The transnational assemblage of Indian rape culture

ABSTRACT

We analyse the affective-cultural assemblage of “Indian rape culture” across historical time and social space. We examine news coverage of a highly visible 2012 rape in Delhi in two newspapers, New York Times and Times of India, and the longevity of these articulations through an analysis of online discourses three years later. We further trace colonial-era materializations of Indian rape culture which emerged in the context of the “Indian Mutiny” in contrast to local perspectives, and which were rearticulated by development and human rights organizations. We show that at each moment, Global north voices and institutions dominate. The processes of articulation emanating from Global north institutions serve to realize a racialized transnational assemblage of Indian rape culture. Our framework points to the “soft” power and fluidity of racializing processes, the heterogeneity, and the multiple logics that appear disconnected, but which nonetheless flow and come together to sustain racialized power structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnationalism
• intersectionality
• assemblage
• Indian rape culture
• sociology of news
• postcolonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Ghosh, Tanushree. 2015. “I Always Thought I’d Return to India – Until I Had a Daughter.” The Huffington Post, June. Accessed March 17, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tanushree-ghosh/i-always-thought-id-return-home-to-india_b_7472776.html.

2 Since we look across articles that have identifiable authors and others that do not, and use these articles as data, we have not cited the authors of these articles where these are known. The articulations, rather than the perspective of individual authors, constitute the data.

3 See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/70897?hl=en. Accessed 21 October 2016.

4 From http://southasiainstitute.harvard.edu/harvard-gender-violence-project-resources/. Accessed 14 November 2014.

5 From https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/195279283/rape-culture-in-a-global-context. Accessed 14 November 2014.

6 From https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ncfw-fighting-rape-and-victim-blaming-in-india. Accessed 14 November 2014.

7 With regard to Indian women, however, a central distinction from the representation of Englishwomen as victims of Indian men was that Indian women’s victim status was elaborated within longer standing images of their own barbarism and heathenism. For example, nineteenth-century missionary narratives moved between images of Indian women’s barbaric treatment and neglect of their children to their own violent victimization by men with cultural practices such as widow burning (Burke 1983, 222–223).

8 Equally important, Sinha (1988) argues that the circulation of this narrative persisted as the second wave of white feminists in academia sought to describe the subjugated other and empower them (see also Mohanty 2003).