Rupal Oza, "Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India"

The Center for the Study of Women and Society is pleased to present a Book Salon with Rupal Oza, speaking on her new book, Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India. Oza will be in conversation with Linda Martín Alcoff and Dina Siddiqi.

In Semiotics of Rape (2023, Duke University Press), Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is not only a violation of the body, but a language through which a range of issues—including caste and gender hierarchies, control over land and labor, and the shape of justice—are contested. Rather than focus on the laws governing rape, Oza closely examines rape charges to show how the victims and survivors of rape reclaim their autonomy by refusing to see themselves as defined entirely by the act of violation. Oza also shows how rape cases become arenas where bureaucrats, village council members, caste communities, and the police debate women’s sexual subjectivities and how those varied understandings impact the status and reputations of individuals and groups. In this way, rape gains meaning beyond the level of the survivor and victim to create a social category. By tracing the shifting meanings of sexual violence and justice, Oza offers insights into the social significance of rape in India and beyond.

Semiotics of Rape is simply stunning. It is an honest, provocative, and searing ethnography of rape in rural Haryana. In unpacking women’s experiences under conditions of violence, it is a powerful exposition of how their subjectivities are forged by multiple scripts of rape at different scales ranging from the intimate to the bureaucratic. In doing so, Rupal Oza has unleashed the power of feminist critical geography to analyse the political economy of rape in India.”—Pratiksha Baxi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

About the speakers

Rupal Oza is professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies, Hunter College, the Earth and Environmental Studies Program and the Women and Gender Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work focuses on socio-political transformations in the global south, the geography of the right-wing politics, and the conjuncture between gender, violence and political economy. Her first book, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization was published in 2006 by Routledge, New York and by Women Unlimited, India. She has several articles in peer-reviewed journals on a range of issues: human rights in an age of terror and empire, rethinking area studies, special economic zones in India, and realigned geographies after 9/11. Her most recent articles appear in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Gender, Place and Culture and are based on three years of empirical research in rural Haryana. Her book length monograph entitled Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Violation & Subjectivity in Rural India, based on this research, from Duke University Press, is forthcoming in February 2023.

Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. She is a past President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. Recent books include Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation (Polity 2018); The Future of Whiteness (Polity 2015); Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford 2006), which won the Frantz Fanon Award for 2009. See more books at www.alcoff.com. She has also written for the New York Times, Aeon, the NY Indypendent, and other newspapers and magazines. For the past decade, she has taught courses on decolonial philosophy and epistemology in various places around the world. In 2021 she was named by Academic-Influence.com as one of the ten most influential philosophers today, based on citations. She is originally from Panama but lives today happily in Brooklyn.

Dina Siddiqi, a cultural anthropologist by training, teaches in the School of Liberal Studies, New York University. Her research, grounded in the study of Bangladesh, joins development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of labor and Islam. She has published extensively on the global garment industry, non-state gender justice systems, and the cultural politics of Islam and nationalism in Bangladesh. Professor Siddiqi is on the advisory board of the journals Dialectical Anthropology and Contemporary South Asia. She is on the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), and an Advisory Council member of the South Asian feminist network, Sangat. She is also a member of the Executive Board of Sakhi for South Asian Women. Her publications can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dina-Siddiqi"

Co-sponsored with the Center for the Humanities, the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, the CUNY Graduate Center PhD Programs in Anthropology, Critical Psychology, and Earth and Environmental Sciences, the MA Program in Liberal Studies, the CUNY Graduate Center Library, The Public Science Project, The Feminist Press, and Women's Studies Quarterly. 

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