Rupal Oza - Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India

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.

This event will be held in person at Roosevelt House and online via Zoom.

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