Second Critical Studies Conference

"Spheres of Justice"

Name of the Panel: Marginalities and Justice-I

<%'------------------------Bookmark Module wise------------------------%>       Danielle Haase-Dubosc        Legal and Social Justice for Women in Occupied Palestinian  

     Justine McGill                                Spheres of Violence: Failures of Social Justice in France and Australia
 

     Paula Banerjee                     AIDS, Women and Marginality
                             

     Saptarshi Mandal                  Dalit Life Narratives as Ethnographies of Justice 
 

Examples will be given based on the work of Women Studies Centers in the West Bank and Gaza and my own experiences at Birzeit  University, the Islamic University of Gaza, women’s groups at Hebron, and the women in Deisheh refugee camp.
 

Bionote

Danielle Haase-Dubosc’s principal  research orientation is that of gender studies in  comparative literary and historical perspectives: she has two areas of concentration: the early modern period and the contemporary (2oth century to present). Her recent work reflects this dual commitment: Ravie et Enlevée ,a book about historical and fictional representations of abduction and seduction in 17^th-century France and  two readers, Contemporary issues in Indian Feminism and French Feminisms, published respectively in France and in India. She has recently lectured and lived in the Occupied Territories of Palestine.

Justine McGill          Spheres of Violence: Failures of Social Justice in France and Australia    Full Paper

This paper is part of a larger project which aims to shed light on the violence occurring in two distinct communities by comparing them. The two cases are those of the immigrant communities living in the suburbs of French cities (in particular, Paris) and indigenous communities of Australia (particularly those living in the York Peninsula). In both contexts, violence has become highly visible in recent times in the form of riots against the police. Such outbreaks can be seen as an extreme continuation of the “routine violence” (in Gyandendra Pandey’s phrase) that characterises life for many members of these communities in their relations with the state, and with other community members.
One aim of bringing these cases together is to emphasise the context of systematic injustice that forms the background (or even the foreground) of the violence in both locations. There are two main types of injustice, and corresponding struggles for justice, at issue here. The first is historical: it concerns the legacy of colonial violence. The second is social: here the focus is the effects of policies pursued in the name of the welfare state.
In this paper, I will suggest that one way to understand the violence occurring in both of these communities is to see it, in Etienne Balibar’s term, as “counter-violence” that responds and corresponds to the violence of the state. In the case of the riots that have broken out in both France and Australia in the past year, this “counter-violence” is an expression of frustration that illuminates not only the impotence of the rioters, but equally the impotence of all those whose work is supposed to address the injustices that underlie such outbreaks of violence. The momentary illusion of total power that is created in the spontaneous outbreak of violence mirrors the equally illusory sense of total power created by systems of social control (and authoritative theoretical discourses).

Since 2006, Justine McGill has been a lecturer in contemporary Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. In 2005 she was awarded her PhD for a thesis on the concept of responsibility in the work of Nietzsche. She also holds a DEA from the University of Paris-X, where she was supervised by Professor Etienne Balibar. At present, she is completing a book called “Broken Promises,” about the concept of personal responsibility. This year she has also begun a new collaborative project with Swedish anthropologist Johanna Gullberg, comparing violence in the French banlieues with violence in indigenous communities in Australia.

