Meenakshi Gigi Durham. Feminist Media Studies. Volume 15, Issue 2, 2015.
Introduction
On the evening of December 16, 2012, a young woman named Jyoti Singh Pandey boarded a bus in New Delhi. It was to be the last act of her life. On board the bus, she was savagely beaten and repeatedly gang-raped by six men, who also used a rusted iron rod to penetrate her. After many hours of brutal abuse, she and her male friend were flung naked, wounded, and bleeding into the street. Medical reports indicated that Jyoti Pandey suffered massive injuries to her abdomen, intestines, and genitals due to the assault. Six days later, she died of her internal injuries.
The horror of her rape and murder sparked demonstrations and vigils throughout India, and her story became a media cause célèbre. News accounts, editorials, blog posts, and analyses of this incident and its aftermath flooded the news stream worldwide, drawing attention to a variety of issues, including India’s gender imbalance, women’s roles in Indian society, and Indian human rights policy.
But overwhelmingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the news coverage focused most on violence against women in India. “India hates women,” declared blogger Pubali Roy Chaudhuri, writing on the Ms. magazine website. “That is the ugly, unvarnished truth. [Pandey’s rape speaks] to a pervasive, deeply entrenched misogyny whose roots run bedrock-deep in our society” (Pubali Roy Chaudhuri 2013). “Sexual violence has become a national scandal in India, amid regular reports of gang rapes and other assaults against infants, teenagers and other women,” noted Jim Yardley in The New York Times (2012, A6). Again and again, news articles and commentaries returned to the scene of the crime, marking it in reference to nation-state boundaries and geographical location; New Delhi attained a new visibility as the purported “rape capital” of the world.
This paper examines the US news coverage of Jyoti Pandey’s gang rape and murder in relation to the signification of sexual violence as a function of place, and more specifically, of a Third World1 location. Edward Soja reminds us of how “relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology” (1989, 6). Social geographers, anthropologists, and postcolonial scholars have long been aware of the salience of place as a symbol of power relations, racial hierarchies, imperialist violence, and exploitative economic practices. Because India moved to the forefront of the media agenda as a locus of sexual violence in the news coverage of this event, it is important now to consider the media’s engagement with place as a complex signifier of gender and sexuality, especially at a moment of intense confrontations around global economics, transnational politics, and sexual identities.
A longstanding body of scholarly literature deals with certain concepts of space and place in media discourse, particularly in terms of cultural imperialism and “Western” media’s coverage of “foreign” countries (e.g., Thomas J. Ahern 1984; Tsan-Kuo Chang, Pamela J. Shoemaker, and Nancy Brendlinger 1987; Timothy Jones, Peter Van Aelst, and Rens Vliegenthart 2013; Wilbur Schramm 1964; David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit 1981). This literature raises many important issues regarding concepts of distance and the relative cultural positioning of countries and cultures. Yet it also leaves unexplored important areas pertaining to the ways in which media discourse is imbricated into contemporary geopolitics, especially with regard to the material realities of gender and sexuality.
The fact that this media event involved sexual violence invokes the need to consider place and space as deeply implicated in the discourses and attendant politics of gender and sexuality. As Doreen B. Massey observed:
Spaces and places, and our sense of them (and such related things as our degree of mobility), are gendered through and through … And this gendering of space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood in the societies in which we live. (1994, 186)
A growing body of feminist literature examines space as a crucial factor in women’s perceptions of sexual safety and public mobility (Marian Meyers 2004; Rachel Pain 1991; Gill Valentine 1990; Louise Wattis, Eileen Green, and Jill Radford 2011). Over the past decade, theories of transnational feminism have rigorously interrogated the gendered and sexualized politics of place/space, and in this paper I draw on these insights to analyze the media representations of the New Delhi gang rape. This analysis engages crucial analytical factors advanced by transnational feminism in conjunction with a critical reading of news texts in order to examine the ideological undercurrents at play in the transcoding of Jyoti Pandey’s gang rape into an international media spectacle.
