By: Monica Gupta,
on 8/29/2016
Skirts, ladies and India’s Tourism Minister Advice – हमारा भारतीय पहनावा और संस्कार . केंद्रीय संस्कृति और पर्यटन मंत्री महेश शर्मा ने कहा है कि भारत आने वाली महिला विदेशी पर्यटक स्कर्ट या अन्य छोटे कपड़े नहीं पहनें.ये सुनकर भारतीय लडकियां सोच में हैं कि किसलिए उन्होनें विदेशी महिलाओं को कहा होगा. Tourism Minister […]
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By: Monica Gupta,
on 8/26/2016
(तस्वीर गूगल से साभार) मुस्लिम औरतें और बॉम्बे हाईकोर्ट का फैसला खुदा क्या वाकई लानत भेजता है मुस्लमान महिलाओ को दरगाह पर जाने से ??? कुछ दिनो पहले खबर पढी थी कि लखनऊ के ऐशबाग में ईदगाह में पहली बार महिलाओं ने पढ़ी नमाज!! ऐशबाग ईदगाह में पुरुषों के साथ तकरीबन पांच हजार महिलाएं शामिल […]
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By: Erica Albanese,
on 8/1/2016
When Laura Bush said in April 2016 that she wanted the President of the United States to care about Afghan women, one could reasonably infer that she would rather see Hillary Clinton elected President than Donald Trump. Hillary has proclaimed that women’s rights are human rights, meaning that to the extent that human rights have become a part of mainstream political discourse, so should women’s rights.
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By: Monica Gupta,
on 7/6/2016
महिलाएं, नमाज, ईदगाह और हमारा बदलता समाज मेरा देश बदल रहा है का शानदार उदाहरण कि अब महिलाएं भी ईदगाह जाकर नमाज अदा कर सकेंगी. लखनऊ इस शानदार और एतिहासिक पहल का उदाहरण बनेगा. ईद की हार्दिक बधाई और ढेरों शुभकामनाएं !! ईद मुबारक !! भारतीय महिलाए और समाज – Monica Gupta महाराष्ट्र के शनि […]
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By: Monica Gupta,
on 5/29/2016
महिलाएं और उनकी अनसोशल नेटवर्किंग थोडी देर पहले मार्किट जाते हुए एक महिला जोकि स्कूटी पर तीन बच्चों को लेकर जा रही थी. वो गर्दन टेढी करके फोन पर भी बात करती जा रही थी. चौराहे पर जब वो रुकी तो मैने पता नही क्यो पर उसे टोक दिया कि आप प्लीज एक तरफ स्कूटी […]
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By: Monica Gupta,
on 4/28/2016
भूमाता ब्रिगेड और मीडिया की भूमिका शनि शिंगणापुर और नासिक के त्र्यंबकेश्वर मंदिर के प्रवेश मे मिली भारी सफलता के बाद तृप्ति देसाई यानि भूमाता ब्रिगेड आज मुम्बई में हाजी अली दरगाह पर प्रवेश पाने के लिए मार्च निकालेगीं. कारण तो पता नही पर जितना समझ आया वो है पहले उस दरगाह पर महिलाओं को […]
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Caitlin Press is seeking submissions by Canadian women, including queer and trans-women, for an anthology on Canada’s immigrants (migrants, refugees or others who identify with the immigrant label). Looking for deeper topics such as dealing with the sense of loneliness, alienation and disconnection from one’s old home, reconciling different cultural values, or coping with surprises (enjoyable, shocking or unpleasant) of one’s new life in Canada. Submit nonfiction 1000-4000 words. Submissions of the children of immigrants telling their parents’ stories will also be considered. Deadline: June 30, 2016.
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Theories of HER is an experimental anthology open to submissions of poetry, streams-of-consciousness, flash fiction, micro non-fiction (essays, opinion pieces, personal anecdotes). Theme: What it means to be, admire, and/or interact, etc. with women and/or girls. Payment (upon acceptance): $5 per poem; .025/word for flash fiction, excerpts and non-fiction (up to 700 words); $20-$35 (visual art). Deadline: May 11, 2016.
