The Social Life of Sexualized Violence: Rape and its Discourses in India’s Recent History

Abstract

To what extent is sexualized violence woven into the fabric of postcolonial north Indian society? What historical factors have converged to produce this phenomenon, and how might charting this contribute to the struggle for liberation? This paper takes seriously the significance of rape—both its material reality and discourses thereof—as a crucial factor in shaping social life in postcolonial north India. It focuses on two key moments wherein official and popular discussion about rape intensified and changed: the late 1970s to early 1980s, sparked by the Mathura case, and the mid-2010s, in response to the Nirbhaya case. Closely reading sources from law, media, and politics, I unpack the historical factors that shaped these events—both the instances of sexualized violence and the discourses emergent from them—to understand rape as both an interpersonal violent act and a feature of the social constituted broadly. Bringing theoretical insights from transnational feminist, gender, and queer scholarship together with a historical approach, my analysis suggests that sexualized violence is structurally enmeshed in the fabric of postcolonial north Indian society. Equally, it insists on the historically contingent, rather than predetermined, nature of this embeddedness, as evidenced by persistent resistance against individual instances of sexualized violence and structures that facilitate them apparent from the very same sources, and therefore possibilities for less violent futures.