Gendered discipline, gendered space: an ethnographic approach to gendered violence in India

ABSTRACT

Why are Indian women’s lives at fatal risk in the public sphere, when Indian democracy is inclusive in terms of gender? Addressing this question reveals a methodological and theoretical blind spot in political science scholarship – a blind spot which results in the reproduction and legitimization of gender-blindness. To understand how and why political science reproduces and legitimizes gender-blindness I reflect on a particularly horrific case of sexual and gender-based violence, the 2012 Delhi gang rape. This analysis is significant because it provides insight into the difficulty of understanding gendered violence in political science and achieving gender equality within democratic societies.

KEYWORDS:

• feminism
• political science
• political ethnography
• public sphere
• violence against women (VAW)
• sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Carstens Family Funded Research Aides, Arizona State University for facilitating this research. I would also like to thank Raquel Zamora, Rebekah Sterling, Sarah Marusek, and the anonymous referees for their constructive and thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The scope of the paper is limited to an analysis of political science as a discipline in the United States and how gender-blindness in this discipline creates biased knowledge about democracy and gender in India.

2 Some feminist scholars complicate the private/public binary and demonstrate that private sphere domestic violence is both a form of political violence and a precondition for more visible violence against women in the public sphere. This paper, however, limits its focus to Indian women’s experience of gendered violence in the public sphere to meet the call of the special issue on digesting the public sphere.

3 Political science also valorizes objectivity and neutrality, which often enables the discipline to ignore gender and race. For a detailed discussion, see Behl (2016).

4 The young woman was the first in her family to pursue a professional career. In November 2008, she enrolled in a physiotherapy programme at Sai Institute of Paramedical and Allied Sciences in Dehradun, India. To afford her tuition, her father, an airport worker, sold most of his land in his village, borrowed money from family members, and worked 16-hour shifts handling luggage at the airport, while the young victim worked nights at a call centre, helping Canadians with their mortgage issues. In October 2012, the young woman returned to Delhi to look for a volunteer internship, a requirement of her physiotherapy programme (for a detailed discussion about the victim and her family, see Pokharel, Chaturvedi, Agarwal, & Lahiri, 2013).

5 The bus in question was a private bus. Delhi has a mix of public and private buses serving more than 7 million people everyday. According to the police, the assailants tricked the victim and her friend into believing that the bus was part of the city’s public fleet. One of the perpetrators posed as a conductor, called out for passengers, and charged the victim and her friend bus fare (Mandhana & Trivedi, 2012).

6 For a detailed discussion of the six perpetrators of the gang rape in Delhi, see Sharma et al. (2013).

7 It is difficult to obtain reliable statistics for violence against women in India because rape within marriage is not counted as a crime, penile penetration is a necessary element of rape in Indian law, and women are deterred from reporting crimes.

8 In comparison, 55% of women in Kigali, Rwanda and 25% of women in Paris, France feel unsafe in public spaces (United Nations Women, Safer Cities Free of Violence against Women and Girls Initiative).

9 According to the 2012 UN Women Delhi survey, when respondents were asked what factors put women at risk for violence in public spaces, the number one response was gender. Gender, more so than age, religion, disability and state/region, puts women at risk (United Nations Women, 2012 Delhi Survey, Safer Cities Free of Violence against Women and Girls Initiative). According to Shirin Rai, “It is not just the act of rape but the threat of rape that keeps women inside the home, out of the public sphere” (1994, p. 217).

10 According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crimes, the rape rate in India is 1.7. The mean rape rate is 11.7 and the median rape rate is 5.2. The five highest rape rates: South Africa (113.5), Australia (91.6), Swaziland (76.1), Canada (68.2) and Jamaica (50.8). The five lowest rape rates: Pakistan (0), Egypt (0.2), Armenia (0.3), Maldives (0.3) and Azerbaijan (0.4). The lower rape rates in India can be attributed to underreporting, lack of reliable data and differences in the definition of rape. The UN rape rate is calculated per 100,000 population (United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, 2010, International Statistics on Crime and Justice).

