Abstract
The SlutWalk campaigns around the world have triggered a furious debate on whether they advance or limit feminist legal politics. This article examines the location of campaigns such as the SlutWalk marches in the context of feminist legal advocacy in postcolonial India, and discusses whether their emergence signifies the demise of feminism or its incarnation in a different guise. The author argues that the SlutWalks, much like the Pink Chaddi (panty) campaign in India, provide an important normative and discursive challenge to a specific strand of feminism based on male domination and female subordination in the area of sexuality and also speaks to the emergence of consumer agency in the very heart of pleasure in the neo-liberal moment. It serves as a space clearing gesture, a form of feminism ‘lite’, rather than offering a transformative or revolutionary politics, and thus enables the possibility of feminist theoretical positions in a postcolonial context that have hitherto been marginalised or ignored in feminist legal advocacy in India to emerge.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
“Fashionable girls invite rape: AP police chief”. 2011. India Today 30 December. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/andhra-pradesh-dgp-blames-fashion-for-increase-in-rapes/1/166548.html. Accessed 13 January 2012.
`Women’s activists blast DGP’. 2012. The Hindu 1 January. http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-andhrapradesh/article2765415.ece. Accessed January 14, 2012.
Another founding member of the SRS, Pravin Valke, stated "These girls come from all over India, drink, smoke, and walk around in the night spoiling the traditional girls of Mangalore. Why should girls go to pubs? Are they going to serve their future husbands alcohol? Should they not be learning to make chapattis [Indian bread]? Bars and pubs should be for men only. We wanted to ensure that all women in Mangalore are home by 7 p.m." (Johnson 2009).
According to Mackinnon, sexuality is the lynchpin of oppression: “If sexuality is central to women's definition and forced sex is central to sexuality, rape is indigenous, not exceptional, to women's social condition” (MacKinnon 1987, 172). She argues that sexual exploitation and sexual violence are experiences women share in common and that these commonalities are more important than any differences between women. In her view, all women experience oppression at the hands of patriarchal power, and she argues that power is invariably male (MacKinnon 1987, 157–170). In law, it is expressed through `male laws’ and `male’ systems of justice (MacKinnon 1982, 1983).
The feminist movement, more typically referred to as the women's movement in India, is diverse and vast. Similar to elsewhere in the world, there is no one essentialised, homogenous movement. My discussion of the feminist position refers to a specific feminist position that has become dominant in legal advocacy and law reform efforts, that is dominance feminism, rather than to one specific movement.
The Adhoc Committee on Rape and Sexual Assault was set up by the National Commission of Women in India in 1996 to formulate recommendations for the government on how to reform the legal provisions on rape contained in the Indian Penal Code, 1860, (IPC) so as to cover child sexual abuse and provide more effective protection to minors. In examining the rape provisions under sections 375 and 376 of the IPC, the Committee came to the conclusion that the very definition of rape had to be revised and expanded to cover sexual assault. The Committee’s recommendations included the need to delink adult women from children in formulating the legal definition of the crime of rape. It also recommended elaborate definitions on the meaning of consent and sexual assault and separate sentencing provisions for the rape or sexual assault of an adult woman, young person, and minor. The recommendations were ultimately rejected on the simple ground that the Committee had gone beyond its mandate.
I have elaborated on the politics of victimisation rhetoric elsewhere in relation to feminist legal advocacy in India as well as within the context of international women's rights activism and state interventions (Kapur 2005, 91–136). The victim-subject has been deployed differently in different contexts including in different Western contexts, and is not exclusively aligned with the postcolonial setting or the notion of `Indian womanhood’. Within the context of India, the victim-subject has come to be sutured with a politics of cultural essentialism and invested by different players with a distinct notion of Indianness or Indian identity.
The issue of gender has also been raised within a number of social and political movements such as the Dalit Movement, the indigenous people’s rights movement, as well as within local issue based struggles against the sale of arrack, deforestation, or for land reform. However, in relation to law, a feminist position centring women’s victimisation and sexual violence and based on a relationship of male domination and female subordination has been the dominant one and difference has often been assimilated into this position rather than used to destabilise it.
The campaign was successful to the extent that the Indian Penal Code was amended to include a new crime of custodial rape, which included more stringent sentencing provisions (section 376 (2)). However, the statutory definition of rape remained the same.
Naz Foundation v Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, 160 Delhi Law Times 277 (Delhi High Court 2009), in which the court read down the scope of section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, criminalizing sodomy, holding that it only applied to non-consensual sexual conduct.
Fire was produced by the Canadian diasporic filmmaker—Deepa Mehta in the late 1990s. The story involves the attraction between two rather stunningly beautiful married women, Radha and Sita, who live together in a joint family household. Radha and Sita are both names derived from central female characters in Indian epics. In celluloid, they are reimagined in the contemporary moment to transgress nearly every sexual, familial and cultural norm that constitutes India as it is imagined, including trespassing into an `unacceptable’ sexual space. The film triggered a national controversy over the representation of lesbianism and the cultural legitimacy of the film and its screening in India.
