With the advent of the digital age and online networks, a new facet of human experience materialised called the cyberspace. In other words, it is an addition to an individual’s intrapsychic world. Millions of people are using the Internet as a day-to-day activity to enhance their lives while at the same time there are people who are using it for anti-social purposes such as stalking, harassing, bullying and so on. This, with the advent of the Internet, has become a new weapon of abuse. This research intends to bring the two realms of virtual and physical, which are considered as binaries into a productive dialogue on violence against women. In doing so, it takes forward the narratives of cyber violence survivors into rethinking the construction of disembodied and embodied violence. I pursue this aim by exploring how women survivors of India conceptualise and respond to cyber violence. This is a qualitative exploratory study located within the theoretical framework of feminist standpoint theory in order to engage each survivor’s story from their individual standpoint. An in-depth interview was conducted for 30 women survivors in India. This study will help to critically understand cyber violence as an embodied experience.
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.
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