This paper addresses the overarching research question, “How does geopolitical space function as an ideological trope in the US media coverage of the New Delhi gang rape case?” This far-reaching question offers an opening into a number of complicated problematics, including the mutually constitutive relationships between the global North and South; the role of media discourse in those relationships; the ways in which gendered and sexual embodiments and practices figure into the picture; and the way meaning-making around social events highlights issues of power, domination, and resistance.
A significant body of critical/cultural studies scholarship has illuminated the discursive underpinnings of global geopolitical dynamics. This scholarship has been taken up in transnational feminist analysis, and it also has impacted media studies. A critical examination of US media representations of the New Delhi gang rape incident necessitates a consideration of the linkages among media representation, space, and gendered/sexualized embodiments, thus falling at the confluence of these theoretical approaches.
Power, Place, and Representation
Jyoti Pandey’s rape and murder attained global notoriety as a media spectacle, a technologically disseminated, highly visible, ritualized representation that saturated the media environment; such spectacles “dominate news, journalism, and Internet buzz, and are highlighted and framed as … key events” (Douglas M. Kellner 2010, 79). For Guy Debord, whose concept of the “society of the spectacle” underpins this idea, a spectacle is “a social relation among people, mediated by images” (1977, 2). On Kellner’s reading, the media spectacle is “a contested terrain in which different forces use the spectacle to push their interests and agendas” (2010, 78). Kellner’s metaphor marks media as an ideological space, with the corollary recognition that media representations are not static objects but practices that constitute the boundaries as well as the irruptive possibilities of an ideological field.
In ideological analyses of media representations, much has been written about the process of Othering and its efficacy in creating and sustaining social and imperial hierarchies, but very little of that literature recognizes geographical space as central to those operations. On this order, the cartographer Jeremy W. Crampton (2001) characterizes maps as “fields of power” rather than scientific diagrams. Drawing on the work of J.B. Harley, he writes:
Maps are situated in a particular set of (competing) interests, including cultural, historical and political; maps can be understood by what they subjugate/ignore/downplay … the way to interpret maps is not as records of landscapes but tracing out the way they embody power … (241)
Following Crampton, I will posit that, like maps, media representations are imbricated with power relations; like maps, they use language, visual imagery, and other symbols to represent the world; and like maps, they help to orient us to our surroundings. Indeed, “[n]ews media help create popular understandings of geographic reality by producing place images” (Joel Gruley and Chris S. Duvall 2012; see also Paul C. Adams 2009). And as Bella Mody (2010) points out, “Foreign news, by constructing a ‘picture in our heads’ (to use Lippmann’s expression) of distant realities, is a major source of our knowledge about foreign Others” (3).
Elfreide Fürisch (2010) observes that journalistic representations of the Other, both as minorities within a nation and as figures outside a nation’s borders, are largely predicated on enduring negative myths and stereotypes; in her analysis, journalism operates “by suppressing regional, local, and minority interests and access and by Othering anyone outside national borders” (118).
Theories of media globalization tend to focus on the transnational linkages and flows of media content and their audiences, as well as the rapidly globalizing scope of corporate networks, with ensuing arguments arising about the homogenization of culture versus “glocalization,” both of which understand borders as fluid and increasingly irrelevant (Arjun Appadurai 1995; Manuel Castells 2009; Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash 1995; Jésus Martín-Barbero 1991).
However, as Annabelle Sreberny (2012) has noted, the binate global/local framework elides the continued power of the nation-state as a “crucial level of political, economic, and cultural decision-making” (537). Sabina Mihelj (2011) points out that “the modern media continue to be involved in the reproduction of nationalism, in spite of the ongoing intensification of global media flows” (27). This has been borne out particularly in news coverage at times of national crisis, as in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, when sharp distinctions were made between American Muslims and Muslims abroad; the complexities of the World Trade Center attacks were oversimplified to pit the Islamic world against America (Dina Ibrahim 2010). Thus, the borders of nation are ideologically reinscribed according to political necessity, and the world is continually being discursively reordered in ways that sustain strategic hegemonies.
Karim H. Karim (2003) points to the media’s vital role in these discursive practices; as he writes, most major media corporations are anchored in the global North, which they take as their cultural reference point, so that events in other countries are “judged according to their geopolitical placement in relation to the North” (4). Edward Said’s now-classic conception of Orientalism revealed clearly how discourse functions strategically and productively in such relations, using rhetorics of representation to position Occident and Orient in mutual tension such that the former becomes the privileged site of power and the latter the inferior and exoticized “Other,” a binary that sustains the material injustices of imperialism and neo-colonialism (Edward Said 1978).
Arturo Escobar (1995/2011) describes these interwoven discursive practices as “regimes of representation,” which “can be analyzed as places of encounter where identities are constructed and also where violence is originated, symbolized, and managed” (10). Both Said and Escobar invoke place as a central concept in the operation of such discursive regimes. For Said, “imaginative geography” conjures, through discourse, locations that are distanced from the presumptive Western “center” as barbarous, uncivilized, and inferior; and Escobar points out that these historical invocations are still powerful, particularly in terms such as First and Third Worlds, global North and South, and center/periphery.
While Said understood the representational strategies of place in Orientalism to be part of a Western rationale “for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978, 3), he also saw them as patriarchal constructions tied to the notion of the Orient as “a deep, rich fund of female sexuality” (182). The sexualized undertones of colonial and postcolonial “imaginative geography” extend beyond Said’s oversimplified dichotomization of masculine West/feminine East to open up an exploration of the ways “the representation of otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural modes of differentiation” (Meyda Yegenoglu 1998, 26). Space—delineated by borders, boundaries, distances, maps, legends—is a representative device into which these modes of differentiation are imbricated.
Gendering Geopolitics
Place and space are gendered and sexualized; men and women, as well as people of diverse sexual orientations, in varying geographical locations and cultural contexts, have different relationships to space. Issues of mobility, liberty, and safety inflect these relationships. “Space,” writes the geographer Phil Hubbard, “is not just a passive backdrop to human behavior and social action, but is constantly produced and remade within complex relations of culture, power and difference” (2001, 51). Globalization’s reordering of time and space has implications for gender and sexuality (Jon Binnie 2004; Kathryn Farr 2007; Carla Freeman 2001; Nandini Gunewardena and Ann Kingsolver 2007).
From the perspective of transnational feminism, genders and sexualities are functions of global flows of power; no longer can gender or sexuality be tied to a particular location. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (2001) present a complex model of transnational sexualities, noting that discourses of human rights, foreign policy, and juridical-legal rulings work to both produce and constrain sexual subjects as part of a globally operative framework. M. Jacqui Alexander demonstrates that the politics of sexuality, including its disciplining and regulation by state actors, is a key part of a “global neoliberal imperial project” (2005, 182) that echoes the ways in which discourses of sex and gender, as well as race, once animated colonialism. Contemporary empire-building, she notes, also “require[s] sexuality’s garb” (236). For Alexander, sexed bodies are deployed in the service of global imperialism and transnational capitalism; sex and gender are configured by global power systems.
Building on these ideas, Chandra T. Mohanty (2003) argues that feminist praxis must always be sensitive to borders, not just of nation but also of race, class, sexuality, religion, disability, and other demarcations of difference; her analysis of gender and sexuality is predicated on cartography so as to always recognize the international context in which practices of oppression emerge and can be challenged. In a similar vein, Uma Narayan (1997) explores feminism in India through the lens of “the interpenetration of ‘Western’ values and institutions with the national political and cultural landscapes of ‘home,’ and the way that ‘Western’ and ‘local’ elements mesh in the geography of our lives” (32), concluding that feminist voices represent a cross-national political bricolage that must be taken seriously.
The transcontinental and cross-cultural interconnections highlighted by transnational feminism are integral to understanding the media’s role in constituting genders and sexualities. Dennis Altman (2001, 2004) identifies media culture as an important element in the diffusion of sexual ideas and the emergence and enactment of genders and sexualities globally. There are progressive as well as regressive aspects to these mediated phenomena; in Altman’s as well as other discussions of the flows of global media and their engagements with gender and sexuality, there is a recognition that global–local convergences give rise to hybrid, complex, multiple, and shifting configurations of gender and sex. Transnational feminists, in particular, emphasize the agency and variety of experiences of women in non-Western contexts, challenging the hegemony of Euro-American feminist discourses that depend on binary, oppressor/oppressed constructions and rob Third World women “of the very agency that Western feminists so cherish and advocate” (L.H.M. Ling 1999).
