Speaker: Rebecca Waxman, History Department, University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract: »Abundant scholarship by feminist historians within and beyond South Asia have demonstrated that issues of gender and sexuality are not, and have never been, separate from broader society and politics. In the context of colonial and postcolonial India, caste is a key power structure with which ideas of gender and sexuality are bound up, with material impacts on girls’ and women’s lives. How have legal and popular understandings of what constitutes sexualized violence been constituted in relationship with dynamics, enactments, and contestations of caste? What have been the legacies and residues of definitions and redefinitions of both rape and caste, and how do they inform the landscape of struggle against Brahminical and patriarchal powers and the discursive and material violence they produce? My paper seeks to answer these critical historical questions through feminist and anti-casteist readings of the archival records of sexualized violence in the first half of the 20th century. While essential scholarship has been produced cases of caste-based sexual violence in the postcolonial period, especially the last several decades, this paper begins to address the lacuna of studies on the relationship between rape, caste, and definitions thereof in the (late) colonial period. By examining court records, legislative debates, and periodicals of sexual violence cases and the ways they engage, promote, or subvert casteist ideology, I aim to enhance understandings the colonial history of caste, gender, sexuality, and violence, to further inform possibilities for continued critical resistance.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of India / British Raj | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in India