§ 01
Indian socio-legal studies
Harm that law causes
A court can hurt a survivor a second time. I study that kind of harm, and how women look for justice in the second-best categories the law leaves them.
On what the law will not call rape:
A wife’s account, told in a vocabulary that was never hers.
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§ 02
Gendered violence
Rape with no name in law
For an adult wife in India, rape by her husband is not rape in law. I work on wife rape and domestic violence, and on the caste order of marriage that holds both in place.
§ 03
Indian feminist studies
Whose feminism
Feminism in India has often treated caste as someone else’s concern. I learn from Dalit feminist writers who insist marriage cannot be understood without it.
§ 04
Trauma studies
Telling it so it can be heard
Complex trauma and alexithymia can make feeling hard to put into words, and a courtroom wants a tidy story. I think about the distance between the two.
§ 05
Indian anglophone literature
What fiction can lend
Novels can give a woman words before the law does. I read postcolonial fiction by women, including Meena Kandasamy and Shobha Rao, for what a story makes sayable.
§ 06
Cultic studies
Leaving a world you were born into
My other long interest is the FLDS, and how people raised inside a closed community leave it, and what leaving costs.
§ 07
Existentialism
Freedom, for whom
Sartre gave me existence before essence, and Beauvoir’s The Second Sex taught me to ask who is allowed to become what.
∞
Who names the harm?
When a tribunal is the authority that names harm, what happens to the survivors’ accounts?