"You": A Girl amidst Images and Sounds of Adult Violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s Rape: A Love Story

Teena Maguire and her child, Bethie, are brutally attacked and beaten by a mob of violent young men in a park at night. While the mother is gang raped and nearly killed, the daughter is both the witness and the victim of physical and psychological violence. Through its innovative second-person narration, Joyce Carol Oates’s novella Rape: A Love Story (2004) contributes to her sustained interest in family relationships, violence, crime and justice. However, rather than focusing on the victim of the rape, Oates writes a coming-of-age story that explores the daughter’s trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder and fight for survival, a struggle that coincides with the girl’s critical passage from childhood to adulthood. During the months after the assault, Bethie’s innocence is also repeatedly violated by the aggressors’ intrusion into her life and the hostility of the community in the town of Niagara Falls and its social institutions, such as police, school, media, healthcare and the judicial system. Unable to cling to girlhood or to find maternal protection, her forced witnessing of her mother’s gang rape compels Bethie to mature too early while experiencing her first love for a man.

New Screen Economies and Viewing Paradigms: The Ethics of Representation in Delhi Crime

The new technologies of television viewership following the digital turn have introduced new anxieties and possibilities. While new screen cultures facilitate a transnational viewership, the importance of ethically and morally grounded representations cannot be overstated. In this context, Delhi Crime, the Emmy award-winning Indian series based on the Delhi gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi, will be instrumental in informing the ethico-political concerns that ought to be prioritized while representing the subaltern subject and the novel socialites fashioned through the new viewership patterns. This article attempts to understand the way in which the emerging screen economies provide new terrains for ethical representation and engendering digital publics. Thus, this article is interested in understanding the intersection of media ecologies and ethico-political concerns to introduce new dialectical possibilities.

Tribunal Theatre in Spain: Jauría and the La Manada Gang Rape

Jauría (2019) was the first tribunal verbatim play in Spain and it had a great impact on audiences in the context of heated debate about how national legislation had a long-standing legacy of sexism. Based on the transcripts of the legal proceedings of the La Manada gang-rape case, Jauría not only clarifies this controversial case for different types of audiences, but it also poses very important questions concerning the nature of rape and how the judicial system treats the victims of rape. This article studies the performative force of tribunal verbatim in shaping the audience’s understanding of an actual gang-rape case and indicates how a feedback loop is created in the performance itself, transforming the spectators’ attitudes. Svetlana Antropova is a lecturer at Villanueva University in Madrid. Her recent publications include ‘Filming Trauma: Bodiless Voice and Voiceless Bodies in Beckett’s Eh Joe’, in Elspeth McInnes and Danielle Schaub, eds., What Happened? Re-presenting Traumas, Uncovering Recoveries (Brill/Rodopi 2019), and ‘De/Construction of Visual Stage Image in Samuel Beckett’s Play’ (Anagnórisis: Revista de Investigación Teatral, XXII, 2020). Elisa García Mingo is an associate professor in Sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and is an associate member of the Centre for Transforming Sexualities and Gender at the University of Brighton.

What is Behind the Bodice (Choli Ki Pichhe)? Narratives of Simulacra, Rape, Forced Whoredom: A Critical Analysis of Mahasweta Devi’s Behind the Bodice

Media is not a charitable organization rather a profitable institution. Media often fails to publish important national issues and success to publish the non-issues for escalating the mercantile gains. Interestingly, media often adopts simulation, simulacra, hyper-reality to printed or digitalized news applying their unethical de-realization or yellow journalism. I, therefore, theoretically and thematically will show in my paper how this paid journalism and unethical media using a false representation of Gangor’s breast doomed her life. This ‘Simulacrum’ gives birth of narratives of violence, gang rape, and forced prostitution in Mahasweta Devi’s story Behind the Bodice. Jean Baudrillard defines ‘Simulacra’ as something that replaces reality with its false representation. According to him, it refers the false reality of the image and misrepresentation of true reality actually. In the story Behind the Bodice, Gangor’s breast feeding of her child is a natural phenomenon. But this true reality, ‘save the breast’ (simulacra) is represented with erotic code which sells abroad by Upin Puri at huge prices. This ace-photographer exhibited the nakedness of India to the West for his journalistic prosperity. His false representations of Gangor’s breasts germinate the tales of violence, eviction, male gaze, narratives of forced prostitution and finally, a tragic doom. I will highlight in my paper how this subject is appreciated by then. On the other hand, ‘Behind the Bodice’ introduces the narrative of simulacra, rape and forced whoredom by the power, politics and apparatus of the repressive state.

