Wednesday, March 25th, 2015 Governance Feminism in the Post-Colony: India’s Rape Law Reforms of 2013

Description

Against the backdrop of the phenomenal international successes of governance feminism, my paper considers governance feminism in the post- colony. In particular, the paper uses the wide-ranging law reforms on rape and trafficking in India in the wake of the rape and murder of a Delhi student in December 2012 to make two arguments. First, that Anglo-American governance feminism has a rather limited and contingent influence on postcolonial feminism. Second, that a mapping of Indian feminist interventions on the law of rape over the past three decades suggests that Indian feminism displays key characteristics of governance feminism. Viewing the 2013 reforms as the culmination of decades of feminist lobbying of the state for rape law reform, the paper argues that Indian governance feminism is deeply committed to a highly gendered understanding of sexual violence. Further, that Indian feminism has increasingly resorted to the use of the criminal law to address sexual violence even as its historical suspicion of postcolonial state power has reduced considerably and is now mostly evident in its opposition to the death penalty for rapists. On the pathway to increased influence, Indian governance feminism has faced challenges from advocates of the LGBT community, children’s rights groups and sex workers’ groups. The paper considers in detail mobilizational efforts of one such group, namely, sex workers to illuminate both aspects of governance feminism, namely, the politics of feminism in relation to sex work but also the challenges for governance feminism as sex workers have mobilized outside the folds of the Indian women’s movement and in the space of what Partha Chatterjee calls political society. Brought together in the struggle for the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, I compare and contrast the ways in which Indian feminists and sex workers approached law reform. This illuminates ways in which governance feminism relates not just to juridical power but also to highly mobile forms of governmentalised power. This paper thus tells a highly contextual story of fragmentation, partial reception, partial rejection, and the local production of feminist ideas and stances towards governance.

Prabha Kotiswaran is Senior Lecturer in Law, King’s College London where she teaches criminal law, transnational criminal law, jurisprudence, law and social theory and sociology of law. She is the author of Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India. Published by Princeton University Press (2011) and co-published by Oxford University Press, India (2011), Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor won the SLSA-Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics in 2012. She is also the editor of Sex Work, an anthology published by Women Unlimited (2011) for a series on issues in contemporary Indian feminism. Current projects include an edited volume on Shaping the Definition of Trafficking in the Palermo Protocol, a co-authored book on Governance Feminism and a co-edited Handbook on Governance Feminism (both with with Janet Halley, Rachel Rebouche and Hila Shamir). She is also the Co-Convener (with Peer Zumbansen) of the King’s Summer Institute in Transnational Law and Governance.