‘The Body on the Threshold: Histories of Rape in Colonial North India’ analyzes political, judicial, and diplomatic records of sexual violence in the modern Indian provinces of Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh from roughly 1820 onward. I explore these colonial archives to reappraise the problem of rape in modern India and how it has come to be conceived and misconceived spatially. With the colonial emergence of India’s contemporary legal and penal system, I argue, a new criminal law of rape transformed public space—local roads, forests, village fields and pastures, railway carriages, and town streets—into constitutively dangerous and exclusionary space, about which a perverse cultural and political consensus prevailed that nothing could be done except that women and girls fear and avoid such space when possible. This notorious and longstanding exclusionary injunction upon mobilities and freedoms in modern Indian social life is a gendered common-sense, and structuring of the commons, that I aim to defamiliarize. As a new, ostensibly ‘decolonized’ criminal code with a restructured rape law comes into force in India this year, I offer a cautionary obituary for the law it replaced, and the past India seeks to leave behind.Bringing a combination of spatial, socio-legal, and micro-historical approaches to bear upon colonial judicial archives, I work tangentially to their central object: the criminal court proceeding. To explore how the jurispathic incentives of colonial criminal law engendered unsafe public environments, I work to pull the concept of rape out of the silo imposed by these court proceedings, which reflect the epistemic distortions of a regime that narrowly prioritized punishing only brutally violent rape upon victims below the age of consent—setting evidentiary precedents that affected the governing of rape in much of the British Empire. Employing sources such as crime reports, police handbooks, diplomatic letters, and native newspapers, I focus on instances of what might be referred to today as ‘stranger rape’: rape committed in ‘public’, often brazenly, at the margins of political conflicts over sovereign power and direct rule, such as border wars, princely revolts, and cattle-smuggling feuds. I recruit histories of short-distance migration and the public/private circulation of women within the marriage system, among others, to counter assumptions about South Asian women’s inherent immobility and seclusion. I also index emerging procedural and forensic technologies of the colonized Indian body politic—which reinforced an understanding of rape survivors as unreliable, and of most rape accusations as fabricated—to local ideas about public safety and state responsibility, which were often premised on caste-differentiated and retributive ethics of justice. I trace how pre-colonial practices of social exclusion, scapegoating, and outcasting—and the complex dispute-resolution systems that mandated such punishments—were absorbed into an ecology of colonial violence and territorial occupation, attempting to emplace the evolving meaning of rape within broader transformations in politics and social life under colonialism. I argue that the authority to sanction rape—to both punish and prescribe—became foundational to jurisdictional and territorial conflicts between propertied castes, local power-holders, and functionaries of the British Indian colonial state.

This thesis is an investigation of the representation of the figure of the man who raped on the early modern stage. The early modern “man who raped” must be distinguished from the modern term “rapist” insofar as the modern term ascribes an ontological or sociological position to the individual male that was alien to the early modern world view. The shifting value of “rape” in the early modern period presaged more modern conceptions of rape as “an experience imposed on an embodied subject, a violent sexual assault that in its corporal nature destabilizes the intersubjective personhood of the victim” (Cahill 207). As such, the shifting values of the term also prefigured more modern conceptions of masculinity and the successful performance of masculine values. The figure of the man who raped on the early modern English stage often was not merely the monster against which successful forms of masculine behaviour could be contrasted – often such characters found a sympathetic audience. And often, that audience was encouraged and directed through paratextual and dramaturgical devices to see themselves in and identify with the man who raped, for he could be redeemed. This thesis uses the lens of the Roman play to investigate sexual assault because Roman plays clarified masculine ideals for the early moderns; Rome, civilization, manliness, stoic self-control and virtus on the early modern stage were all coincident terms that articulated sexual difference and therefore the construction of the male subject (Kahn 15). The first section looks extensively at the English inheritance of Roman and Anglo-Saxon laws on sexual assault, while the subsequent chapters turn to early modern drama more closely. The plays under study are Marston’s Wonder of Women, Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, and Fletcher’s Bonduca. / SSHRC, School of English and Theatre Studies, College of Arts

