CENTRE FOR WOMEN’S STUDIES, JNU
Invites you to a Seminar on
Sexual Subjectivity in Rape Narratives: Consent, Credibility and Coercion in Rural Haryana
by
Rupal Oza
(Department of Women and Gender Studies, Hunter College, CUNY, New York)
Since the national uprising after the brutal rape and death of a young physiotherapy student in 2012 and subsequent amendments to strengthen the law, the National Crime Records Bureau in India has recorded an increase in the number of cases. This talk is an empirical study based in rural Haryana that seeks to understand this increase. On asking police officers, attorneys, and senior bureaucrats about the increase, the most common refrain the speaker heard was that 90% of the rape cases were false. Against documented evidence of police collusion and challenges women and minorities face to file a rape charge, Rupal Oza is interested in what the amplification of false cases allows. There are two arguments she makes; first she suggests the false case narrative is a hostile response to structural and discursive credibility, albeit limited and contingent, that women’s claims of violation are beginning to receive. Second, she argues that consent – in the false rape narrative – simultaneously nullifies the rape charge while discrediting the woman as corrupt and immoral. It is a disciplining maneuver, which seeks to bring the straying women back into the libidinal boundaries of the patriarchal home and state. Sexual subjectivity, in the title of this talk, signals deep anxiety of the patriarchal state machinery, which motivates efforts to wrest autonomy, accorded by the term ‘consent’ from women back to its ‘rightful’ place with men.
Date: 22nd January 2019, Tuesday, Time: 3.00 PM to 5.00 PM
Venue: Room No.324, Third Floor, SSS-1
