This post is part of a series of reflections on the interdisciplinary winter seminar, “Mumbai At Home and in the World: Gender, Sexuality and the Postcolonial City.” BCRW Associate Director Catherine Sameh introduced the seminar in part 1, BCRW Research Assistant Nicci Yin reflected on occupying space in an urban environment in part 2, and Liz Gipson discussed understandings of queer space in part 3.
Students and faculty eat lunch and discuss the themes of the seminar at Sophia College in Mumbai
I spent two fleeting days at the Mumbai Winter Seminar. And yet, it served as a crucial conduit between my Barnard experiences (notably the Global Symposium in Mumbai) and my new position at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. Connecting three women’s colleges across the globe; transporting and translating ideas, philosophies, literatures, values.
In preparation for teaching a student body that represents the entirety of continental Asia, I was particularly keen on finding comparative elements in each session. Collectively, the few segments I attended offered some really interesting comparative insights into patterns of physical, sexual, and structural violence.
The session that best exemplified these themes was conducted by BCRW Associate Director Catherine Sameh. She applied a transnational feminist framework to recent incidents of severe violence, such as the December 2012 rape in Delhi and the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which allowed us to locate similar (if not the same) theoretical principles in an analysis of extremely different cases (that one might otherwise deem entirely unrelated). Often, ‘western’ discourses shame non-western cultures for breeding violent mentalities. In reality, we are guilty of the same, and it is imperative to also turn the critiques westward if we wish to really understand violence as a global cultural phenomenon. Perhaps Indian culture has cultivated an environment in which men feel overly entitled, women are overly objectified, and the sociopolitical, legal structures in place rarely serve the needs of victims. If so, then American culture has created a space for gun possession to become normalized, gun violence to take place all too frequently, and victims of any act of violence unfairly undervalued (if not entirely blamed).