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By: Cathy and Louise,
on 3/26/2016
Fearless Flyer: Ruth Law and Her Flying Machine by Heather Lang illustrated by Raul Colon Calkins Creek, 2016 ISBN: 978-1-62091-650-6 Grades 2-6 Heather Lang and Raul Colon have collaborated to share the exciting story of Ruth Law in the picture book biography, Fearless Flyer. Before Amelia Earhart won the hearts of Americans with her aviation accomplishments, Ruth Law was flying "daredevil
By: keilinh,
on 3/10/2016
In honor of Women’s History Month, we’ve rounded up ten of our books that feature some amazing women of color! From a baseball player to an American politician, these women have helped pave the way for many others.
1. Wangari Maathai, Seeds of Change: Planting a Path to Peace – the first African woman, and environmentalist, to win a Nobel Peace Prize
2. Marcenia Lyle, Catching the Moon: The Story of a Young Girl’s Baseball Dream – the first woman to play for an all-male professional baseball team
3. Anna May Wong, Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story – the first Chinese American movie star
4. Florence Mills, Baby Flo: Florence Mills Lights Up the Stage – an international dancing and singing superstar during the Harlem Renaissance
5. Augusta Savage, In Her Hands: The Story of Sculptor Augusta Savage– a sculptor during the Harlem Renaissance who carved out her own special place in art history
6. Pura Belpré, The Storyteller’s Candle / La velita de los cuentos – New York City’s first Latina librarian
7. Patsy Mink, How We Are Smart – an American politician from the U.S. state of Hawaii
8. Hiromi Suzuki, Hiromi’s Hands – one of a handful of women in the male-dominated world of sushi chefs
9. Rosa Parks, Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue with Today’s Youth – Mrs. Parks changed the course of history when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, sparking the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement
10. Zora Neale Hurston, Zora Hurston and the Chinaberry Tree – renowned African American writer
We’ve also created a Women’s History Collection, available now for purchase on our website.
Further reading on Women’s History Month:
By: Michael Smith,
on 7/3/2015
Over the past several decades, few fields of American history have grown as dramatically as women’s history. Today, courses in women’s history are standard in most colleges and universities, and historians regularly produce scholarship on women and gender. In 1981, historian Gerda Lerner provocatively challenged, “always ask what did the women do while the men were doing what the textbook tells us was important."
The post The history of American women [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Hannah Paget,
on 5/14/2015
A red open car blasts past you, exhaust and radio blaring, going at least 10 miles faster than the speed limit. Want to take a bet on the driver? Well, you won’t get odds. Everyone knows the answer. All that exhibitionism shouts out the commonplace, if not always welcome, features of young males. Just rampant testosterone, you might say. And that’s right. It is testosterone. The young man may be driving the car but testosterone is what’s driving him.
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By: Cathy and Louise,
on 4/13/2015
Out and About: a first book of poems Written and illustrated by Shirley Hughes Candlewick Press. 2015 ISBN: 9780763676445 Preschool thru Grades 3 I received a copy of this book from the publisher. Beloved British author/illustrator Shirley Hughes introduces a new generation of readers to her bustling, neighborhood where anything is possible. Her London is filled with diversity and
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By: Sara Burrier,
on 3/23/2015
By: Cathy and Louise,
on 2/20/2015
Turning 15 On the Road to Freedom: my story of the 1965 Selma Voting Rights March By Lynda Blackmon Lowery; as told to Elspeth Leacock and Susan Buckley; Illustrated by PJ Loughran Dial Books. 2015 ISBN: 9780803741232 I borrowed a copy of this book from my local public library. Grades 4 thru 12 <!--[if gte mso 9]> 0 false 18
By: Clare Hanson,
on 1/14/2015
‘The possible’s slow fuse is lit
By the imagination’
– Emily Dickinson (Franklin, 1999: 608)
When back in the 1990s I started doing research into women’s careers I was struck by how many respondents apologized for not having had a ‘career plan’ or indeed for not having a career at all. When I returned to these respondents seventeen years later I was curious about what had happened to their dreams, and wondered if they had been fulfilled, or somehow shattered. However, I soon realised that these were all the wrong questions, based on assumptions about women having long-term, guiding visions that either work out or fail. But it wasn’t like that. Many spoke of luck, of falling into their careers, and of being in the right place at the right time – or the wrong place at the wrong time. Such explanations might have served to highlight diffidence or modesty that is seen as socially desirable or to explain trajectories that respondents felt were more meandering than purposeful. Or it could be that in a society that values goal orientation and strategic decision-making, the lack of a clear end-point is a bit embarrassing. However, without clearly articulated plans and dreams, the achievement of these visions was a moot point.