Ruth Vanita and Salim Kidwai have traced how same-sex love has existed in Indian culture over two thousand years. In a somewhat essentialist account they argue that the erasure of same-sex love was largely due to the presence of the British and the nineteenth century colonial encounter. The colonial power introduced Victorian cultural values and morality in and through the Indian Penal Code as well as in the educational curriculum. Ironically, the very provisions that had their origins in Victorian morality are today defended as part of Indian cultural values (Vanita and Kidwa 2001).
The Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) (The Unstoppable Movement for Women’s Equality), based in Calcutta, is the most well known group. It was formed in 1995 as a forum exclusively consisting of over 70,000 sex workers and their children. DMSC demands decriminalization of adult sex work and the right to form a trade union. Other groups include VAMP, a collective of sex workers formed in 1996 and based in the western state of Maharashtra, Aastha Atmanirbhar, a sex workers federation based in Bombay, and the Karnataka Sex Workers Union in the southern state of Karnataka. These groups have lobbied in favour of self-regulation and the right to monitor and report the trafficking of minors into the sex industry without state intervention. They oppose moves to abolish sex work or to criminalize their clients.
The critique of dominance feminism has been a continuous one and was not triggered solely by the SlutWalk phenomenon or the Pink Chaddi campaigns. The critique has emerged from a range of diverse theoretical positions, including from post-feminists, postcolonial feminists, queer theorists and poststructuralists. My critique draws attention to the specific challenges produced by the politics of SlutWalk and Pink Chaddi for feminism within a postcolonial context.
See for example Bharwada Bhoginbhai Hirjibhai v State of Gujarat 1983 AIR 753, in which the court stated that:
It is conceivable in the Western Society that a female may level false accusation [sic]as regards sexual molestation against a male for several reasons … Rarely will a girl or a woman in India make such false allegations of sexual assault, whether she belongs to the urban or rural society, or, sophisticated, or, not-so sophisticated, or, unsophisticated society. Only very rarely can one conceivably come across an exception or two and that too possibly from amongst the urban elites … A girl or a woman in the tradition bound non-permissive society of India would be extremely reluctant even to admit that any incident which is likely to reflect on her chastity had ever occurred (at 281 paras 2:2 and 2:3)
See also Gita Hariharan v. RBI 1999 AIR 1149:”[N]obility and self-denial coupled with tolerance mark the greatest features of Indian womanhood in the past …” (para 1); and Nergesh Meerza v Air India “It seems to us that the termination of the services of an AH [air hostess] under such circumstances is not only callous and cruel act but an open insult to Indian womanhood—the most cherished and sacrosanct institution.” (at 443 para 11).
Judith Butler makes a similar argument in relation to the deployment of the term “queer” (Butler 1994).
See, for example, The Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, 2010 available online at http://mha.nic.in/writereaddata/12700472381_CriminalLaw(Amendment)Bill2010.pdf. Accessed 19 July 2011.
Section 155(4) of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, which allowed the defence to examine a witness about sexual history, was deleted in 2002.
See for example Apparel Export Promotion Council v. A.K. Chopra All India Reports 1999 Supreme Court 625, in which a complaint of sexual harassment was upheld partly because of the complainant’s pristine conduct, including her lack of knowledge about sex, as she was not married. These factors redeemed her credibility and suggest that had she been knowledgeable, it would have damaged her credibility and undermined the allegation that the sexual advances were unwelcome.
References
Bell, Sarah. 2011. Slutwalk London: Yes means yes and no means no. BBC, 11 June. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13739876. Accessed 12 February 2012.
Bersani, Leo. 1996. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Besant, Annie. 1921/2004. The speeches and writings of Annie Besant. Whitecliff, MT: Kessinger Publishing.
Brown, Wendy. 2001. Politics out of history. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. London, New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1994. Against proper objects. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6: 1–26.
Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York: Routledge.
Concerned Citizen’s Tribunal, (CCT) Crime Against Humanity: An Inquiry into the Violence in Gujarat. 2002. http://www.sabrang.com/tribunal/tribunal1.pdf. Accessed August 11, 2010.
Dhillon, Amrit. 2011. SlutWalk mocks Indian women, real issues. Hindustan Times 19 June. http://www.hindustantimes.com/SlutWalk-mocks-Indian-women-real-issues/Article1-711363.aspx. Accessed 18 January 2012.
Dietrich, Gabriel. 2003. Loss of socialist vision and options before the women’s movement. Economic and Political Weekly 38 (43):4547–4554.
Dines, Gail, and Wendy Murphy. 2011. SlutWalk is not sexual liberation. The Guardian, 8 May. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/08/slutwalk-not-sexual-liberation. Accessed 18 July 2011.
Doezema, Jo. 2010. Sex slaves and discourse masters: The construction of trafficking. London: Zen Books.
Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC). 1997. Sex workers’ manifesto. First National Conference of Sex Workers in India, Calcutta. 14–16 November.
