Session #3: Saturday, 10 January, 9.30 - 11.15 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Srimati Basu, University of Kentucky (srimati.basu2@uky.edu)
Chair/discussant: Tanika Sarkar, CHS, JNU (sumitsarkar_2001@yahoo.co.uk)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
This panel seeks to interrogate and reformulate the jurisprudence of sexual violence, to read the limits of legal and quasi-legal processes that are used to adjudicate violence against women, to dwell in complications of female victimization and agency thrown up in these legal encounters. We look at both the encoding and decoding of laws of intimate violence: at both social movements and their ongoing struggles in defining optimal policies, as well as at institutions set up in response to social movements and the ways in which they concretize policy visions. The first set of papers focuses squarely on social movement struggles, particularly on seemingly progressive movements and their difficult attempts to grapple with issues of gender, class and religion. The second set examines quotidian applications of formal and informal laws pertaining to violence against women in courtrooms, police stations and social settings, mapping the exact terrain around which intimate violence is conceptualized as part of systems of kinship, sexuality and property. The panel critically examines feminist understandings of sexual violence and attempts to devise new rubrics to confront emergent problems of legal execution.
The women’s movement in India has been in search of a transformation of the legal system by a widening of its horizons to include/accommodate a feminist jurisprudence in the near future, but beginning from our contemporary locations today. Ambivalences and contradictions are thus inherent in the situation as the juridical structures and legal institutions are deeply embedded in hierarchies of power along the lines of gender, caste, class and community. Within this broad context there have been many crisis moments for the women’s movement where it has been challenged to rethink its assumptions and goals, and forced to make compromises and strategic turn-arounds, fracturing the very movement itself at different moments. This paper will examine a particular moment in the history of feminist jurisprudence: the genocidal violence in Gujarat in 2002 and will focus on the attempt of feminist lawyers and activists to challenge and expand the existing laws on sexual violence with particular reference to a situation of conflict and instances of mass rapes of women, as part of a genocidal project. It seeks to document the attempts to ensure justice for survivors of the sexual violence, as well as for those who have died, through a close examination of the work of a feminist tribunal and the twists and turns of a single case where the survivor both witnessed the rapes of other women who were killed and survived her own experience of sexual violence to file charges against the assaulters.
The paper considers the category of sexual violence as situated in the discourse and practices of resistant politics. It is interested in exploring the interrelation and continuities between implicit forms of sexual violence and the explicit terror of political violence, taking as its point of departure my research on the late 1960s Naxalbari movement of West Bengal. Within the domain of such revolutionary struggles, ‘ordinary’ acts of sexual and gender-based violence, particularly those faced by women activists, tend to be neglected in the face of the ‘extraordinariness’ of political terror. While such violence is locatable in the politics of everyday life and within the textures of interpersonal relations, it also needs to be made sense of in terms of the gendered logic of resistance itself. The very legitimisation of resistant violence relies on and reproduces gendered power relations; for instance, in positing a feminised victim who needs to be protected by the ‘good’ violence of the revolutionary against the ‘bad’ violence of the state. This masculinist discourse of protection (Young 2003) suggests how central gender is to the production of particular types of violence, and equally, the subjects and objects of violence (Hutchings 2007). The ways in which political ideologies of ‘righteous’ violence are themselves gendered also implicate, I argue, other forms of violence, as well as larger projects of witnessing and resisting violence. This is observable in the ‘official’ adjudication of rape and sexual harassment in the context of Naxalbari where sexual violence was rendered varyingly (in)visible through a logic of ‘class oppression’. An appreciation of the complexities of the category of sexual violence in the realm of resistant politics demands, then, a close look at the gendered economies on which resistance relies.
The relationship between women's movement and the individual woman victims is dynamic, and in recent years, has become contentious and controversial. The paper attempts to explore this theme through some recent concerns of the Indian women's movement. Some issues have been with us for a long time and some have emerged on the horizon more recently. But there is a common theme that runs through them - who speaks for the victim or rather, does the individual woman have an agency to speak for herself or whether feminists / women's groups can articulate her concerns in support of a larger feminist cause. The paper will be woven around three thematic concerns - validity of marriage of minors and the provisions of the Child Marriage Restraint Act; the recent controversy around making S.498A of IPC (cruelty to wives) compoundable at the behest of individual woman victim and the malicious campaign against bar dancers on the ground of sexual morality and protecting their dignity and the economic implications of the subsequent ban. Through these thematic concerns, the paper attempts to interrogate the rhetoric of rights and feminist postures and its impact on individual women.
There is a legal understanding of acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence experienced by women within the family. A gap between experience of the suffering and legal rhetoric exists. Many of the afflictions that women become familiar with necessarily does not translate into a legal language of universalism of what constitutes violence. It is important to discuss the myriad meanings and the expanse of the word violence in connection with women’s lives. Primarily a specific understanding of violence is given much recognition in the legal language—bodily harm or injury inflicted upon some individual or a collective. Although by championing the slogan ‘personal is political’ many of the woman’s private experiences have become a part of the public discourse, yet not all private experiences have been incorporated within the public agenda. There is, for instance, a hierarchization between the violence inflicted on the body and that on the mind. Law’s emphasis on positivist enquiries is responsible and related to the importance that is attached to bodily harm. Moreover, rape or physical molestation within or outside the family structure underlies notions of sexual chastity and purity as well as the image or the functions of the family. Everyday suffering or pain like the feeling of neglect, mental agony, stress or emotional turmoil are seldom legally recognized mainly considering it as an individual, emotional subjectivity/experience of an (unreasonable) woman which is open to many interpretations. This daily denial or subjugation into suffering is not brought within the ambit of violence primarily because patriarchal arrangements of the family offer a dichotomy between security and control. This paper will cover the following areas:
• To trace the literature of what constitutes violence on women and to identify whether habitual suffering has been a part of this literature.
• To map out the legal system’s construction of the body over the mind. Indian laws, Law Commission Reports and selective landmark cases will be analyzed to discover the connotation of violence in the Indian legal system.
• To argue how a disjuncture is created between subjectivities of suffering and the ‘objective’ law’s rhetoric on it.