Instead, the stories I heard were about how the women continuously responded to their changing contexts, making a myriad of incremental adjustments as the structures, cultures, and ideologies that informed their choices evolved. Most did mention moments of success or failure, such as Rachel finally being able to move her law firm out of her front room, or Silvia whose hotel business suddenly ground to a halt as foot and mouth disease swept through the English countryside. But no one spoke of her career as a delineated, bounded entity that could be fixed or judged in its entirety.
Highlighting the idea of organizational strategy as emergent (in contrast to conventional wisdom of the day which saw it as wholly rational), Henry Mintzberg drew on the metaphor of the potter. Without a clear picture of the final product, she uses her accumulated skill, knowledge, and touch to mould her pots, watching them take shape beneath her hands:
At work the potter sits before a lump of clay at the wheel. Her mind is on the clay but she is also aware of sitting between her past experiences and her future prospects. (Mintzberg, 1987: 66)
Neither the potter nor the women in my research experiences unfettered choice; their horizons are not limitless and neither pots nor careers can look any way or be anything. Rather they are circumscribed, constrained, and enabled by what is seen to be possible at any given time. Given this moving, emergent picture, better questions would have been: How did respondents understand careers, where did these ideas come from and how did they envisage their own career-making within this broad landscape? To answer these questions I propose a new concept: the career imagination.
The career imagination attends to the idea of career as both a social and an individual process, cast and re-cast in the flow of time and across space. As my respondents narrated their careers, in 1993/4 and again in 2010, they painted rich and detailed pictures not only of what they did or the way they did it (or indeed what they were inclined to do), but also of the understandings that these actions, or propensities for action, were based on. I am calling these pictures the career imagination. It is a cognitive construct, articulated discursively, that defines and delimits what is possible, legitimate and appropriate, prescribing its own (sometimes competing) criteria for success. It is a local accomplishment, a product of a particular time, place and social circumstance, informed by experience and history.
Part of what I like about the term ‘imagination’ is its ordinariness. Situating the concept firmly in daily life gives it salience and purpose. Indeed, I find myself referring to career imagination, not just in academic discourse, but also in everyday conversations – unexceptional talk about, say, my parents’ working lives or what my own children see as their future possibilities. However, while this commonsense appeal is a great strength, it is also raises concerns precisely because in the course of our day we use the term in such diverse, even contradictory ways. On one hand we use imagination to refer to flights of fancy, thoughts that transcend everyday experience and understandings and take us to new places and untrammelled possibilities. My data contained many such examples, like Anthea who said she had always wanted to pan for gold! However, I am not using the term in this sense. The career imagination is a bounded concept, defining the limits of what a person sees as possible in career terms, and in so doing, also what is impossible.
As respondents considered what careers look like and how their own careers might be construed, they spoke of occupations and the trajectories they prescribed, underpinning values, the connection between career and other aspects of life. They reflected on the material rewards and career identities that their working lives might bestow upon them.
Although the concept connotes dynamism, it does not discount the many enduring elements in respondents’ (or indeed in any of our) stories. Thus old ideas don’t simply disappear as new ones come to the fore, but rather the career imagination continuously expands, accommodating, sifting, and sorting possibilities. It can thus be seen as a repository of history and experience, and a product of its particular time and place. Like the potter whose products carry traces of the past as she works in the present and into the future, it is at once steeped in the past, but alive to current contingencies and mindful of the things to come.
Headline image credit: Always standing, always reaching out by Broo_am (Andy B). CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr
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By: Elizabeth Gorney,
on 11/20/2014
The theme of the American Society of Criminology meeting this November is “Criminology at the Intersections of Oppression.” The burden of violence and victimization remains markedly unequal. The prevalence rates, risk factors, and consequences of violence are not equally distributed across society. Rather, there are many groups that carry an unequal burden, including groups disadvantaged due to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, sexual identity, place of residence, and other factors. Even more problematically, there is an abundance of evidence that there are marked disparities in service access and service quality across sociocultural and socioeconomic groups. Unfortunately, even today this still extends to instances of outright bias and maltreatment, as evidenced by ongoing problems with disproportionate minority contact, harsher sentencing, and barriers to services.
