UW assistant professor of anthropology Sareeta Amrute recently published her article “Moving Rape: Trafficking in the Violence of Postliberalization” in the Spring 2015 volume of Public Culture.
This essay reads the case of rape in moving vehicles against the texture of an unfinished liberalization. I argue that the violence of this gang rape and similar cases is firmly tied to the question of lower-class incorporation in contemporary India. In moments of violence, the privatization of business and the private sphere of consumption meet, and the figure of the lower-class male moves to the center by means of the violation of a middle-class woman’s body. To explicate the link between economic liberalization, class, and gendered violence, I track the figure of the lower-class, periurban male across three vectors of incorporation
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