Moving Rape: Trafficking in the Violence of Postliberalization

• Published in: Public culture Vol. 27; no. 2; p. 331
• Main Author: Amrute, Sareeta
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Durham Duke University Press, NC & IL 01.05.2015
• Subjects: Automobile drivers; Automobiles; Call centers; Economic policy; Rape; Social classes; Women; India
• ISSN: 0899-2363; 1527-8018
• DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2841892

This article discusses violence against women in cars in India, including the recent high-profile Delhi rape case, arguing that these cases should be set in the context of economic liberalization. The dynamic between women and their drivers should be understood as a labor relationship within a mode of consumer citizenship that revalorizes Indian middle classes. I argue that the men who drive are members of a lower class with an ambivalent position in liberalized Indian economies, simultaneously excluded from protections of government and relied on to do the dangerous job of navigating roads at speed. I focus on call center drivers as an example through which to think about how such subjects figure in postliberalization Indian imaginaries -- as border guards to middle-class private consumer pleasures and as call center workers with unvalorized labor. I use the cases of call center violence to illuminate the relationship between economic privatization and privacy in India today.