Most importantly, transnational feminism alerts us to the ways in which globalized relations of power configure the politics of sex and gender. Again, there are possibilities of resistance, empowerment, solidarity, and emancipation in these processes, but there are also reinscriptions of existing power relations and the imposition of “scattered hegemonies,” as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994) put it. “With the transnational circulation of media images,” writes Radha Hegde (2011), “the hegemony of the West is reproduced in the global imaginary as the site of sexual politics” (3).
The transnational media spectacle of the gang rape on the New Delhi bus provides a potentially productive analytical locus for exploring these ideas.
Method
The complexities of the issues raised in this case call for a method of analysis sensitive to the subtexts, nuances of language, and ideological currents at play in the cross-national media coverage of the incident. Strategies of critical discourse analysis are appropriate for the kind of deep reading necessary for tracing the specific ways in which news texts organize power; they help us to identify and delineate the “reciprocal relations of a rhetoric and an ideology” (Umberto Eco 1967). Discourses must be understood as an interlinked network of practices; texts represent and reproduce the social world in all its complexity, yet they are inspirited by the contexts and conditions of their production (Michel Foucault 1972; Siegfried Jäger and Florentine Maier 2012). They are articulated to the ideological formations in which they emerge, and thus, they tend to be invested in the dominant social, political, economic, and cultural interests of their structural milieu, although they are also potential seedbeds for oppositional or alternative ideas.
Because this analysis is focused on a manifestly gendered event, and takes into account relations of domination and oppression enacted via geospatial tropes, a feminist perspective on critical discourse analysis is utilized here. As Michelle M. Lazar notes, feminist critical discourse studies not only examine how taken-for-granted gendered assumptions and hegemonic power relations are discursively played out, but they recognize that textual strategies “have material and phenomenological consequences for women and men in specific communities” (2007, 142): she terms this methodological approach “feminist analytical activism” (145).
News texts operate as hegemonic discourses (Kevin Carragee 1991; Stuart Hall 1982; Karim 2000; Teun A. van Dijk 2003). In this sense, they are terrains of struggle, with dominant ideologies confronting oppositional and alternative ones in the news narratives; critical discourse analysis provides analytical strategies for tracking the specific mechanisms in the textual artifact that create ideological meaning. This is particularly relevant for feminist praxis. As Lazar (2007) points out, “Feminist discourse scholars can learn much about the interconnections between and the particularities of discursive strategies employed in various forms of social inequality and oppression that can feed back into critical feminist analysis and strategies for social change” (144).
Lazar’s approach to feminist critical discourse analysis is premised on the concept that gender is an ideological structure, “discursively produced as well as (counter)-resisted in a variety of ways through textual representations of gendered social practices” (2007, 149). These textual representations are multimodal, involving images as well as linguistic forms that can interact to function as a semiotic system.
To analyze the discursive techniques at work in the news coverage of the New Delhi rape, my method is adapted from Lazar’s framework as well as from Jäger and Maier’s (2012) approaches to analyzing structures of discourse. Jäger and Maier suggest examining discursive strands, analyzing the ways subtexts interconnect and combine to produce meaning. Another analytical strategy in their toolbox involves studying discursive position; as they note, the position or standpoint of the text “contribute to and reproduce the discursive enmeshments of subjects” (2012, 49). They also advocate for situating discourse in its societal and global context, which is comprised of multiple discourse planes. Amalgamating their approaches, I will examine a variety of textual elements, focusing closely on how space and place as discursive tropes are articulated to other subtexts, especially of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and nation.
I will employ these techniques to parse the selected news texts in order to investigate the focus, latent meaning, and interpretive schemes encoded within them.
