PROGRAM

The Roosevelt House Human Rights Program

and the Women and Gender Studies Department

invite you to attend

a book discussion on

Semiotics of Rape

Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India

Monday, March 13th

Roosevelt House Auditorium

47-49 E 65th Street

at 6:00 PM

Click here to RSVP for In-Person

Reception to follow.

Please join us for a book discussion as we mark the release of Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India by Human Rights Faculty Member and Women and Gender Studies Professor Rupal Oza. The author will be in conversation with Vasuki Nesiah, Professor of Practice in Human Rights and International Law at the NYU Gallatin School.

In this work, Rupal Oza follows the social life of rape in rural northwest India to reveal how rape is not only a violation of the body but a language through which a range of issues—including caste and gender hierarchies, control over land and labor, and the shape of justice—are contested.

Rupal Oza is professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies, Hunter College, the Earth and Environmental Studies Program and the Women and Gender Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work focuses on socio-political transformations in the global south, the geography of the right-wing politics, and the conjuncture between gender, violence and political economy. Her first book, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization was published in 2006 by Routledge, New York and by Women Unlimited, India. She has several articles in peer reviewed journals on a range of issues: human rights in an age of terror and empire, rethinking area studies, special economic zones in India, and realigned geographies after 9/11. Her most recent articles appear in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Gender, Place and Culture and are based on three years of empirical research in rural Haryana. Her book length monograph entitled Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Violation & Subjectivity in rural India, based on this research, from Duke University Press, is forthcoming in February 2023.

Vasuki Nesiah is Professor of Practice in Human Rights and International Law at the Gallatin School, at NYU. She is also a founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). Her current book projects include International Conflict Feminism (under contract with UPenn) and Reading the Ruins: Slavery, Colonialism and International Law. She is also co-editing TWAIL: A Handbook (under contract with Elgar). She is originally from Sri Lanka.

PRAISE FOR SEMIOTICS OF RAPE

“Semiotics of Rape is simply stunning. It is an honest, provocative, and searing ethnography of rape in rural Haryana. In unpacking women’s subjectivities under conditions of violence, it is a powerful exposition of how women’s subjectivities are forged by multiple scripts of rape at different scales ranging from the intimate to the bureaucratic. In doing so, Rupal Oza has unleashed the power of feminist critical geography to analyze the political economy of rape in India.” — Pratiksha Baxi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

“Exploring how rape is entangled with and shapes broader politics of caste, gender, and land, Rupal Oza considers the political, social, and economic antecedents and consequences of sexual violence. Urgent and beautifully written, this important and brilliant book allows us to understand the complex and unexpected ways in which survivors are able to find some measure of agency in contexts of ongoing intimate and structural violence. It will immediately appeal to feminist scholars, anthropologists of South Asia, and scholars of the law and the state, caste, and rural and agrarian studies.” — Radhika Govindrajan, author of Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas