From defiance to distortion: misappropriation of gendered resistance in two cases of protests in northeast India

This essay interrogates the symbolic and political trajectories of two gendered protests in Northeast India—Manipur’s 2004 Kangla Fort naked protest and Assam’s 2023 Silsako semi-nude protest—to examine how acts of embodied defiance are systematically misappropriated by patriarchal state and media narratives. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory and critical discourse analysis, the paper argues that while such protests deploy nakedness as a subversive tactic to reclaim agency and challenge state violence, their radical potential is often diluted through eroticisation, sensationalism, and narrative reframing. These protests become visual spectacles, displaced from their political roots and repurposed into consumable, depoliticised media events. The essay argues this process as a “boomerang effect,” wherein feminist resistance is reabsorbed into the very structures of power it aims to disrupt. Through a comparative analysis of media framings, symbolic strategies, and socio-political reception, the study highlights how gendered resistance is differentially legitimised based on caste, region, and militarisation. Ultimately, the essay calls for praxis-oriented feminist strategies that resist co-optation, foreground structural injustice, and reassert narrative agency. It contributes to broader debates on the neoliberal commodification of dissent, proposing that meaningful feminist resistance must transcend spectacle and align with legal, media, and activist interventions that uphold political intent.