Examining Violence against Women in India
This Thursday: Room 602, 1957 E Street NW, Elliott School for International Affairs
Examining Violence against Women in India: Changes, Challenges, Futures
11 AM-1 PM
The panel’s conversation will explore the many complexities of the situation of violence against women in India, and also allow for a discussion of it in a comparative frame, linking it to histories of violence in the United States or elsewhere. Speakers include cultural theorists, historians, practitioners in the field of gender and development. This panel discussion hopes to initiate some deep rethinking on the shapes and forms of violence against women in India, and strategies for how we might stop it. The issue of violence against women in India was catapulted into international visibility with the remarkable media coverage of the gang rape and murder of a young physiotherapy female student on a public bus in New Delhi on 16 December 2012. As newspapers and TV channels picked up the story and presented it, unprecedented protests against this violence and the government’s failure to prevent it were organized on the streets by middle-class urban residents. Contrary to the popular image of “shining India” and rapid economic growth that recently has preoccupied Euro-American representations of India, this incident generated a critical discourse that essentially charged the land of Gandhi for failing to protect “its women.” The panel hopes to have a genuine debate and dialogue about questions about gender in contemporary India; gender violence and the politics of its representation; strategies for challenging violence; transnational feminist approaches; the role of NGOs, the state and civil society institutions in sustaining or interrogating gender violence, among others.
Speakers include:
