Sanitary Panels

Sanitary Panels is an Indian webcomic by activist Rachita Taneja. Taking a distinct feminist angle, Sanitary Panels comments upon social justice topics ranging from discrimination to victim blaming. Taneja started her webcomic on Facebook in June 2014 and has since accumulated over 50,000 followers.

Sanitary Panels
Author(s)Rachita Taneja
Current status/scheduleOngoing
Launch date15 June 2014

Content
A short 2015 Sanitary Panels strip.

Rachita Taneja's Sanitary Panels uses a stick figure artstyle to comment upon topics such as misogyny, sexism, and social injustice. Taneja noted that she "doesn't consider herself an artist": though her webcomic tells short stories about discrimination and hypocrisy, its primary purpose is to cover issues ranging from victim blaming, harassment and homophobia to menstruation and democracy.[1] Sanitary Panels is an explicit webcomic about feminism, similar to The Royal Existentials, Inedible India comics, Why Loiter?, Blank Noise, and various other Indian webcomics. The webcomic covers other topics as well, such as net neutrality.[2]

Development

Rachita Taneja uploaded the first strip of Sanitary Panels on Facebook in 2014, in response to people being arrested for denouncing president Narendra Modi on the social media platform. In an interview with The News Minute, Taneja described her thoughts at the time as followed: "I thought if they want to arrest people on the basis of what they say on Facebook, I'll give them something to be mad about." At the time, Sanitary Panels were simple doodles Taneja drew on her tablet and shared with her friends, but she quickly found that her work was collecting a lot of positive attention, which prompted her to start an official Facebook page for her webcomic on June 15 that year. Taneja wanted to name her webcomic something taboo, and chose a pun on sanitary pads.[3]

Taneja cofounded the Internet Freedom Foundation in 2016, campaigning for net neutrality, free speech, and privacy. She is also a proponent of the Me Too movement.[4] In 2017, Sanitary Panels was covered by the Obama Foundation in a YouTube video, in which Taneja talks about the responsibility she feels to make her content as accurate and fair as possible as it reaches millions of people and influences them. Taneja wishes to contribute to social justice through her comic strips.[5]

Taneja finds that humour is highly effective when communicating complex ideas to large groups of people, claiming that "the best thing about the [online] medium is its inclusiveness."[6]

Impact

Sanitary Panels has over 50,000 followers on Facebook since January 2019,[7] and over 33,000 followers on Instagram since December 2019. Taneja was one of the leading people behind the net neutrality movement in 2015, and her art was used en masse during the Citizenship Amendment Act protests.[8]

References
  1. Bangera, Aneesha (2016-03-20). "Comic Relief". The Hindu.
  2. Seker, Archanaa (2016-08-31). "A strip on social media that can change the world". The New Indian Express.
  3. Mantri, Geetika (2016-09-19). "Stick figures with food for thought: Hilarious web-comics making feminism fun". The News Minute.
  4. "Facebook takes down Sanitary Panels comic criticising it, restores it after several hours". Scroll.in. 2018-11-06.
  5. Obama Foundation, Meet Rachita Taneja and Sanitary Panels, retrieved 2019-01-19
  6. Choksi, Nidhi (2015-12-13). "A new superhero has emerged, the web comic". Hindustan Times.
  7. "Sanitary Panels". www.facebook.com. Retrieved 2019-01-19.
  8. Majumdar, Meghna (2019-12-23). "How art on social media became the face of anti-CAA protests". The Hindu.
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