However, there is promising news, because advances in both research and practice are readily attainable. Regarding research, there are a number of steps that can be taken to improve our existing state of knowledge. To give just a few examples, we need much more research on hate crimes and bias motivations for violence. Hate crimes remain one of the most understudied forms of violence. We also need many more efforts to adapt violence prevention and intervention programs for diverse groups. The field has still made surprisingly few efforts to assess whether prevention and intervention programs are equally efficacious for different socioeconomic and sociocultural groups. Even after more than 3 decades of program evaluation, only a handful of such efforts exist. Program developers should pay more systematic attention to ensuring that materials that use diverse images and settings. However, it is also important to note that cultural adaptation means more than just superficial changes in name use or images.
Regarding practice, what is needed is more culturally appropriate approaches. In many cases, this means more flexible approaches and avoiding a “one size fits all” approach to services. Most providers, I believe, have good intentions and are trying to avoid biased interactions, but many of them lack the tools for more culturally appropriate services. One specific tool that can help is called the ‘VIGOR’, for Victim Inventory of Goals, Options, and Risks. It is a safety planning and risk management tool for victims of domestic violence. It is ideally suited for people from disadvantaged groups, because, unlike virtually all other existing safety plans, it has places for social and community issues, financial strain, institutional challenges, and other issues that affect people who experience multiple forms of disadvantage. The safety plan does not just focus on physical violence. The VIGOR has been tested with two highly diverse groups of low-income women, who rated it as better than all safety planning they had received.
The VIGOR also offers a model for how other interventions can be expanded and adapted to consider the intersections of oppression with victimization in an effort to be more responsive to all of the needs of those who have sustained violence. With greater attention to these issues, there is the potential to make a real impact and help reduce the burden of violence and victimization for all members of society.
Dr. Hamby attended an Author Meets Critics session at the ASC annual meeting yesterday morning. The session was chaired by Dr. Claire Renzetti, co-editor of the ‘Oxford Series of Interpersonal Violence’.
The post Violence, and diverse forms of oppression appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Cathy and Louise,
on 10/27/2014
El Deafo Written and illustrated by Cece Bell Amulet Books; an imprint of Abrams. 2014 ISBN: 9781409710209 Grades 3-12 To write this review, I borrowed a copy of this book from my local public library. Everyone has a superpower. What is yours? In El Deafo, author-illustrator Cece Bell shares her experience growing up deaf. I was a regular little kid. I played with my mom’s stuff. I
By: Cathy and Louise,
on 9/25/2014
Little Melba and Her Big Trombone by Katheryn Russell-Brown illustrated by Frank Morrison Lee & Low Books, 2014 ISBN: 9781600608988 Grades K-5 The reviewer received a copy of the book from the publisher. "Spread the word! Little Melba Doretta Liston was something special." The first line of this picture book biography announces to readers that they are about to meet an amazing individual.
By: Sinead O’Connor,
on 8/24/2014
Women are involved in many organized illegal activities, albeit in small numbers. Editors Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy of The Oxford Handbook on Gender, Sex, and Crime have compiled important information about women’s involvement in organized crime. Here they’ve adapted some information from “Organized Crime: The Gender Constraints of Illegal Markets” by Valeria Pizzini-Gambetta (Chapter 23).
(1) Most organized crime falls into one of two distinct types – illegal industries and mafias — both of which are dominated by males. Illegal industries supply illegal commodities through networks that vary in shape and size according to the circumstances of the trade. Mafias are club-like groups defined by ritual entry, a territorially-based hierarchical structure, and the supply of extra-legal governance to illegal markets. Both types of activity have been dominated by men, but there are many historical examples where women also participated, particularly in illegal industries.
(2) There is historical evidence of mixed-gender groups of criminals. Several mixed-gender groups of criminals roamed the Netherlands and the German territories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some pirate groups in the Far East were also mixed-gender marauding communities. In the early nineteenth century, Chinese pirates were ruled by the widow of their late general for several years. They formed a nation at sea, in which junks were gender-mixed, with female captives and family members on board. Buccaneer and pirate communities in the Caribbean golden age were essentially gender-exclusive; nevertheless, a handful of women entered the world of sea piracy through love relationships, cross-dressing, and kinship.
(3) Female entrepreneurs have been involved in running illegal businesses in the modern period. Marcellina Cardena, Marie Debrizzi, and Stephanie St. Clair were part of the gender and racial blend that animated gambling in Harlem until the 1930s. These so-called “bankers” needed only cash and a network of policy vendors to conduct illegal gambling. They hired other women to go door to door to take dime bets in exchange for a small percentage of the win from both bankers and winners. Women have also played important roles in the drug trade. In Latin America, Eva Silverstein (arrested in 1917), Sadie Stock (arrested in 1920), and Maria Wendt (arrested in 1936) were part of international rings of traffickers that imported opium and its derivatives from China and Mexico for export to the United States and Europe. More recently, Mahalaxmi Papamani and her network of Tamil female neighbors managed an important share of the drug retailing market in Mumbai in the 1980s.
