Rape, Retribution, State: On Whose Bodies?

Abstract

Although the rhetoric of capital punishment operates in the name of women, its objective is not the right to bodily autonomy of all women. Retribution aims at punishing men for having breached the contract between the masculinist state and all men. A reading of the Lok Sabha debates around the amendments to the rape law in 1983 indicates that the object of legislative reform was politicised between the state and the individual offender, defining the powers of the masculinist state over the kind of women who may be sexually accessible to all men, and others to some men.