Finally, my strategy of analysis also draws its inspiration from Marilyn Frye’s (1990) conceptualization of feminist epistemology:
Our process has been one of discovering, recognizing and creating patterns … Pattern recognition/construction opens fields of meaning and generates new interpretive possibilities … Instead of drawing conclusions from observations, it generates observations … What we do is sketch a schema within which certain meanings are sustained. (179)
Utilizing these critical, qualitative approaches, I analyzed the first two weeks of news coverage of the New Delhi rape case in several mainstream US news media outlets. My intention in focusing on American media was to interrogate the dynamics of place as they played out in the cross-national news coverage, recognizing that North/South and First World/Third World relationships lay the groundwork for the meanings mobilized in these narratives.
The rape occurred on December 16, 2012. I examined news accounts from December 17 through to December 31. As Jäger and Maier (2012) point out, discursive events influence the further development of a discourse; and a media frame becomes “a central organizing principle” (William A. Gamson, David Croteau, William Hoynes, and Theodore Sasson 1992, 384) for understanding events. The initial coverage of the event defined the event, set the tone, and delimited the range of meanings for interpreting the incident, so the first news stories carried a great deal of ideological weight compared with the proliferation of reports, commentaries, editorials, and analyses that followed.
For this analysis, I looked at all the stories that appeared during the week in the highest circulating news media in the United States: The Wall Street Journal (combined circulation 2,096,169), USA Today (circulation 1,784,242), and CNN (the top-rated cable news station [Jesse Holcomb, Amy Mitchell and Tom Rosenstiel 2012]).
Stories from the week under investigation were drawn from the Factiva, NewsBank/Access World News, and EBSCOHost Newspaper Source databases using combinations of keywords including “India,” “New Delhi,” “rape,” and “gang rape,” as well as from the Lexis-Nexis database of broadcast transcripts and the online archives of the selected news organizations. Opinions, commentaries, and editorials were excluded from the analysis; the focus was on “hard news,” generally perceived as the most authoritative and credible source of information (van Dijk 2003). The search yielded eight print stories, nine online stories that did not appear elsewhere, and ten news videos, which were subjected to rigorous and detailed analysis following the protocols of discourse analysis outlined above. The narratives included written, verbal, and visual texts.
The analysis revealed that place functioned as a multilayered signifier, serving, first, as a complex site for the intricate articulation of gendered, sexual, and geopolitical ideologies that functioned to reinscribe highly politicized social relations; and, second, to mask and obstruct the possibility of progressive linkages across borders. After discussing the former, I will turn to the significance of the latter as having crucial implications for transnational feminism, an argument illuminated by the linked concepts of nepantla (Laura E. Perez 2006) and “alliance-based feminism” (Aimee Carillo Rowe 2003).
Analysis
Savage Streets
All the stories began by marking the “scene of the crime.” Location (part of the who, what, where, when, why liturgy of news reporting) is, of course, an essential part of any news story. However, in examining the “discursive strands” of the news texts, the entanglements of place with other tropes were revealed to be significant. Violence, in particular, was an inextricable feature of the news stories’ definitions of the place of the assault.
None of the news outlets reported the rape itself as a stand-alone incident worthy of news attention: the incident only became a “discursive event” after widespread protests were organized. Although many of these protests were in fact peaceful candlelight vigils, the news stories portrayed them as impassioned and uncontrolled melées. The stories all described thousands of milling protestors in pitched conflict with authorities. “Police in India’s capital used tear gas and water cannons Saturday to push back thousands of people who tried to march to the presidential mansion to protest the gang rape and brutal beating of a 23-year-old student on a moving bus,” wrote Ashok Sharma in an AP story that ran in USA Today (2012):
Several protesters suffered injuries when they repeatedly tried to break through steel barricades in a high-security zone in New Delhi. Police fired tear gas and chased the protesters with sticks, and some of the protesters attacked police with stones during sporadic clashes throughout the day. The see-saw battle became fierce in the evening as a large number of protesters ran toward the nearby parliament building and again targeted police with stones and sticks.
