Durba Mitra - Sexual violence and the fight for political change скачать в хорошем качестве

Durba Mitra - Sexual violence and the fight for political change

Feminists have long theorised about how to consider evidence and women’s testimony as factual. The question of evidence in cases of sexual violence has been critical to feminist organising for the last 50 years. About Durba Mitra "I’m the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. I am a scholar of the history of sexuality and epistemology in South Asia and the comparative colonial and post-colonial world." Questions of evidence and testimony Feminists have long theorised about how to consider evidence and women’s testimony as factual. In South Asia, the question of evidence in cases of sexual violence has been critical to feminist organising for the last 50 years. The rape law was passed under colonialism as part of the Indian penal code in the 1860s, and medical evidence takes precedence over a woman’s own testimony about what happened. Particularly in the context of colonial India and post-colonial South Asia, including Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, we see the rise of the question of evidence of women’s virginity in sexual violence cases, where a woman’s virginity becomes critical for the determination of whether a woman has been raped or not. Feminists have been organising around these issues for decades. In the 1970s, the case of an extraordinarily violent gang rape goes all the way up to the Indian Supreme Court. In this case, the Mathura rape case, a girl is gang-raped by the police. The Indian Supreme Court determines that she had been so-called “habituated” to sexual intercourse. In other words, she was accustomed to sex and therefore had not, in fact, been gang-raped. From that moment, we see the galvanising of an extraordinary feminist movement which tries to transform the concept of evidence itself. Key Points • The history of collecting medical evidence in rape cases reveals how ideas about women’s sexual propriety are linked to ideas about sexual violence. • One of the biggest challenges of feminist mobilisation is translating critique into structural change. • Feminism offers the tools to re-imagine a more just future.