Foucault, Michel. 1993. Excerpts from the history of sexuality: Volume 1: An introduction. In A postmodern reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, 333–341. New York: State University of New York Press.
George, Nirmala. 2011. ‘Slutwalk’ plan triggers debate on Women in India. ABC News 22 June. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=13899668. Accessed 18 January 2012.
Ghosh, Shohini. 2010. Fire: A queer film classic. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Ghosh, Shohini. 2009. The pleasures and politics of pornography. HIMAL South Asian. http://himalmag.com/component/content/article/617-The-pleasures-and-politics-of-pornography.html. Accessed 18 July 2011.
Golwalkar, Madhav Sadashiv. 1947. We or our nationhood defined, 4th ed. Ahmedabad: Bharat Prakashan.
Govindan, Padma. 2012. Understanding India’s pub-going, loose, and forward women. Infochange human rights: News and analysis on social justice and development issues in India. http://infochangeindia.org/human-rights/the-body-politic/understanding-india’s-pub-going-loose-and-forward-women.html. Accessed 12 February 2012.
Halley, Janet. 2006. Split decisions: How and why to take a break from feminism. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Halperin, David. 1995. Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
International Initiative for Justice (IIJ). 2003. Threatened existence: A feminist analysis of the genocide in Gujarat. International initiative for justice, 117–120. http://www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/reports/iijg/2003/fullreport.pdf. Accessed 11 August 2010.
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1998. The Hindu nationalist movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press.
Johnson, T.A. 2009. “Mangalore metamorphosis.” Indian Express 3 February. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/mangalores-metamorphosis/418422/0. Accessed 18 January 2012.
Kapur, Ratna. 2005. Erotic justice: Law and the new politics of postcolonialism. London: Cavendish, Taylor and Francis.
Kapur, Ratna. 2010. Makeshift migrants and law: Gender, belonging and postcolonial anxieties. New Delhi, London: Routledge.
Kapur, Ratna. 2011. Hecklers to power: The waning of liberal rights and challenges to feminism in India. In South Asian Feminisms, ed Ania Loomba and Ritty Lukose, 333–355. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kempadoo, Kamalam, Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik (eds.). 2005. Trafficking and prostitution reconsidered: new perspectives on migration, sex work, and human rights. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers.
Kirmani, Nida. 2011. Beyond the impasse: Muslim feminism(s) and the Indian women’s movement. Contribution to Indian Sociology 45:1–26 (February).
Kotiswaran, Prabha (ed.). 2011. Reader on sex work. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Krishnaraj, Maithreyi. 2003. Challenges before women’s movement in a changing context. Economic and Political Weekly 38(43): 4536–4545.
MacKinnon, Catharine. 1987. Feminism unmodified: Discourses on life and law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
MacKinnon, Catharine. 1982. Feminism, Marxism, method and the state: An agenda for theory. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7(3):515–544.
MacKinnon, Catharine. 1983. Feminism, Marxism, method and the state: Toward a feminist jurisprudence. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8:635–658.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In Third world women and the politics of feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (eds), 51–80. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Narain, Vrinda. 2002. Gender and community: Muslim women’s rights in India. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Narain, Arvind, and Alok Gupta. 2011. Law like love: Queer perspectives on law. Calcutta: Yoda Press.
NDTV. 2009. “What is Sri Ram Seva”. 26 January. http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20090081485. Accessed 18 January 2012.
News24. 2011. “Slutwalk plan triggers debate”. 6 June. http://www.news24.com/World/News/SlutWalk-plan-triggers-debate-20110622. Accessed 19 July.
Phadke, Shilpa. 2003. Thirty years on women’s studies reflects on the women’s movement. Economic and Political Weekly 42(17): 4567–4576.
Poonacha, Veena. 2003. Women’s studies in Indian universities: Current concerns. Economic and Political Weekly 38(26): 2653–2658.
Savarkar, Veer Damodar. 1971. The six glorious epochs of Indian history. Trans. S.T. Godbole. Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan.
Sharma, Jyotirmaya. 2003. Hindutva: Exploring the idea of Hindu nationalism. New Delhi: Penguin Viking India.
Sharma, Jyotirmaya. 2007. Terrifying vision: M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India. New Delhi: Penguin Books, India Pvt. Ltd.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1987. In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics, 197–221. New York: Routledge.
Timson, Judith. 2011. Why SlutWalk raises hackles—and hopes. Globe and Mail, 12 May. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/news-and-views/judith-timson/why-slutwalk-raises-hackles-and-hopes/article2020043/. Accessed 18 January 2012.
Vanita, Ruth, and Salim Kidwa. 2001. Same-sex love in India: Readings from literature and history. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Wente, Margaret. 2011. Embrace your inner slut? Um, maybe not. Globe and Mail, 12 May. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/embrace-your-inner-slut-um-maybe-not/article2018828/. Accessed 18 January 2012.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kapur, R. Pink Chaddis and SlutWalk Couture: The Postcolonial Politics of Feminism Lite. Fem Leg Stud 20, 1–20 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-012-9193-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-012-9193-x