A CNN story from December 24, 2012 began with a brief voice-over from reporter Jonathan Mann: “Police face off with a crowd of protestors in New Delhi. Thousands of demonstrators demanding justice after the brutal gang rape of a woman on a bus” (Jonathan Mann 2012)—the prelude to sixty seconds of footage of turbulent, wildly gesticulating crowds of people, mostly men, being doused with jets from water cannons. An online CNN story led with:
Police locked down New Delhi’s key government district ahead of Monday’s visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin, after two days of pitched street battles following the gang rape of a woman on a bus. (Harmeet S. Singh 2012a)
It went on:
Furious weekend demonstrations rocked Raisina Hills as public outrage surged … incensed protesters defied a police ban on demonstrations, clashing repeatedly with police. (Singh 2012a)
A Wall Street Journal story noted,
The rape sparked angry demonstrations last weekend over the perceived incompetence of the police in protecting women in India’s capital, where incidents of rape, sexual abuse and harassment are frequently reported. Many of those in the initial protests were young students, like the rape victim.
A police clampdown on the protests with tear gas and water cannons further fanned the outrage. (Paul Beckett 2012)
The linguistic devices used in these descriptions work to typify New Delhi and its inhabitants as vicious, unruly, and dangerous. The imagery of violence is invoked by verbs such as attacked, fired, chased, targeted, clashing; adjectives such as fierce, furious, and angry; and repeated descriptions of police clampdowns, tear gas, and water cannons that fanned the outrage but were necessary to contain the seething mobs.
This representation of India’s capital as a place of untamed aggression and turmoil reinforces a view of the global South as uncivilized and lawless, in implicit contrast to the regulated law and order of the North. Sara Mills (2005) describes the “contact zone” of colonizer and colonized as one marked by fear of sexual contact or sexual attack; Jenny Sharpe (1991, 1993) shows that the confinement of British women in India due to imagined fears of sexual attack was integral to the justification of colonial rule.
Echoes of these colonial characterizations of India—as wild, barbaric, and in need of Western civilization (Pramod K. Nayar 2012)—haunt the media figures in this analysis: as in the colonial rationalizations of the past, they mobilize anxieties about non-Western places that can be deployed to justify military actions and neo-imperialist strategies.
Of Bodies and Buses
The stories hammered home the point that New Delhi was a “rape capital,” a place in which sexual assaults were purportedly not only common but routine. The CNN stories repeated the statistics in every story: “New Delhi alone reported 574 rapes last year and more than 600 in 2012” (Harmeet S. Singh, Mallika Kapur, and Laura Smith-Spark 2012); “Delhi has always been notorious for its crimes against women. Two out of three Indian women have been sexually harassed more than five times in one year” (Mallika Kapur 2012). The reportage emphasized women’s vulnerability to sex crimes in India. “[T]he Dec. 16 rape has spurred discussion of how to improve women’s security in a country where an evening bus commute or a nighttime walk down a city street can be a frightening endeavor,” noted a Wall Street Journal article (Amol Sharma 2012, A1). USA Today reported women protestors “demanding authorities take tougher action to protect them against the daily threat of harassment and violence” (Ashok Sharma 2012).
The fact that the gang rape occurred on a city bus surfaced issues of the dangers attendant to Third World women’s embodied mobility. “The sexual assault in Delhi took place in a bus, a regular mode of transport for many Delhi commuters, including these young women,” ran Mallika Kapur’s voice-over to a visual image of upper-class college women (2012); the next shot showed an overcrowded city bus with leering men eyeing the women passengers. A related story featured an interview with Ranjana Kumar, the director of the New Delhi Social Research Center, an upper-level administrator who recalled being pinched, touched, and groped on a city bus (S. Udas 2012). The combination of visual and verbal texts there conjured a tension between women’s emancipation and education, and the spatial barriers to it presented by the Third World context.
The news reports repeatedly referred to India as a place of great sexual danger to women, demonizing Indian men as morally degenerate while positioning Third World women as oppressed and victimized. Namita Goswami argues that neo-colonial and neo-imperial narratives ensure that “the notions of world and home are a priori performed and articulated through heteroimperial masculine boundary maintenance” (2008, 344–345). These strategies position Western masculinities as superior to the uncontrolled and debauched sexualities of the “racial inferiors” in formerly colonized countries (see also Robert W. Connell 1998; Joane Nagel 2003; Mrinalini Sinha 1995; Laura Ann Stoler 1995). Similarly, postcolonial feminist analysis identifies the narrative strategies through which Third World women are construed via an “epistemological geography” of East/West oppositions and pejorative stereotypes (Chilla Bulbeck 1998, 3) hinging on the powerlessness, dependency, and sexual oppression of non-Western women; the works of Narayan (1997), Mohanty (2003), Alexander (2005), and Yegenoglu (1998), among others, elucidate and demonstrate this discursive bias—echoed in these contemporary news texts.
