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In a “Fragile Space”: Sexual Harassment and the Construction of Indian Feminism *
Author(s) -
SUNDER MADHAVI
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
law and policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.534
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1467-9930
pISSN - 0265-8240
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9930.1996.tb00177.x
Subject(s) - harassment , sociology , gender studies , feminism , criminology , space (punctuation) , modernity , tracking (education) , political science , law , pedagogy , linguistics , philosophy
Tracking the feminist legal reform movement in India from its initial focus on rape in the late 1970s to recent efforts to address sexual harassment, the author chronicles Indian feminists' struggle to develop indigenously authentic approaches to modernity and development through law. The author explicates sexual harassment in India as a crime related to women's everyday struggle to challenge traditional boundaries and reformulate identities: Sexual violence is often used to thwart these challenges and lock Indian women into traditional roles. The resulting “process‐based” Indian analysis of sexual harassment, which departs from traditional victim‐based analyses of the crime in the West, serves as one example of Indian feminists self‐consciously creating a legal reform movement that both engages international dialogue on sexual harassment, and integrates that dialogue with its own particular history to create a distinct legal reform.