Routine unrecognized sexual violence in India

Namrata Mitra

pp. 183-200

in: Clara Fischer, Luna Dolezal (eds), New feminist perspectives on embodiment, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

This chapter responds to the following question: how does a long history of unrelenting sexual violence that wrecks lives and produces lifelong harms for survivors seem invisible to so many others? Focusing on the specific context of India, I explore the chasm between the articulations of harm by survivors of violence, on the one hand, and the dominant scripts of sexuality and political identity since colonial British India to the present, on the other. I show that the asymmetrical relation between the two renders routine sexual violence unrecognizable in the public sphere in general, and in the law and courtroom practices in the particular.