Feminist Studies

news and views "TheDelhiGangRape": The Making ofInternationalCauses Poulami Roychowdhury Jyoti Singh Pandey's rape and murder in December 2012 provoked a mass media furor across the globe. Over 1,515 articles appeared in the United States alone within the two-month period following the inci dent.' Given the myriad forms of violence that plague the world and the media's notoriously brief and selective attentiveness, the astonish ing depth and breadth of this engagement raise some pressing ques tions: What key patterns emerged in the reporting of Pandey's rape and murder? What do these representations tell us about how certain acts of violence become international causes that are publicized and socially recognized across the world? What kinds of politics do these representations validate? While the mobilization within India around Pandey's assault obvi ously played a large part in making the event an international cause, my exploration of these questions in this article focuses on a selection of highly visible international mass media reports.2 I focus on one aspect of international media coverage, namely the way many media stories presented Pandey's assault as a putative battle between two Indias: the first,new and modern, and the second, old and backward. This juxtaposition illustrates a larger logic: the way violence becomes FeministStudies39, no. 1. © 2013 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 282 PoulamiRoychowdhury 283 internationally recognized as a violation of modern, rights-bearing subjects. A new, relatively empowered, "Third World" woman — one who not only demands women's liberation but does so within the confines of a global consumer economy—is critical to this process. Her violation simultaneously serves as a site of international curios ity and scrutiny, while providing a rationale for political claims-mak ing and legal intervention. In the aftermath of Pandey's assault, global news outlets high lighted a series of "facts" about Pandey and her assailants that laid the groundwork for a range of theorizing about the causes of the violence. Readers learned how Pandey watched LifeofPi with a male friend prior to the assault. Like Pi, the movie's indomitable protagonist, Pandey was similarly "determined to survive."3 Several articles drew atten tion to Pandey's status as a medical student whose father had sold his land to finance her education. Pandey was reported to have wanted "more" out of life, "a smart overcoat, a Samsung smartphone."4 In undisclosed family photographs, she was described wearing "western clothes," and keeping her "long, dark shiny hair down and flowing— never tied up."5 Regardless of how the real Pandey may have under stood herself or conducted her life, the media's Pandey was emblem atic of a decidedly modern Indian woman. This woman is no longer "confined to the home," but is "out and about, in the malls and movie theaters," and has fully "embraced the aspirational lifestyle."6 She is professionally successful and consumer-oriented. In contrast to Pandey, who was represented as highly individu ated and "westernized," her male assailants were described as a group of migrant workers who lived in a local slum. They were reported to have been drunk and purposefully circling the city in a private van "looking for fun."7The Australian noted how the men were part of the "tens of thousands of newly urbanised [Indians], from villages still almost medieval," who consider sexual harassment and assault "their male birthright."8 Meanwhile, CNN likened the assailants to men in other "traditional societies" who "see improvements in the status of women as a challenge to their own" and who use rape as a weapon of power against such advances.9 Notions of Western gender progres sivism implicitly and explicitly guided these commentaries. Manu Joseph's New York Timeseditorial most starkly contrasted India's "patri archal village culture" with the ostensibly true cosmopolitanism of 284 Poulami Roychowdhury Western cities, assuming that the latter is somehow definitionally safer for women.10 Comparative rates of violence against women of course say otherwise.11 But for international media, systematic analy sis proved to be inconvenient to the narrative of modernity and back wardness that framed what had become the "Delhi gang rape." Such distinct portraits of Pandey and her assailants are espe cially remarkable...