Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in South Asian Studies
Episode: Rupal Oza, "Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India" (Duke UP, 2022)
Description: In Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India (Duke UP, 2022), 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. Rather than focus on the laws governing rape, Oza closely examines rape charges to show how the victims and survivors of rape reclaim their autonomy by refusing to see themselves as defined entirely by the act of vio...