Event Summary

The first public GendV event saw Prof. Srimati Basu (University of Kentucky) and Prof. Pumla Gqola (Nelson Mandela University) in conversation about urban transformation and gender-based violence in India and South Africa.

In a wide-ranging and critically astute manner, Prof. Basu sketched out key analytical frameworks through which we can think about gender-based violence today. Taking stock of the changing political leadership and socio-political imaginations over the past decades in India; strides in feminist thinking and activism; juridical advancements and misworkings; and global moments of feminist reckoning and solidarity, she emphasized the need to think of GBV ‘not as the doing of a few bad actors or even the primary driver of patriarchy, but rather as embedded in intersectional structural vulnerabilities regulated through governmentalities that amplify these forms of privileges’. The important point is to problematize ‘overdetermined narratives’ about GBV and probe the ‘stakes’ of such narrativizing. Referencing Kalpana Kannabiran, she made the case for unpacking ‘the norm and the normative’ with respect to GBV - ranging from the figure of the ‘gentlemen rapist’, love jihad, micro-politics of gender relations in private and intimate lives, the ‘consenting’ over-modern woman, the supposed falsity of rape accusations, and the class and caste specific nature of public outrage to GBV. Prof. Gqola began with the important provocation that oft-used statements such as ‘history matters’ and ‘context matters’ can lose their critical edge and begin to look deceptively simple. Critically reanimating the context(s) of GBV, Prof. Gqola showed how it is here that we can see the ‘tensions’ between what is visible and known, and that which is hidden or forcibly silenced. Considering history not as mere background but as the very basis for the ‘encoding of the present’, she traced how legacies of white supremacy, slavery, and warfare shape the current ‘rape culture’ of South Africa, and how juridical precedents confirm the ‘unrapebility’ of the black woman. Drawing on her evocative phrasing of the ‘female fear factory’, Prof. Gqola urged a rethinking of GBV as ‘constitutive of spaces that are not ostensibly about violence’, especially focusing on fear as a regulating mechanism that controls spaces and women and ultimately, ‘render them out of place’.

For us at GendV, the conversation between Prof. Basu and Prof. Gqola powerfully highlights the benefits of comparative thinking across the geographical divides, through which to better capture the differing contexts of violence and sharpen our intersectional thinking, as also forge transnational networks of feminist solidarity. In many ways, the conversation also serves as a starting point from where our own exploration and thinking takes off. Our project endeavours to analyse what Prof. Basu called the multiple ‘fields of violence’. Not just overt or spectacular incidences of violence against women, we want to map the everyday structuring of gendered lives, aspirations, mobility, relations, intimacy and fantasies, especially as it interacts with the changing urban landscape. Studying the ‘protected’ lives of upper-class women just as much as the ‘vulnerable’ lives of working class women, the ‘safety’ of the bedroom and the home just as much as the ‘risks’ of the street, we want to highlight the entirety of gendered lifeworlds in fast world-ing cities where the management of violence is a mundane aspect of daily living.

Watch the recorded conversation here.

By Garima Jaju