Crossing boundaries:bras, lingerie and rape myths in postcolonial urban middle-class India

With the processes of modernization, urbanization and the entry of women in the formal labour market in Indian metropolitan spaces, this paper examines how the modern middle-class woman’s sartorial choices become enmeshed in popular rape myths (false beliefs) that serve to blame her for the wearing of western clothing. The paper articulates the ways in which middle-class women’s social realities are shaped by historical, colonial and nationalist ideologies of modernization, constructed and mediated through moral codes of dressing. By drawing upon original and contemporary empirical narratives from the urban spaces of Delhi and Mumbai, we emphasise how everyday sartorial choices, in relation to particularly the bra and lingerie, can reveal the nuanced ways in which Urban Indian Professional Women (UIPW) seek to understand, negotiate, and resist patriarchal power. Our findings shed light on conflicting and contradictory spatial experiences, where some women internalize and negotiate moral codes of dressing, out of fear, and others who transgress are subject to sanctions. Given the paucity of scholarly literature in this area, the paper makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution with its focus on postcoloniality and everyday discursive material spaces of gendered and sexualized dress practices. It argues for the consciousness raising of everyday urban geographies of dress that reveal complicated structures of power that are often deemed hidden

Liabilities of Queer Anti-Racist Critique

In September 2009, Raw Nerve Books, a small independent feminist publisher in Britain, issued a public apology to prominent gay right activist Peter Tatchell for content they had published in an edited collection titled, Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality (2008b).1 It has been widely speculated that this apology was the result of a threat of legal action.2 The book contained an article critical of Tatchell’s gay rights activism in Britain, arguing that some of his work contributes to larger patterns of racism and Islamophobia (Haritaworn et al. 2008). Both the article and book offered important and timely analysis of the ways that discourses of queerness and raciality have been silenced, displaced and marginalized within more dominant LGBTQ politics and human rights work.The book had been initially scheduled for reprint following a sold out first run. However, in November 2009, amidst considerable controversy surrounding their earlier apology, Raw Nerve Books released a statement declaring that due to ‘factual errors’ and ‘inaccuracies’ in the book they had ‘no alternative’ but to refrain from republishing.3 As a result, the book is no longer available for re-ordering and, with no reprints in production, the authors and editors of Out of Place have become effectively subject to the same form of silencing they critique.</p