News Coverage of Rape as a Site for Global Contests of Power

• In Event: Narrations of Rape in Postcolonial India and Beyond: Rape Discourse in Global Contests of Power

Abstract

In this paper I will analyze the coverage of rape in multiple locations, including U.S. coverage of inter-caste rape in India and Al Jazeera’s coverage of campus rape in the U.S. Through my examination of coverage of rape in multiple locations, I will broach the question of how rape becomes the ground for contestation between different interpretations of modernity and progress or the lack of it. The paper will point to the epistemic harm that is done when rape becomes the ground for global contests for hegemonic positioning between older and newer powers and between different regions of the world. There is a long history of the symbolic deployment of women’s issues for global projects, including colonial and neocolonial projects. The selective appropriation of feminist and gender issues by capitalist projects, especially advertising and marketing, has also been documented in the literature on commodity feminism. It becomes important to look at the continuing exploitation of women’s and gender issues by the mainstream media in an age when transnational feminisms advance on the uneven terrain of neoliberal hegemony. This creates the contradiction of the appropriation of feminist-inspired rhetoric in the service of global contests of power, used to position particular regions globally but also to resist challenges to hegemony. I will attempt to identify some of these contradictions through my analysis of rape coverage in multiple locations.

Author

• Rashmi Luthra, U of Michigan - Dearborn