Critical Events, Incremental Memories and Gendered Violence

Abstract

The ‘Delhi gang rape’ was not only a ‘critical event’, but also simultaneously a part of successive and incremental memories of gendered violence. The protests which erupted in Delhi and across the country against the gang rape, wove an imagined community of citizens around the iconised figure of the raped woman. The diverse strands which constituted the protests, invoked distinct and divergent ideas of the state, drawing upon the different ways in which the modern state exercises power over its citizens to elicit their obedience and consent. At the same time, the gang rape, assumed criticality, by providing the site for the revival and regrouping of collective energies which mobilised against sexual violence and presented a critique of the state and its laws. In the process, the complex relationship between Indian feminism and the state and the manner in which state and law become constitutive sites of contestation were brought out.