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In recent decades, the issue of gender-based violence has become heavily politicized in India. Yet, Indian law enforcement personnel continue to be biased against women and overburdened. In Capable Women, Incapable States, Poulami Roychowdhury asks how women claim rights within these conditions. Through long term ethnography, she provides an in-depth lens on rights negotiations in the world's largest democracy, detailing their social and political effects.
Roychowdhury finds that women interact with the law not by following legal procedure or abiding by the rules, but by deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. And they behave this
way because law enforcement personnel do not protect women from harm but do allow women to take the law into their own hands.These negotiations do not enhance legal enforcement. Instead, they create a space where capable women can extract concessions outside the law, all while shouldering a new burden of labor and risk. A unique theory of gender inequality and governance, Capable Women, Incapable States forces us to rethink the effects of rights activism across large parts of the world
where political mobilization confronts negligent criminal justice systems.
In recent decades, the issue of gender-based violence has become heavily politicized in India. Yet, Indian law enforcement personnel continue to be biased against women and overburdened. In Capable Women, Incapable States, Poulami Roychowdhury asks how women claim rights within these conditions. Through long term ethnography, she provides an in-depth lens on rights negotiations in the world's largest democracy, detailing their social and political effects.
Roychowdhury finds that women interact with the law not by following legal procedure or abiding by the rules, but by deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. And they behave this
way because law enforcement personnel do not protect women from harm but do allow women to take the law into their own hands.These negotiations do not enhance legal enforcement. Instead, they create a space where capable women can extract concessions outside the law, all while shouldering a new burden of labor and risk. A unique theory of gender inequality and governance, Capable Women, Incapable States forces us to rethink the effects of rights activism across large parts of the world
where political mobilization confronts negligent criminal justice systems.
List of Terms
Acknowledgments
Section I Opening
Chapter I Introduction
Chapter II Stalled
Sections II Negotiations
Chapter III Running a Family
Chapter IV The Business of Mediation
Chapter V Incentivizing the Law
Chapter VI States of Disempowerment
Chapter VII Incorporating Women
Section III Citizens
Chapter VIII Running a Case
Chapter IX Aspirational-Strategic Subjects
Chapter X Illicit Justice
Chapter XI The Allure and Costs of Capability
Chapter XII Conclusion
Section IV Appendices
Appendix A Methodological Discussion
Appendix B Key Legal Reforms
Appendix C First Information Report
Appendix D Domestic Incident Report
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Poulami Roychowdhury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University. Her research examines the relationship between politics, law, and social inequality, with a focus on the global south. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec.
"...it is the subjective shift Roychowdhury documents when women
learn that the law is a strategic field open to them to engage with
and manipulate that proves the most enduring lesson. These women's
recognition that the legal system can be strategically navigated as
a way to claim rights is perhaps the strongest justification for
developing 'capability'. In doing so, Roychowdhury presents a clear
case for why rights continue to matter even in the face of
incapable systems of justice." -- Chelsea Wallis, BCL Candidate,
Univeristy of Oxford, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies
"Capable Women, Incapable States meticulously takes you through the
struggles of domestic violence victims as they seek redress from a
weak and low capacity Indian state, learning to play the system,
leverage allies, make the most of the accommodations, and in the
process build their capabilities as citizens. Roychowdhury weaves
together a narrative of women's situated agency that is as
empirically rich and compelling as it is theoretically
powerful.
For anyone who cares about gender justice, how the law works and
how rights have to be seized to make them work, this is the book
for you." -Patrick Heller, Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences,
Brown
University
"Roychowdhury has authored one of the most original,
richly-documented works on gender and states to appear in a long
time. Her work brilliantly examines how civil society actors are
left to struggle among themselves, leaving state officials 'off the
hook.' This exposes those who suffer abuse to deal with risk on
their own or, fascinatingly, to activate their ties to grassroots
organizations, which may carry out what might otherwise be state
functions, such as
punishing domestic abusers. Roychowdhury's subtle analysis of
relationships among state officials at all levels of government and
various civil society groups puts her work at the forefront of
scholarship on states--their capacities, their boundaries with the
'private,' and potentials for transformation. Her work should
inaugurate a new wave of scholarship on politics in the broad range
of cases in which state capacities cannot be taken for granted."
-Ann Shola Orloff, Northwestern University
"How does Amartya Sen's notion of 'capabilities' play out on the
ground, as ordinary women negotiate the law, the state, the police
and the family in contexts of domestic violence? Roychowdhury's
deep and thorough research in Bengal reveals the limitations as
well as the possibilities of engaging with questions of
capabilities in relation to women's rights and empowerment, and the
masculinities of the law and the state in India. This is an
illuminating and
important contribution to the study of gender and violence and
post-development thought." -Inderpal Grewal, Professor Emerita,
Yale University
"Poignant, insightful, surprising and analytical, Poulami
Roychowdhury's book beautifully illuminates how, far from being an
issue within a home, domestic violence implicates the world in
which homes are embedded: neighborhoods, fictive kin, local
political interests, and multiple levels of the state. It shows
how, in highly unequal conditions, survivors of domestic violence
must transform themselves into capable women rather than victims in
order to claim
their rights. In so doing, the survivors take on the work of very
state which continues to fail them." -Raka Ray, Dean of the
Division of Social Sciences, and Professor of Sociology and South
Asian
Studies, University of California, Berkeley
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