Cancelled: Colloquium Series 2023-24: Radhika Govindrajan

This event has been cancelled.

“All Cases Are False”: Law, Gendered Violence and the Politics of Thickening in Himalayan India

This talk by Dr. Radhika Govindraja from the University of Washington will focus on Indian women’s experiences of legal filing complaints in order to address two interconnected questions: How are complaints about gendered violence authenticated as genuine or rejected as dubious before they even reach a courtroom? And how do women who bring complaints before the law navigate a social field inwhich what counts as the “truth” might conflict with their own understandings and experiences? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Himalayan India, this talk will explore how family, community, and local state officials engaged in a kind of thick description that contextualized women’s complaints within rural social relations and political economy. This everyday thickening, I will argue, bears a troubling similarity tothe theory and methods of feminist activists and anthropologists, necessitating reflection on how to ethically write about gendered violence in a way that does notreplicate this violence.