The Public Body: Individual Tactics and Activist Interventions on The
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Texas A&M Repository THE PUBLIC BODY: INDIVIDUAL TACTICS AND ACTIVIST INTERVENTIONS ON THE STREET IN DELHI, INDIA A Thesis by BRIDGET CONLON LIDDELL Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Chair of Committee, Kirsten Pullen Committee Members, Jayson Beaster-Jones Rumya Putcha Jyotsna Vaid Head of Department, Donnalee Dox August 2015 Major Subject: Performance Studies Copyright 2015 Bridget Conlon Liddell ABSTRACT After a brutal and widely publicized gang rape in December 2012, women’s safety in public spaces has been a significant site of debate and discourse about Delhi as a city and India as a country. My Master’s thesis focuses on women’s negotiations of public spaces in Delhi, India. I explore how women in general—and activists in particular—shift Delhi’s public culture, in order to intervene in dominant discourses on women’s agency in India’s capital as well as the dismissive, alienating narratives of the city as hopelessly violent. Jagori, a Delhi-based women’s rights organization, sponsors “The Safe Delhi Campaign” to address the constraints on and challenges of women’s Delhi street experience with a focus on urban design, public transport, and raising public awareness. My project brings a Performance Studies perspective to Jagori’s goals, paying close attention to my interlocutors’ (university-aged female residents and Jagori activists) voices, bodies, and tactics. Fear and the anticipation of violence shapes when, where, and how female residents move through Delhi: the spatial and temporal safe, cautionary, and forbidden zones, bridged by acceptable forms of transportation, expose how fear fractures the map. I argue that my interlocutors are negotiating their own comfort against social expectations and the potential for violence in public. Female embodiment in rape cultures is marked by the anticipation of violence, where sexual assault indicates a failure to adhere to the preventative regime. That fearful embodiment manifests in the everyday practices of managing the dominant male street culture in Delhi. I explore protests post-Dec-12 as my interlocutors experienced them, arguing that ii some protests disrupt the normative Delhi public culture, creating a temporary atmosphere in which women can more freely move and express themselves, where that fear fades or disappears. Hopeful and future-oriented protests call for the women’s full access to public spaces without fear. From the everyday self-policing, restrictive tactics of female university students to activists occupying the streets in attention-grabbing protests, how Delhi’s women are responding to the threat of violence exposes the everyday lived reality, juxtaposed contradictions, and enduring potential of the capital city. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee chair, Dr. Kirsten Pullen, for her guidance and support throughout this project and my studies at Texas A&M. I would also like to thank Dr. Jayson Beaster-Jones for his advice and dedication to both this thesis and my scholarship as a whole. Thank you as well to my committee members, Dr. Rumya Putcha, and Dr. Jyotsna Vaid, for their presence and advice throughout this project. I would also like to recognize the South Asia Working Group at Texas A&M University, for hearing my work and offering feedback. I want to thank my cohort for our beautiful, powerful, collective work over the last two years—and Hannah Adamy most of all, for her partnership and steady brilliance, which keeps me grounded and inspired. The Graduate Research Fellowship (2014-15) I received from The Glasscock Center for the Humanities at Texas A&M University enabled my ethnographic research in Delhi. I am deeply thankful for the Glasscock Center, both for its financial support and the opportunity to showcase my work as part of the Graduate Colloquium Series. I am also grateful to the Texas A&M University’s Women & Gender Studies department for the Research Award for contributing to my travel as well. This project would not be possible without the support and efforts of Charnita, Ishita, and, especially, Srilekha, for putting me in touch with potential interviewees and frequently hosting me in North Campus. Their insight and impact was essential. Lastly, I am grateful for the team at Jagori, particularly Prahbleen Tuteja, for giving me some of their incredibly limited time. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 Approaching Delhi’s Public and People: Developing the Project ................ 5 Delhi’s Public Culture: Context .................................................................... 11 CITY, SPACE, AND THE PUBLIC BUILDING A TEMPORAL ETHNOMAP OF DELHI .................................. 22 Mapping Delhi .............................................................................................. 24 Mobility: Transportation and Negotiating the Street .................................... 28 Involuntary Intimacy in Central Delhi .......................................................... 32 Curfews and the Failure of Protectionism .................................................... 37 FEARFUL FEMALE BODIES: NEGOTIATING THE REGULATORY REGIME ...................................... 42 Regulate Yourselves: Fear and the Instructional Climate of Delhi ............... 47 Being Self-Conscious in Delhi ...................................................................... 52 Clothing Style and Perceived Sexual Availability: the “Traditional” v. “Western” Spectrum ..................................................... 57 Tactics: Anticipating and Avoiding Attention or Performing Confidence and Using Aggression ....................................... 67 PROTESTS POST-NIRBHAYA: OCCUPYING SPACE AND DANCING THE FUTURE ........................... 77 The Shift in Delhi’s Protest Culture .............................................................. 80 Emergence and Affect: Take Back the Night, Dec 31, 2012 ........................ 82 Remembering and What Comes After: Slutwalk, Spring 2014 .................... 85 Hope and Futurity: One Billion Rising, February 14, 2014 ......................... 89 Looking Forward: Hope and the Ideal City .................................................. 93 EPILOGUE: SOME CONCLUSIONS ..................................................................... 97 REFERENCES ......................................................................................................... 103 v INTRODUCTION On December 16th, 2012, the brutal gang rape of a young woman on a moving bus in Saket, South Delhi (India) sparked intense, violent protests at the heart of the city and across the country. The thousands gathered to protest at India Gate in Central Delhi clashed with the police. The high presence of men at these protests reflected everyday gender ratios on the street, but at the same time, large numbers of women led protests and sat in the streets holding candlelight vigils. The Nirbhaya1 attack in December 2012 remained a high presence in Indian and international media for many weeks, as protests were held across India; the sustained attention influenced new legislature expanding the definition of rape and increasing punishment for offenders (Criminal Amendment Act (2013)). The culture of violence and fear was there before December 2012; Delhi already had a notorious reputation in India. But the December 2012 assault was particularly brutal, committed by men who did not fit the stereotypical “outsider” profile, and against a university student in the supposedly safer South Delhi region. Delhi’s reputation as the “rape capital of India” grew to being the “rape capital of the world” after December 16th, 2012 (commonly referred to as “Dec-12”)—it is a watershed moment, where sexual violence, fear, and the city are discussed in terms of pre- and post-Dec-12. Reviewing articles written on gender and safety in Delhi in the last two years from The Hindu and The Times of India, I noticed how often the city was characterized 1 “Nirbhaya,” one of the pseudonyms given to the victim, means “fearless.” 2 See India’s National Crime Records Bureau 2013 report for current statistics on violent crimes 1 as significantly unsafe, its people as simultaneously chaotically violent and desperately afraid, and its female residents’ bodies as both deeply threatened and (sometimes) thoroughly responsible for that threat and any materialized assaults. There is fear in the public body and particular (female) bodies. During the citywide outcry in December 2012, and since, the blame for Delhi’s culture of violence2 and the anti-women everyday public practices has been directed towards migrant populations, the media, Western influences, unemployed young men, and more. When Delhi’s objects of fear, the potential sexual offenders, are difficult to distinguish within the city and its educated, middle class female residents could be gang raped in public, city residents must find fault somewhere.