ABSTRACT
In her comparative analysis of violence against women in India and the United States, Uma Narayan argues for the importance of attending to the epistemology of “border-crossings” and the historically and politically specifi c contexts in which violence against women is manifested.2 In particular, Narayan focuses on the wide circulation of the reductionist story that “women in India are burned everyday,” a reference that mistakenly confl ates the incidence of contemporary so-called ‘dowrydeaths’ with what is wrongly assumed to be an ancient and hegemonic Hindu tradition of suttee. She asks feminists to consider the function and effects of the circulation of these stories of ‘spectacular violence’ against women, and the dehumanizing and decontextualizing effects that ensue from attributing to a complex, dynamic and diverse peoples the practice of burning-women-since-the-beginning-of-time. Narayan offers multiple insights that enable us to understand that ‘dowry deaths’ are incidents of domestic violence that have increased in response to economic globalization and a growing demand amongst middle-class Indians for wealth, economic mobility, and consumer goods. As such, they are thoroughly secular, capitalist, and contemporary manifestations of violence against women. By contextualizing the incidence of dowry deaths in a structural analysis of economic globalization and patriarchal power, frameworks that are not foreign or Other, she humanizes Indians and offers an analysis of the structural power that makes domestic violence possible. In doing so, her analysis connects Us to Them and enables us to see the violence of the Other as something quite familiar, comprehensible, and continuous with a range of domestic violence issues.
