Postcolonial Governmentality and the Politics of Rape: Violence, Vulnerability and the State

<strong>CENTRE FOR WOMEN'S STUDIES, JNU</strong> a Seminar on <strong>Postcolonial Governmentality and the Politics of Rape: Violence, Vulnerability and the State</strong> by <strong>Nikita Dhawan</strong> Professor of Political Science at the Leopold-Franzen University Innsbruck and Director of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt DATE:<strong> 8th JANUARY, 2015</strong> Given the routineness of rape, the unprecedented nationwide anti-rape rallies in India protesting the gang rape and gruesome assault of a young student in the country's capital have been hailed in the global media as a sign of an "empowered" Indian public, which managed to shame the Indian state into action against sexual violence. The troubling questions are whether the protests would have been so widespread if the young woman had been from a marginalized group or had "only" been brutally assaulted, instead of being raped. Do the protests and media coverage simply reflect the fetishization of penovaginal penetration? Against the deployment of sex as a site of power, Michel Foucault recommends "desexualization of rape" as a strategy against disciplinary power. The sexual definition of rape, he argues, reinforces the genitalization of the body, thereby justifying the disciplinary targeting of sexuality. He provocatively asks why an assault with a penis should be distinguished legally from an assault with any other body part. Given his distrust of law as well as the state, Foucault seeks to delink desire and crime, sexuality and the law in an attempt to immunize sexual acts from becoming target of state intervention. Revisiting Foucault's controversial proposal to treat rape like a "punch in the face", Dhawan's talk will address issues of gendered vulnerability and political agency, shame and guilt, accountability and governmentality, surveillance and securitization, to investigate the role of civil society and the state in promoting and obstructing gender justice. Instead of pursuing for or against positions vis-à-vis the state and judiciary, she will explore the Derridian/Spivakian idea of state as pharmakon - medicine as well as poison.