Abstract

Law is an evolving set of historical and cultural engagements between a state and its citizens. Examining how crimes against women are imagined within a particular national framework provides significant insights into the socio-historical environments that shape feminist legal theory and advocacy in that region. My doctoral project is a transnational study of law and advocacy responses to violence against Indian women in India and the United States. In order to understand how Indian women's lives are shaped by various degrees of access to and representation within diverse legal systems, I examine three central questions: (1) How are global flows of people, culture, media and capital testing the limits of anti-violence law and what kinds of legal subjects are being produced within these transnational spaces? (2) What are the particular constraints faced by advocates who work on cases involving violence against Indian women in India and the United States? (3) What are the sources of these constraints? These questions are translated into a two-pronged methodological approach: ethnographic (based on in-depth interviews with advocates), and archival/textual (a targeted review of legislative histories, statutes and cases based on analysis of the specific legal frameworks each nation has adopted to address violence against women). Building on theoretical ideas from Transnational Feminisms, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory, my research forms an architectural theory that begins with the micro analysis of violence that originates in the home but increasingly calls upon a consideration of macro or global concerns which influence the development of intersectional identities within each of these spheres. Drawing on data from my ethnographic and archival research, I demonstrate how law and advocacy work has been altered by a growing interconnectedness between the United States and India engendered by globalization, new patterns of marriage and migration, and the specific forms of violence these shifts have enabled. This analysis of migrating spouses, traveling cultures and evolving bodies of law, suggests that new types of legal subjects are being produced within transnational spaces which undermine the meaningfulness of legal remedies conceived within the narrow boundaries of the nation-state.