[Anthropgrad] Seminar by Dr Srimati Basu on Friday, 14 Nov 08

[Sin Wen Lau]

Anthropology Friday Seminar Series, Semester 2, 2008
Milgate Room, AD Hope Building
Friday, 14 November 2008, 3pm

'Sexual Property: Staging Rape and Marriage in Indian Law and Feminist 
Theory'
Seminar by Dr Srimati Basu, Associate Professor, University of Kentucky

This paper examines some recent prominent cases of rape arrests in India 
following men's failure to marry after sexual relations, which have 
galvanized conversations around rape in terms of sexual agency, marriage 
and fraud. I focus on ethnographic data in legal settings, news reports 
and texts of appellate cases which evoke and elide rape in the context 
of marriage. Legal categories for managing divorce and sexual violence 
have seemingly been negotiated separately (through political 
negotiations and feminist formulations), but they have come to shape 
each other as legal strategies, such that rape and marriage come to be 
mutually constituted, simultaneously delineating sexual and economic 
regimes. While judicial discourse around rape appears to have moved away 
from notions of property redress, these recent cases underline 
continuing constructions of rape in terms of specters of compensation 
and fraud, and the role of law in buttressing norms of 
kinship/conjugality over sexual agency.

Srimati Basu is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies 
(and Anthropology) at the University of Kentucky. She has an 
Interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Ohio State University in Cultural Studies/ 
Anthropology/ Women's Studies. Her teaching, research and community work 
interests include Legal Anthropology, Women in Development, Feminist 
Jurisprudence, South Asia, Feminist Theory and Methodology, Work, 
Property and Violence Against Women. Her principal present project, 
Managing Marriage: Family Law and Family Violence in India, engages with 
debates about lawyer-free courts, domestic violence and forum-shopping, 
rape discourse in the context of marriage, reformulating kinship in the 
postcolonial State, mediation in the context of violence, and 
transnational engagements with family law reform.

Her research on Indian women and inheritance laws has been published in 
She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property and Propriety (SUNY 
Press, 1999), and she is also the editor of the Dowry and Inheritance 
volume in the in the Kali for Women series Issues in Indian Feminism. 
Some other pieces on property, law, popular culture and resistance 
appear in the anthologies Signposts: Gender in Post-Independence India ( 
Kali for Women, 1999), Religion and Personal Law in India (Indiana U 
Press, 2001), Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in 
Colonial and Postcolonial India (Anthem Press, 2002), and Gender At Work 
In Economic Life (University Press of America, 2001), and in the 
journals Feminist Media Studies, , Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 
Cultural Dynamics and Journal of Legal Pluralism.
==================================================================
Lau Sin Wen
Department of Anthropology
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT0200
Australia

Telephone : +61-2-6125-3271
Fax	 : +61-2-6125-4896
Email	 : sinwen.lau at anu.edu.au
Website	 : http://rspas.anu.edu.au/anthropology
==================================================================