Creator and psychologist Divija Bhasin has sparked an online debate with her movement to reclaim a slur used against women, titled the ‘Proud R***’ movement. The term has cropped up in her Instagram bio, and she talks about the usage and motivation behind it in her reels. A lot of her followers, some of them minors, have begun adding the term to their bios.
Bhasin's videos have gone viral, her first reel crossing 7 million views. She puts up messages from women sharing experiences of being called the slur. She insists the campaign is not about normalising the word but about highlighting its widespread use, from parents to online abusers.
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Bhasin, whose account @awkwardgoat3 enjoys over five lakh followers, told ThePrint over email, “I felt empowered to make a whole YouTube video about it because I talked about it in my stories, and my female audience shared stories of being called randi by their parents. I realised the problem doesn’t just concern creators like me. It’s also happening to women belonging to regular households.” She further said, “I felt empowered to make a whole YouTube video about it because I talked about it in my stories and my female audience shared stories of being called randi by their parents. I realised the problem doesn’t just concern creators like me. It’s also happening to women belonging to regular households.”
Can a derogatory word be reclaimed by women?
As per a report by the Print, Not all experts agree that the slur can be reclaimed. Ashoka University's Professor Rita Kothari said, “You can’t evacuate a popular memory of a word. Those are encrustations upon a word over a period of time; these could be good, derogatory, you cannot now manage or engineer a word which comes from Polysemic history. ” She also said that separating shame from the word is possible, but, “from that place to go to a concerted campaign seems like a big leap.”
Words that are related to a marginalised group have faced derogation historically, says Professor Santosh Kumar, a sociolinguist with Bengaluru University. “This is not the first time in the history of linguistic regeneration, it happens with words that gain derogation in their usage. It can be seen as an attempt to reclaim the word and make it a kind of a pride or badge on the sleeve in order to subvert the semantic connotation. These linguistic politics are common, and it is nothing new,” he said. Like the 'n' word for Black people, or words such as 'slut,' 'bitch,' and 'disabled,' reclaiming them as a badge of pride can subvert their negative connotations. But fewer examples exist in Hindi, making this reclamation more challenging, he added.
‘You can never normalise it for us’
As per the report by The Print, for women such as Sunita, a sex worker in GB Road, the movement has little relevance. “It will never be easy for women like me to yell proud r** on the top of our voices. Unless you understand the lived experience of being a R* and the violence associated with it, you can never normalise it for us,” she said.
Activists working among sex workers also raised questions about the motive of the movement. Juhi Sharma of Light Up, Emotions Matter Foundation, called it “a clickbait exercise.” She further said, “Nothing in this viral sensation changes conditions at the grassroots for women who are sold, coerced, or forced into sex work. It overlooks the gravity of their circumstances - the trauma, addiction, sexual violence, and structural neglect faced by sex workers. It does not do their realities justice.”
