Moving Rape: Trafficking in the Violence of Postliberalization

Abstract

This article discusses violence against women in cars in India, including the recent high-profile Delhi rape case, arguing that these cases should be set in the context of economic liberalization. The dynamic between women and their drivers should be understood as a labor relationship within a mode of consumer citizenship that revalorizes Indian middle classes. I argue that the men who drive are members of a lower class with an ambivalent position in liberalized Indian economies, simultaneously excluded from protections of government and relied on to do the dangerous job of navigating roads at speed. I focus on call center drivers as an example through which to think about how such subjects figure in postliberalization Indian imaginaries—as border guards to middle-class private consumer pleasures and as call center workers with unvalorized labor. I use the cases of call center violence to illuminate the relationship between economic privatization and privacy in India today.