Place as a System Failure
The news discourse not only delineated India as a sexually unsafe place for women in literal terms, it denoted Indian society as a failed democracy where progressive gender politics cannot gain traction: India’s political system was transcoded as a place that shields and sanctions sexual violence. A CNN story that ran online on December 22 described an injured protestor lamenting “a failure of democracy in the country” (Singh, Kapur, and Smith-Spark 2012); it quoted the protestor as saying “Today, I have seen democracy dying.” The story went on to assert that “anti-women acts in India stem from the country’s largely patriarchal social setup” (Singh, Kapur, and Smith-Spark 2012). Another CNN story featured this quote from a spokesperson for the Indian Council on Global Relations: “There are a lot of reasons why this happens, but the patriarchal system is one, a lack of policing is another and general treatment of women is not equal to men, even though it may be so under the law” (Harmeet S. Singh 2012b).
Stories repeatedly emphasized the lack of enforcement of rape laws and human rights policies in India. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that “the case has brought into the public eye a threat to women’s security that is at odds with India’s image of itself as a modernizing nation” (Amol Sharma 2012), while a USA Today photograph of a candlelight vigil in New Delhi included in its caption the codicil that Indian authorities “have long ignored persistent violence and harassment against women” (USA Today2012). USA Today also reported “a lack of prompt action following the rape attack,” quoting a retired military officer who decried “political and bureaucratic apathy for violence against women” (Ashok Sharma 2012).
The Wall Street Journal also pointed out that
India must confront the sexism that is prevalent in society, activists said, pointing to frequent tone-deaf remarks by male Indian politicians.
Banwari Lal Singhal, a member of Rajasthan’s state assembly, proposed on Friday that skirts be banned from school uniforms to prevent sexual harassment. Other politicians have recently called for children to marry younger to prevent rapes. In many parts of India, rape victims are considered tainted and unfit for marriage, and are sometimes pressured to marry their attackers. (Amol Sharma 2012)
Through this reiterated trope of the dereliction of state authority, India as a geopolitical space was discursively fabricated as a failed state, a society unable to sustain the tenets that supposedly underpin the successful democracies of the First World, a claim that pivoted on the ability of “functional” democracies to free women from the perils of sexual assault. Yegenoglu (1998) points to “an imperial Western feminist gesture,” predicated on an obsession with “liberating” non-Western women and engendered via “the complicitous relationship between Western/imperialist interests and the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment” (12). The rhetoric of neo-liberal feminism is thus deeply imbricated with the logic of American imperialism (Kim H. Nguyen 2013), and these news stories’ tacit rationale that Jyoti Pandey’s rape was caused by India’s failure as a democracy reinforces the differential positioning of gender and sexuality as a function of geopolitics.
Overall, the news coverage invoked archetypes of the Third World as a primitive and undisciplined place populated by savage males and subordinate women, a space in which women’s mobility is constrained and where state authority is complicit in rendering women vulnerable to sexual assault due to its incompetence in governing a modern democracy.
Through this limited and ethnocentric lens, the US news media coverage reinscribed social geographies of power in terms of sex and gender. These findings are hardly surprising—yet from a transnational feminist perspective, they have far-reaching and serious implications. It is of profound consequence to feminist activism that the overall tenor of the coverage erased the possibility of cross-national collaborations, solidarity, and collective action against the worldwide problem of sexual violence against women. I will address these consequences in my closing discussion.
Conclusions
Just a few months before the New Delhi gang rape, a sixteen-year-old girl was gang-raped by two football players in Steubenville, Ohio; her case became nationally notorious because of the perpetrators’ use of mobile technology and social media to document and disseminate their crime. The same month, two men gang-raped a teenage girl in Toronto. In 2011, an eleven-year-old girl was gang-raped multiple times by a group of men in Cleveland, Texas. In fact, the incidence of gang rape, and rape, in the global North occurs with frightening frequency.
