‘To draw light, you need shadow’: Using graphic art to counter gender based violence in Drawing the Line

Abstract

ABSTRACT Women in India cope with an ongoing sense of precarity owing to the frequency of street harassment and sexual violence; this impacts their freedom to travel and sense of autonomous agency. The December 2012 Nirbhaya case, the rape and fatal injury of a Delhi medical student, returned the subject of rape to public discourse leading to mass protests and, eventually, some stronger anti-rape laws; however, #metoo allegations surface weekly, and artists and activists are demanding that the trivialization of rape and verbal abuse stop and active steps be taken to dismantle the cultural scaffolding undergirding twomen's violation. In 2014 a collaboration by Zubaan Press (New Delhi) and the Goethe Institute (Germany) brought a group of Indian graphic artists together to create stories about women’s ground realities and the microaggressions they experience. The resulting publication, Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back, contains fourteen vignettes which reveal the constraints women experience and also illuminate women’s capacity for resilience and boldness. This essay analyzes the forms of resistance imagined in these narratives, how particular stories illuminate slow violence, and what may be lost if we know little about the perpetrators who commit these acts against women.