ABSTRACT
Pratiksha Baxi
This chapter analyses the representations, struggles and sociolegal dynamics following the brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on Deli bus on 16 December, resulting in her death. I examine the legal and discursive impact of the significant, unprecedented public protests calling for justice in the face of the “public secret” of rape. One of the aspects discussed concerns the media coverage of the protests and how it repeatedly isolated and highlighted India as a den of sexual violence, in an obvious cultural alterization and racialization of rape and sexual abuse. In addition, the chapter analyzes the nuances of the different feminist anti-rape discourses, the emergence of a thirst for revenge calling for the death penalty, lynching and castration, and the lingering phallocentric and colonial attitudes evident in the different representations of the rape and the protests which followed.
