The brutal gang rape of Jyoti Singh (Nirbhaya) on a bus in New Delhi became worldwide news in 2012. Widely known as the Nirbhaya rape incident, it was a landmark case that led the Indian government to amend existing criminal laws on sexual violence and rape. The rape also came to transform the media landscape into a space of social activism. Despite that popular cultural representations of the incident have been critiqued for appropriating rape myths. Through a thematic analysis of the BBC documentary, India's Daughter (2015), and the Netflix series, Delhi Crime (2019), the paper examines the ways in which popular culture sustains and furthers rape culture. By interrogating the thematic-cum-visual discourse of these texts, this paper explores the ideological and sexual tropes to understand the cultural configuration of rape and rape victims/survivors. The study finds the ongoing discourse centering rape in popular culture to be a reiteration of the patriarchal norms prevalent in Indian society.
Christian churches in India with their growing access to digital technology have brought along promises to improve the interface between religion and society. This study looks at the Assemblies of God Fellowship (AGF), a popular youth church in Ahmedabad, Gujarat which has utilised the digital space to create an experience of engaging with the spiritual. This study contributes towards an ethnographically researched narrative of the church and its role in the domain of digital tourism, the manner in which religious authority negotiates the influx of the Internet. The research focusses on ways in which online communications shape religious meanings, identities, expressions of religiosity, and contemporary notions of tourism. AGF's inclusion of the online in its day-today faith practices along with its establishment of new units such as the ‗media team' has led to the emergence of a media-savvy leadership.
This article attempts to study deathlessness in relation to notions of physical and moral transgression. Through a close textual analysis of Mary Shelley's work, ‘The Mortal Immortal’, the article undertakes an enquiry into the discomforts of arrested immortality. It argues that by turning an otherwise normative body corporeally interstitial, deathlessness prompts a narrative of transgression. The focus is on the protagonist, Winzy, and the impact deathlessness has on both his personal and social relations. I utilise theories of transgression, linking them to concepts of physical impurity and corruption to examine how deathlessness dehumanises the individual, rendering them a potential threat to social stability. Keeping corporeal transgression as its focal point, I also elucidate how deathlessness-generated-corporeal interstitiality can problematise sexuality. Deathlessness, therefore, is analysed in terms of multiple transgressions synthesised into one. The article identifies and highlights the factors shaping the theme of transgression and the manner in which transgression plays out within the larger context of deathlessness. In the concluding segments, the paper also explores the manner in which transgression prompts the dehumanisation of the deathless.
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