Paula Banerjee          AIDS, Women and Marginality   Full Paper

In recent years the debate on social justice for women in India has not been restricted to debates on economic and political vulnerabilities of women, but it also encompassed issues of health especially in relation to the rising number of HIV positive cases.  India has a population of over one billion and about half of this population falls under the sexually active age group, supposedly the group most vulnerable to AIDS. The first AIDS case was detected in 1986 and from that time onwards every state has reported the presence of HIV positive cases with the highest concentration in Western, Southern and Northeastern states of India such as Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Manipur and Nagaland. All these states can be defined as Border States and so the Indian state designates AIDS as a border disease or a disease from outside. By the middle of 2005 the Indian National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) estimated that 5.21 million Indians were living with HIV. Of these 39 per cent were reported to be women.  A report of the US Census Bureau states that in the recent years HIV positive cases are alarmingly on the rise among sex workers, truck drivers and IV drug users. Further, not only among female sex workers, but HIV infection is also on the increase among the entire female population of India. What results from the acknowledgement of this increase is a veritable witch-hunt and for the HIV/AIDS infected women; more often than not, female migrants are blamed.  The spread of HIV is considered as a result of porous borders and the carriers are considered as women who cross those borders. If one goes through newspaper reportage of the phenomena one can find clear evidence of such an attitude. A report of North East Reporter clarifies the issue by stating:
Assam may soon turn out to be AIDS capital of the Northeast, if immediate steps are not taken to check the growing menace of flesh trade, especially by commercial sex workers who have migrated from Bangladesh.
These immigrant sex workers have posed a serious threat to the health scenario of Assam, causing an alarming rise in the number of HIV positive cases.
A survey conducted by the state AIDS control society indicates that there is an alarming rise in the number of HIV positive cases.  Assam has a total of 334 registered patients out of which 90 are full blown AIDS cases.
Official sources said that 70 per cent of the victims had sexual contacts with prostitutes from the migrant population.
Sexual transmission is the main cause in more than three-fourths of the cases. 71.08 per cent of the patients are reported to have contacted HIV through sexual contacts, out of which 70 per cent of the individuals had regular sex with these immigrant prostitutes. (North East Reporter, 25 February 2004)
This report addressed the two most important issues inherent in the popular threat perceptions related to AIDS, women and borders. These issues are: (a) threat of uncontrolled sexuality of women and (b) women with different sexual mores crossing porous borders leading to a threat to male health and control over the nation. The corrupting influence is then quite easily designated as a foreign influence and women’s bodies are considered as the contaminated vehicles of bringing the threat home. AIDS has therefore become an issue of the control over women’s sexuality and it has thrown up new questions of justice in India.
That the state is a participant in this discourse becomes clear when HIV is made to look like a societal threat that comes largely from sex workers. There is also an effort to portray that the threat is perpetuated by the presence of foreign women in the brothels. The witch-hunt is then brought to the brothels where some of the least empowered women survive. Such a move makes it is easy to mark these women as criminals. After all there is almost no one to protest against such treatment of women. They are blamed for not being able to protect their clients, but when they insist on protection they lose the same clients and the state does not reveal any commitment to support them. Moreover, these women are also forcefully tested and thrown out of these brothels when they are diagnosed as HIV positive. The women are treated as soiled goods and dispensed with. Such acts are easily explained when one consider how these women are marked as criminals in the established discourse. Yet the trafficking of child virgins from foreign land continues because in the flesh market one can still find clients who believe that virgins are able to cure men with AIDS.
The politics of AIDS in India has taken this trajectory because AIDS continues to be designated as a disease from the borders and knowledge about this disease remains as marginal. No state wants to accept responsibility for AIDS and so the price for this is extracted from those who are in the margins of citizenship such as women sex workers, widows, sexual minorities and immigrant labour.  In a patriarchal society, where women have little control over their sexuality, women are blamed for sexual choices that they might not have made. Thus, women’s vulnerability leads to their victimization.  A discourse on social justice needs to address this issue that questions women’s position in society and their ability to negotiate sexual choices. The politics on AIDS throws up many new questions. A few among these are:
1.      In what way do women’s vulnerabilities increase the threat of their victimization in the politics of AIDS?
2.      Are all sections of women affected equally by this process of victimization?
3.      How does this affect the question of social justice?
4.      Is a discourse on social justice possible without a debate on women’s ability to make sexual choices?

Bionote

Paula Banerjee is the treasurer of the CRG. She is an expert on Indo-American relations and studied in Cincinnati, Ohio. As part of her current work on borders and women, she has authored numerous papers on women in conflict situations in northeast India.  She is a full time faculty member in the Department of South and South East Asian Studies, University of Calcutta. Some of her recent publications include: Internal Displacement in South Asia (Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2005), co-editors Sabyasachi Basu Raychoudhury and Samir Das; When Ambitions Clash: Indo-US Relations 1947-1974 (South Asian Publishers, New Delhi, 2003); Girls in the Twilight Zone: South and Southeast Asian Scenario (University of Calcutta, Kolkata, 2003). Co-editor Lipi Ghosh.

Saptarshi Mandal          Dalit Life Narratives as Ethnographies of Justice   Full Paper

‘Situations of marginality produce ideas of justice.’ While thinking about the notion of ‘justice’ in the context of the Dalits, this statement in the preparatory note for the conference kept flashing in my mind. This eventually led me to look at autobiographies written by the Dalits in recent times, as sites for articulation of ideas and concerns regarding justice. Situations of marginality, which constitutes a major ingredient of the Dalit lived reality, finds a frank and poignant expression in the autobiographical narratives. Additionally, writing autobiography for the Dalit is also a means of assertion against their marginality, disempowerment and oppression. For the proposed paper, I shall consider three autobiographies namely, Akkarmashi by Sharan Kumar Limbale, Uchalya by Laxman Gaikwad and Karukku by Bama. I am interested in exploring these autobiographies for the ideas of agency, autonomy, honour, entitlement, oppression and violence entailed therein. Also, the third text, which is written by a woman, shall enable me to look at each of these notions from a gendered standpoint. Through this exercise, I wish to make an intervention in a wider discussion about Dalit justice and the postcolonial Indian State. On the basis of my conclusions, I wish to suggest that for the Dalits the question of justice goes much beyond the narrow limits of distributional aspects (reservation/ compensatory discrimination) and touches upon the so-called ‘non-cognitive’ aspects of life like violence, powerlessness, fear, cultural identity etc. 

Bionote

I am a student of law at the National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata. My primary interest is in understanding the relationship between law and inequality. I seek to do this by bringing together perspectives from Dalit studies, Queer studies, Disability studies and the way law interacts with each of these. At present I am working on the possibility of a Dalit jurisprudence which entails scanning the Indian socio-legal landscape for ideas that could serve as springboards for the articulation of such a perspective and theory.