Creating a Locational Counterpublic: Manushi and the Articulation of Human Rights and Sexuality from Delhi, India

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines the Indian women’s journal Manushi’s coverage of sexual violence and a concomitant articulation of women’s rights to bodily autonomy, albeit one that did not advocate sexual autonomy and choice. However, given the almost exclusive focus on (hetero)sexual violence, the human rights framework used to talk about Indian women in Manushi was not applied to sexual minorities. I begin by situating the publication in Delhi-based women’s activism, the metropolitan context of its origin, and use Nancy Fraser’s theorization of feminist counterpublics and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ideas on subalternity to highlight how Manushi’s activism is locational rather than subaltern. Examining the journal’s publications from the 1980s to 1998, I suggest that its incomplete representation of sexuality is useful as a starting point for a historical inquiry into women’s incomplete and ongoing reclamation of geographic, institutional, typographic, and judicial space in contemporary India. I posit tha...