Studien ”När den anklagade blir till offer” ämnar belysa och problematisera mediernas roll när det gäller representationen av sexualbrottsanklagelser. Medierna kan ha potentialen att påverka den allmänna opinionen om sexualbrott och det är därmed viktigt att uppmärksamma hur representationer förmedlas. Studien undersöker olika diskurser och myter i dokumentären Persona non grata som skildrar Soran Ismails mediala och personliga fall efter de våldtäktsanklagelser han mottog under 2017. Studiens teoretiska ramverk utgår ifrån representationsteorin, genus och könsmaktsordningen samt våldtäktsmyter. I vår analys har metoden multimodal kritisk diskursanalys använts tillsammans med analysverktygen lexikala val, attribut och scenmiljö, sociala aktörer samt kategoriseringar inom våldtäktsmyter. Analysen resulterade i att vi kunde utläsa tre diskursiva teman som bidrog till en ojämlik representation av sexualbrottsanklagelser i dokumentären, där offrens perspektiv uteslöts. Resultatet visade att den anklagade porträtteras som offer genom de sociala aktörernas roller, samt i de kommunikativa valen när han bemöter anklagelserna. Vi fann även flera våldtäktsmyter som bidrar till hur den anklagade representeras i dokumentären — 1) Förövare utgörs enbart av enstöringar, 2) Förövare utgörs endast av underklass, 3) Förövaren är motiverad av lust, 4) Våldtäkt är lika med sex, och 5) Kvinnor använder våldtäktsanklagelser för att få uppmärksamhet. / The study "When the accused turns into the victim" intends to shed light on and problematize the media's role in the representation of sexual crime allegations. Media may have the potential to influence public opinion on sexual crime and it is therefore important to pay attention to how representations are conveyed. This study examines various discourses and myths in the documentary Persona non grata which portrays Soran Ismail's medial and personal collapse after the rape allegations he received in 2017. The study's theoretical framework is based on representation theory, gender studies and gender power structures, and rape myths. In the analysis, the method multimodal critical discourse analysis has been used together with the analysis tools lexical choices, attributes and stage environment, social actors, and categories within rape myths. The analysis resulted in three discursive themes that contributed to an unequal representation of sexual crime allegations in the documentary, where the victims' perspectives were excluded. The results showed that the accused is portrayed as a victim through the roles of the social actors, as well as in the communicative choices when responding to the accusations. Several rape myths were found that contribute to how the accused is represented in the documentary - 1) The perpetrator consists only of solitary confinement, 2) The perpetrator consists only of the underclass, 3) The perpetrator is motivated by lust, 4) Rape is equal to sex, and 5) Women uses rape allegations to get attention.

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The pervasiveness of sexual violence on college campuses poses a significant problem for students and administrations that seek to promote healthy, safe, and equitable access to higher education. Although federal legislation under Title IX prohibits sexual violence as a form of gender discrimination, cultural climates that promote sexual violence—or rape cultures - continue to inform student experiences on college campuses. This thesis roots the discourse on campus sexual violence in the specific localized context at Scripps College. As a women’s college situated in a small, interconnected consortium of co-ed liberal arts colleges, the case of Scripps College raises critical questions about the ways in which gender and sexism play out on women’s bodies, and influence students’ experiences with embodiment on campus. In this thesis, I present a feminist analysis of the current institutional policies that address sexual violence on campus, in addition to the perspectives of eight student activists currently involved in gender justice work at Scripps College. Due to the fact that each of the Claremont Colleges, including Scripps, is currently in the process of re-evaluating their policies and grievance procedures that address sexual violence on campus, now is a key time to reflect on the past, present, and future of the Claremont Colleges and the role that these institutions play in either deconstructing or reinforcing patriarchal structures of power.

The pervasiveness of sexual violence on college campuses poses a significant problem for students and administrations that seek to promote healthy, safe, and equitable access to higher education. Although federal legislation under Title IX prohibits sexual violence as a form of gender discrimination, cultural climates that promote sexual violence—or rape cultures - continue to inform student experiences on college campuses. This thesis roots the discourse on campus sexual violence in the specific localized context at Scripps College. As a women’s college situated in a small, interconnected consortium of co-ed liberal arts colleges, the case of Scripps College raises critical questions about the ways in which gender and sexism play out on women’s bodies, and influence students’ experiences with embodiment on campus. In this thesis, I present a feminist analysis of the current institutional policies that address sexual violence on campus, in addition to the perspectives of eight student activists currently involved in gender justice work at Scripps College. Due to the fact that each of the Claremont Colleges, including Scripps, is currently in the process of re-evaluating their policies and grievance procedures that address sexual violence on campus, now is a key time to reflect on the past, present, and future of the Claremont Colleges and the role that these institutions play in either deconstructing or reinforcing patriarchal structures of power.

This thesis examines gender violence in Argentina in the context of the historic continuum of gender inequality, with a more in-depth analysis of gender violence during the 1976-1983 dictatorship. I argue that gender violence is perpetuated and normalized by its lack of recognition as a political issue with ramifications extending to daily life. I use the construction of a collective memory of the Dictatorship as a framework for making the intricacies of gender violence more visible and provide a detailed analysis of two laws against gender violence to demonstrate its systematic nature. Ultimately, laws are not sufficient to address such a widespread issue, and society is responsible for creating a dialogue that presents gender violence in a context that adequately addresses its complexities. Esta tesis examina la violencia de género en Argentina en el contexto del continuo histórico de la desigualdad entre los géneros, y en particular analiza la violencia de género de la Dictadura de 1976-1983 y de la actualidad. Propongo que la carencia de reconocer la violencia de género en un contexto político la perpetúa y la normaliza. Utilizo la construcción de la memoria colectiva de la Dictadura como un ejemplo de estrategias para visibilizar las complejidades de la violencia de género y analizo dos leyes contra tal violencia para demonstrar cuán sistemática es. Al fin, las leyes no son suficientes para abordar un problema tan generalizado y normalizado y la sociedad es responsable de desarrollar un diálogo sobre la violencia de género y sus complejidades.