(4) Although less common, women have also formed gender-exclusive crime groups. The “Forty Elephants” was an all-female group that flourished in the shadow of The Elephant and Castle male gang in London throughout the nineteenth century and well into the 1950s. The young women of this group specialized in shoplifting in the West End. Their sorority was hierarchical and a “queen” was in charge of distributing targets among the group members.
(5) Women often play “traditional” female roles in organized crime. Women have been relatively less involved as active offenders in mafias; instead, traditional female roles remain the most important resource for this type of organized crime. Intelligence gathering, turf monitoring, and hiding illegal commodities or weapons are tasks that can be accomplished as part of women’s ordinary daily routines. In most groups, women are trusted auxiliaries in a number of capacities at times that are critical for the functioning of the group’s operations.
Headline image: Person in the Shadows with handgun, on natural wooden background. © Alexei Novikov via iStockphoto.
The post Five facts about women’s involvement in organized crime appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Hannah Paget,
on 7/28/2014
It’s easy to assume that we know what pain is. We’ve all experienced pain, from scraped knees and toothaches to migraines and heart attacks. When people suffer around us, or we witness a loved one in pain, we can also begin to ‘feel’ with them. But is this the end of the story?
In the three videos below Joanna Bourke, author of The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, talks about her fascination with pain from a historical perspective. She argues that the ways in which people respond to what they describe as ‘painful’ have changed drastically since the eighteenth century, moving from a belief that it served a specific (and positive) function to seeing pain as an unremitting evil to be ‘fought’. She also looks at the interesting attitudes towards women and pain relief, and how they still exist today.
On the history of pain
Click here to view the embedded video.
How have our attitudes to pain changed?
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On women and pain relief
Click here to view the embedded video.
Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the prize-winning author of nine books, including histories of modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, and rape. Her book An Intimate History of Killing (1999) won the Wolfson Prize and the Fraenkel Prize, and ‘Eyewitness’. She is also a frequent contributor to TV and radio shows, and a regular newspaper correspondent. Her latest book is The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers.
The post Does pain have a history? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Cathy and Louise,
on 7/12/2014
A Woman in the House (and Senate): how women came to the United States Congress, broke down barriers, and changed the country. By Ilene Cooper; Illustrations by Elizabeth Baddeley Abrams. 2014 ISBN: 9781419710360 Grades 7 and up I borrowed a copy of this book from my local public library. It is interesting what we take for granted, especially the opportunities for women. Now girls are
By: JonathanK,
on 6/19/2014
Last week the Guardian reported, “A state minister from Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party has described rape as a ‘social crime’, saying ‘sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong’, in the latest controversial remarks by an Indian politician about rape.” While horrified by these comments, I remembered that a book from OUP India’s office had recently landed on my desk and the author, Pratiksha Baxi, might be able to shed some light on the issue of rape in India for Westerners. Below is a post Baxi sent in response to my query following the story mentioned above. –Christian Purdy, Director of Publicity
In the wake of the Delhi gang rape protests in 2013-2014, a section of the western media was critiqued for representing sexual violence as a form of cultural violence. For instance, a white woman reporter said to a friend, ‘we are filming Indian women of all kinds. You look modern. Please, can you say—I am India’s daughter’. Not fazed by the angry refusal, the reporter found some other ‘modern’ looking woman to mime this script for the camera. The Delhi protests became a resource for a certain kind of racialized sexual politics, which looped back to a nationalist rhetoric decrying the tarnishing of the image of the country abroad. Indian politicians responded by blaming the media, feminists, and the protests for sensationalising rape, and producing the crisis now posed to the image of a globalising economy.
The national and international political debates ignore Indian feminists and law academics—who innovated new juridical categories such as custodial rape and power rape—leading the path to conceptualise rape as a specific technique of state and social dominance. They do not cite the learning of subaltern or Black feminists of the Global South. Nor are different jurisdictions compared to raise more serious questions about the cunning nature of law reform in neo-liberal contexts. Although there has been feminist research on rape, feminist interventions in international law and several global collaborations to combat violence against women, there seems to be an inability to carry the complexities of these debates in the national and international mainstream media.
