With the release of Beyond #MeToo by Dr Tanushree Ghosh, a rational storm begins
Dr. Tanushree Ghosh, a Cornell graduate with a Ph. D. in Chemistry and a Presidency College and IIT Kanpur alumna, ventured into writing in 2012. In her words, she needed to find an avenue for her activism. Her pieces, whether its op-eds on gender, global justice, human rights, or war and peace, or poetries, short stories, and satire which since then have found home in myriad of international publications have all been such.
Her latest work, Beyond #MeToo with Sage Publications, pitched by The Book Bakers Literary Agency, is no exception. Why write on gender? Exactly because of this question – she answers when asked. MeToo – or experience with sexual assault – or, in a broader sense, experience with differentiated experience just for being female – are so many, and so much, that it is not tangible or quantifiable.
She notes. According to her, our acceptance of the unacceptable is pervasive and omnipresent. She mentions that in her book, through a heat map of countries and specific cultural nuances of each that worsen one aspect of gender discrimination (or violence) or other, she has shown that India can’t be singled out. Gender violence (or the even more defined space of what the #MeToo ended up representing – workplace sexual harassment) is not something that can be put into a defined box. There is a cause and effect and effect and cause relationship between gender un-parity and gender violence (including sexual assault). As the Visakha fight showed in the case Bhanwari Devi – decades prior to MeToo – a women’s lack of safety in her workplace affects her socio-economic parity, and the equality metrics of the entire society. Yet, according to the World Economic Forum report (2015), 59 countries, pre-MeToo, had no laws against sexual harassment at work and only eighteen countries out of the hundreds, have no laws that disadvantage women. Why is it, that the US and Europe doesn’t have equal pay yet for men and women? Why it is that the Equal Rights Amendment is still not passed in the US? And most importantly, how are all this connected? We need to know, and we need to talk. That is probably the way to keep ‘revolutions’ from dying and India, needs a living revolution when it comes to gender. She adds.
Apart from global comparisons, in depth historical and contemporary analyses, and facts and stats, the book features in person accounts, testimonials and case studies which adds the needed human lens and voice to the matter.
Tanushree is a contributor (past and present) to several popular e-zines incl. The Huffington Post US (where she authored many successful op-eds on gender, Syria war, the western media’s coverage of the Brazil Olympic and so on), The Logical Indian, Youth Ki Awaaz, Tribune India, Women’s Web, Thrive Global, and Cafe Dissensus (where she hosted her segment on social satire titled Black Light). Her literary resume includes poems and stories featured in national and international magazines (Words Pauses and Noises, UK; TUCK, Glimmer Train Honorable mention) as well as inclusion in nine anthologies such as Defiant Dreams (Oprah 2016 reading list placeholder) and The Best Asian Short Stories 2017 (published out of Singapore by Kitaab). Her first single author book was From An-Other Land (Readomania publishing, India)
Aside from being an author and her day job, in which works at Intel Corporation. She is the founder and director of Her Rights (www.herrights.website), a 501(3) c non-profit in the US committed to furthering the cause of gender equality and fighting gender violence. She is also mother to a now eight year old. I write for her, so that she gets a better world to live in. She is currently visiting India to complete a series of book launch events in Kolkata (Oxford Bookstore Jan 6th) and Chandigarh (Browser Bookstore Jan 8th).
