDS), netnography, and close reading to examine 300 posts as discursive interventions against patriarchal norms relating to marriage, motherhood, public safety, body politics, and emotional labour. CDS offers a culturally grounded framework for reading Instagram posts as communicative acts embedded in broader power-laden discourse systems. Netnography and close reading uncover how visual storytelling, symbolic imagery, and user engagement are mobilised as tools of resistance and feminist meaning-making. The findings show that Indian digital feminist activism is not only reactive to patriarchal backlash but also proactively builds alternative feminist grammars rooted in local sociocultural realities. By foregrounding India as a culturally specific site of feminist meaning-making and extending CDS to multimodal social media discourse, the paper contributes to scholarship on digital feminism beyond the West.
Pandey et al. (Fri,) studied this question.