Protests at Safdarjung Hospital. Photo by Ramesh Lalwani. CC BY-NC 2.0 via ramesh_lalwani Flickr.
In India, the political rhetoric on rape continues to deploy conventional scripts: boys will be boys; sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong; alcohol causes men to rape. There is a political refusal to recognise that rape is central to dominance, a routinized expression of sexualised power. Nor is it in political interest to displace the use of rape as a form of social control. Rather rape becomes a means of doing competitive party politics or as a technique of consolidating power.
Sexual assault is used as a means to control dissenting bodies. Rape is a technique of terror that is used with impunity to control social mobility, stifle dissent, reassert social control, gain political control, and target ‘hated’ communities. There is no serious attempt to challenge this kind of rape culture, which inhabits the cultures of policing. It is a political apparatus of sexual terror, not to be confused with theories of male sexuality or as evidence of cultural predispositions. Rather this rape culture rests on a political apparatus, which has several organised features.
First, it rests on a system of policing and law enforcement, which makes rape look like consensual sex, and consensual sex look like rape. For example, the use of the rape, kidnapping and abduction laws to criminalize love across caste or community is rampant, whilst rape as a form of caste dominance is scarcely taken seriously.
Second, the political apparatus of rape deploys violence to produce the public secrecy of rape: while everyone knows that women are raped, we are told no one must talk about it.
Third, this political apparatus rests on a scripted representational regime that attributes the blames of rape to women, alcohol, literacy, poverty, public access and so on—everything but the structures of dominance in a globalising economy. It institutionalises a politics of forgetting—from the traumatic histories of mass sexual violence to caste atrocities—we are told that there is no connection between everyday and mass scale sexual violence.
Fourth, it denies the link between the dispossession of the marginalised from property or land, and the growing rate of sexual violence. In the Baduan rape and lynching case, the children went out to the fields of the dominant caste to relieve themselves. The subsequent demand for bathrooms for dalit women is an expression of this dispossession, which makes them vulnerable to brutal sexual violence, murder and lynching.
Fifth, such a political apparatus acts as a thought police. It denies the right to sexual autonomy and choice. And it rewards those politicians who rape, riot, murder, censor or humiliate.
All this means that there is complicity between state and society in privileging rape as the expression of male power. The state conserves and even stokes the desire to rape as the foundational tool of male power. This is a political trait, not a cultural trait. There is an ever-expanding indifference to sexual violence survivors, which seems to be in inverse proportion to the anti-rape protests. For instance, even today a spare pair of clothes is not provided to rape survivors when their clothes are confiscated as evidence in police stations or hospitals.
Sexual violence can be prevented and redressed if this political apparatus is disbanded. To destroy this political apparatus, the doing of politics—local, national and international must change. Rather than engaging in an aggressive and masculine competition over crime statistics, politicians must engage seriously with the nature of institutional reform and response to sexual violence.
In the context of the international laws and policies on violence against women, the new government must allocate generous gender budgets to provide essential facilities to rape survivors and institute measures to prevent sexual violence. This must accompany zero tolerance for rape of women, men, sexual minorities and children. The recommendations to criminalise marital rape; repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and legislate against rape as a mass crime must be implemented. Section 377 IPC, a colonial law criminalizing homosexuality must be repealed. In other words, sexual autonomy and sexual dignity must be respected. This means that the conventional notions of sexual morality, which regulate women’s sexuality, pathologize queer sexuality and celebrate violent masculinity, must no longer lay the foundations of the Indian polity. National and international politics must recognise rape as political violence rather than cultural violence; substitute the language of ‘rescue’ with repatriation and learn from languages of social suffering rather than vocabularies of power.
Pratiksha Baxi is Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and author of Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India (OUP India, 2014)
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The post Political apparatus of rape in India appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Sue Macy,
on 6/12/2014
I’d add to this list the real-life Lozen, the woman who inspired Joseph Bruchac’s character by the same name in KILLER OF ENEMIES. She was a warrior (beside Geronimo and her brother, Victorio) who defended the Apache people during a terrible time of war with the United States, as well as using her skill as a tracker (and some supernatural skills) to know where their enemies were coming from.
[…] booktalks allow students to explore and develop their interests. Consider creating collections for Women’s History Month, Cesar Chavez Day, baseball season, National Poetry Month in April, and Earth […]