11 This 900% growth in the incident of rape in India may indicate higher levels of reporting. According to R. Amy Elman, differing conceptions of crime, including rape, and varying methods of record keeping complicates rigorous comparative and cross-national scholarship on gendered violence, including violence against women (2013, p. 240). Elman argues that a dearth of reported incidents often results from a belief among women and girls that they are not reflected in the law as persons worthy of making a grievance, and they have limited faith in the state’s capacity to rectify sexist oppression (2013, p. 240). Conversely, Elman finds, “a higher level of reporting may indicate both a greater awareness among women and girls that their abuse is criminal and a confidence in the state to respond accordingly” (2013, p. 240).

12 Polity IV characterizes India as democratic with a score in +6 to +9 range (−10 being most autocratic and +10 being most democratic). Freedom House characterizes India as free with a political rights score of 2 and a civil liberties score of 3 (1 being the most free and 7 the least free).

13 India, unlike most of the Western developed world, guaranteed women’s enfranchisement prior to the ratification of the Indian constitution. In the following countries, women’s enfranchisement was won through long and sustained feminist struggles: United States, UK, New Zealand, France, Canada, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

14 For further detail, see Kapur (2007); Kapur and Cossman (1999); Keating (2007); Nussbaum (2001, 2002) and Trivedi (2003).

15 In India, the concern with equality and diversity was simultaneous and what emerges is a constitution that provides cultural autonomy for communities, but limits women’s rights because control over women functions as the central marker of cultural autonomy.

16 According to Beer, “many prominent democracy scholars find no contradiction in categorizing political systems as ‘democratic’ even when the female half of the population was prohibited from participating in government” (2009, p. 212). Similarly, Waylen finds that “the mainstream democratization literature has remained largely gender-blind, with very little to say about the participation of women in transitions to democracy or the gendered nature of those processes” (2007, p. 15).

17 For a detailed discussion of democratization scholarship and women’s role in transitions to democracy, see Waylen (2007). For a detailed discussion of democratization scholarship and gendered citizenship, see Behl (2014).

18 For a detailed discussion on definitions of democracy, see Collier and Levitsky (1997).

19 For a detailed discussion regarding conceptualizing, measuring and validating democracy, see Coppedge et al. (2011) and Seawright and Collier (2013).

20 Polity IV measures democracy in terms of three components – executive recruitment, independence of executive authority and political competition – none of which incorporate women’s suffrage either directly or indirectly (Beer, 2009, p. 221).

21 Teri Caraway finds that “by confining the study of democratization to the incorporation of [white] men, the picture of the politics of democratization is skewed” (2004, p. 457). Caraway calls for an integration of gender and race into analyses of democratization because using gender and race as analytic categories will transform the field into more than just studies of the enfranchisement of white men, while also making clear the gender and racial assumptions that underlie much of this scholarship (2004, p. 457).

22 Researchers’ positionality – demographic and locational – influences access to research participants. Intersectional categories of difference can generate access to research situations – or block it (Henderson, 2009; Islam, 2000; Ortbals & Rincker, 2009; Trinh, 2009). Also, locational positionalities draw one into particular networks rather than others, which influences knowledge production (Pachirat, 2009; Zirakzadeh, 2009).

23 I use the term research participant, rather than research subject because this term acknowledges participants agency in the research process. For a detailed discussion, see Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2012) and Ackerly and True (2010, 2013).

24 In contrast, interpretivist scholars evaluate research studies based on the standards of trustworthiness, systemacticity, and reflexivity. For a detailed discussion, see Schwartz-Shea (2006) and Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2012).

25 See, for example, cultural anthropology (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Geertz, 1988; Gupta & Ferguson, 1997; Khan, 2005; Marcus & Fischer, 1999; Narayan, 1993; Rabinow, 1977; Tripp, 1989; Visweswaran, 1994).

26 Some scholars rely on ethnography (Campbell, 2014; Majic, 2014; Pachirat, 2011). Others deploy ethnography and autoethnography (Behl, 2016; Dauphinee, 2010; Doty, 2004; Löwenheim, 2010). For a detailed discussion, see Yanow and Schwartz-Shea (2006); Schatz (2009) and Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2012).

27 For a detailed discussion, see Schatz (2009, pp. 10–12).

28 For a detailed discussion, see Elman (2013).