Clergy-Perpetrated Sexual Abuse in Ghana: A Media Content Analysis of Survivors, Offenders, and Offence Characteristics

While there are no official data and published studies on clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse (CPSA) from Ghana, local media reports continue to show worrying trends of the phenomenon. We drew on 73 media reports from January 2000 to March 2019, to describe the offence characteristics and profiles of the perpetrators and survivors of CPSA in Ghana. The findings showed females aged 10–19 as predominant survivors. The perpetrators were all males found guilty of lone rape, incest, defilement, indecent assault, sodomy, attempted rape, or gang rape. A preventive measure could involve streamlining the recruitment, training, and leadership structures of the church.

TRANSFORMATIVE VIOLENCE AND MOBILIZATION IN INDIA AND MEXICO

Why are some violent acts more galvanizing than others? Examining two cases—the gang rape of a twenty-three-year-old student in New Delhi in 2012 and the disappearance of forty-three students in Mexico in September 2014—this article builds a theoretical model that explains how violent acts can trigger mobilization in defense of groups suppressed by structural violence. Such transformative events differ from the cycles of contentious politics that explain mobilization patterns for most social movements. By process-tracing mobilization in both cases, I identify three conditions that must be in place for an act of violence to become transformative: (1) the victims are identifiable as members of a group of known statistical victims; (2) the violence occurs within pre-existing interpretive frameworks; and (3) both an image and narrative of violence are available. Transformative violence helps consolidate existing activist networks and institutional structures, political opportunities, historical memory, and interpretive frames.

Between Sexual Violence and Autonomy: Rethinking the Engagement of the Indian Women’s Movement with Criminal Law

The aftermath of protests triggered by a brutal gang-rape in New Delhi in December 2012 was archetypal of the broader women’s movement in post-independence India. The primary demands of the social movement to address sexual violence against women were wrapped in the language of rights-based reforms in criminal law provisions. The state responded to the social mobilization in the form of criminal law amendments, while blindsiding key recommendations from feminist groups. This Article revisits pertinent Law Commission reports, subsequent criminal law reforms, and case law on sexual violence against women to analyze how the negotiations between the women’s movement and the State on the seemingly irreconcilable demands of sexual autonomy and punishment for sexual violence. We take account of the intended and unintended consequences of this reliance on criminal law as one of the primary tools in the arsenal of Indian women’s movements. We argue that engagement on the plane of criminal law to address sexual violence against women is a case of limited imagination at best and counter-productive at its worst. This approach of the movement and feminist groups is to react to the “crime” of sexual violence after the fact, leading to distraction from much warranted structural responses. We argue that this approach makes it harder to conceptualize and implement more forward-looking relational models of responsibility that are necessary to address the structural injustice of systemic sexual violence against women.

Quiet Racism: Examining Gendered Orientalism Within Canadian Newspaper Editorial Coverage of the 2012 New Delhi Gang Rape

This study employs Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism and Norman Fairclough’s three-part model of Critical Discourse Analysis in order to analyze The Globe and Mail, The National Post and Toronto Star’s editorial coverage of the New Delhi Gang Rape that occurred on December 16, 2012 in New Delhi, India. Through a conceptual framework using Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall and Edward Said’s seminal work of Orientalism, this paper highlights the key discursive strategies through which residual elements of imperialist ideology shape Canadian editorial discourse about the Delhi Gang Rape. The purpose of this MRP is to give closer attention to the way media represent events like the rape case, and the meanings and these representations have on molding Western views on gender and gender roles in the non-Western World.

Sheltered in Safe Hands - A Study on the Usage and Effectiveness of ‘Kavalan’ SOS App among Women in Tamil Nadu

As we progress towards digital era, using smart phones to ensure safety of citizens, especially women is seen as a great relief. After the gory crime of Delhi gang rape in 2012, the government has introduced various safety measures to protect women, one of which is the development of safety apps. Though there are many safety apps for women, this study focuses on ‘Kavalan’ app, which was launched in 2018 by Tamil Nadu police to ensure women safety. This mobile application seems to have a wide reach as soon it was launched and efforts have been taken by the police department to make sure that citizens are aware of the mobile app. The present study focuses on few questions like the reach of the app in rural areas, and women who do not know to use technology and tries to find the answer through survey and in-depth interviews.

Sarah Everard & Nirbhaya: Comparisions and Commonalities

This brief communication in the form of the editorial attempts to draw out the parallels between two grisly incidents in two parts of the world. However, the vertiginous ferocity of the incidents jostled outrage across the nations— Sarah Everard’s kidnap and murder on 03 March 2021 and barbarity on Nirbhaya through gang-rape and subsequent murder in December 2012. Both the cases unveil an underlying culture of misogyny. The question remains how do we tackle misogyny. Perhaps, deployment of Ubuntu through community engagement is a way forward to magnify respect for women via-à-vis respect for humanity.