Yet, as this analysis demonstrates, the mainstream US coverage of the New Delhi rape made no reference to these incidents, nor did it acknowledge sexual violence against women to be a worldwide epidemic. Instead, it isolated and differentiated India as a crucible for sexual violence, exacerbating global hierarchical power structures. That in fact women and men in India were actively confronting, challenging, and resisting the problem of sexual violence was ignored in the discursive shaping of the news texts.
Chandra T. Mohanty (2012) has argued,
Universal images of the “third world” woman (the veiled woman, chaste virgin, etc.), images constructed from adding the “third world difference” to “sexual difference,” are predicated upon (and hence obviously bring into sharper focus) assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated, and having control over their lives. This is not to suggest that Western women are secular, liberated and in control of their lives … Without the “third world woman,” the particular self-presentation of Western women mentioned above would be problematical. (361)
The discursive dispositions that set First and Third World women against each other intervene in the possibility of cross-national collaborations, of the recognition of common problems, and of the development of contextually specific but globally sustained feminist activism against sexual violence everywhere. News coverage could be a powerful catalyst in such activism, but instead, this analysis indicates that it works to undermine such progressive possibilities.
Transnational feminist scholars have called attention to the urgent need for cross-border feminist praxis; as Mohanty (2003) puts it, our visions of feminist activism “need to be attentive to borders while learning to transcend them” (2). She stipulates the need for feminist solidarity that is not predicated on simplistic utopian notions of “global sisterhood” that invariably reassert First World hegemonies; instead she calls for a politics of engagement where it is “the current intersection of antiracist, anti-imperialist, and gay and lesbian struggles that we need to understand to map the ground for feminist political strategy” (120).
For Carillo Rowe (2003), such a politics emerges in alliance-based feminism, predicated on Laura Perez’s reworking of the concept of nepantla, a state of being and consciousness catalyzed by the trauma of oppression, but reworked as “a resource for social, political, and personal transformation” (17). In Carillo Rowe’s analysis, an alliance frame mobilizes the possibility of collaborative cross-border feminist action. She writes:
An alliance analytic attends to feminism’s complicit role in relation to imperialism, unraveling the affective investment in the Western feminist to imagine herself as pure, civilized, and advanced. An alliance frame deconstructs this subject of feminism, whose power and well-being is imagined as separable from the suffering and victimization of others, is built upon an imaginary of the West as the model of progress; it excavates the rhetorical and spiritual processes through which this normative subject of feminism comes to mark the West’s image of its superiority on a global stage over and against the abject, veiled, and otherwise backward femininities that stand as obvious signs of nonfeminist “victims” in need of salvation. (2003, 22–23)
This analysis shows, by contrast, that US news discourses, through the gendered and sexualized troping of space and place, actively work against such an alliance frame, obstructing the progressive potential of transnational feminism to deconstruct the power hierarchies that impede ethical and effective activism against sexual violence. It is perhaps noteworthy that many of the reporters of these stories were themselves of South Asian descent, underscoring the point made by Don Heider (2000) that a journalist’s minority identity does not guarantee sensitivity to racial bias; as he notes, “an individual’s gender or skin color may not be the guiding influence on what decision he or she might make when it comes to making decisions about news coverage” (23). Heider’s analysis indicates that reporters of color may also be subject to what he terms “incognizant racism,” borne of factors such as class background and professional norms.
In the first two weeks of US news coverage of Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rape, only one news outlet—The Christian Science Monitor—referenced the parallel American rape incidents and acknowledged the potential for global activism. Later, bloggers, commentators, and feminist groups in various regions began to critique the news frames and raise the complexities of the issues at stake in the New Delhi crime and its aftermath. But this analysis of the initial mainstream news coverage of Jyoti Singh Pandey’s rape and murder reveals the media’s potent role in dichotomizing First and Third Worlds via a sexed and gendered politically opposed hierarchy, thus actively countering the epistemic principles and potential for collective praxis of “feminism without borders.”