#ProudRa**i Digital Campaign: Gendered Slurs, Cultural Misogyny, and the Politics of Reappropriation

Abstract

The latter part of 2025 witnessed an intense discourse on India's social media around a campaign dubbed #ProudRandi, which rapidly swept across platforms, drawing significant attention to the politics of appropriation and the effectiveness of reclamation. This movement, started by a female psychologist, influencer and content creator, Divija Bhasin, stirred an intense debate around gendered slurs and reignited the discourse on the deep-rooted cultural misogyny ingrained in the Indian popular cultural psyche. The campaign made a valiant attempt to reappropriate one of the deeply misogynistic Hindi slurs, Randi, literally meaning prostitute, a derogatory term historically used to shame prostitutes, often casually used to sexualise, and insult women in general, and those who are nonconforming in particular. The campaign once again exposed the usual tension between women's empowerment narratives and the resistance they face from multifarious quarters, historically conditioned and often emboldened by the dominant narratives of the times. It also became a site of conflict between digital feminist narratives and the opposition they face from the old-age and new-age self-proclaimed custodians of morality and culture, reinforcing the idea that online spaces provide platforms for both challenging and fortifying gendered power dynamics, albeit with varying degrees of overall impact. Not surprisingly, the engagement it drew from the underage female community, who overwhelmingly expressed solidarity with the campaign, led to the filing of cases against the instigator under various sections, including POCSO. Ironically, this campaign was even accused of reinforcing the very misogynistic structures that it intended to challenge and dismantle. Combining the approaches of critical discourse analysis, social media content analysis, and public sentiment mapping, this research investigates how the aforementioned hashtag circulated, negotiated its connotations, and navigated backlashes. It examines why this movement generated significant support and how certain undercurrents in neo-liberal times propel such 'mini-revolutions'. The study maps this campaign onto broader debates on linguistic reclamation to understand how online gender politics, digital activism, and the reappropriation of gendered slurs play out in the current socio-political landscape. It presents a critical interpretation of the new-age dynamics of feminist politics in contemporary India, which is constrained by the structural and narratological paradigms of social media-driven discourse.