Reorienting the South Asian Female Body: The Practice of Virginity Testing and the Treatment of Migrant Women

Abstract

Through a February 1979 report in The Guardian, it became public knowledge that a number of women had been given gynaecolog-ical examinations by immigration control staff in the UK and at British High Commissions in South Asia, in a practice colloquially known as virginity testing. This chapter examines the culture of racism and sexism within the British immigration control system that allowed these 'virginity tests' to occur, and why South Asian women attempting to enter the country on temporary fiancée visas were subjected to these tests from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. This abusive practice must be seen in the context of the overall highly discriminatory treatment of migrant women coming from the Indian subcontinent evident from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. It is our argument that the practice of virginity testing reflected deep-seated racist and sexist assumptions held by the British authorities , which replicated the attitudes that had been established in the colonial era. Pratibha Parmar argued in 1982 that the racist and sexist assumptions behind virginity testing were based on the 'stereo-type of the submissive, meek and tradition-bound Asian woman'. 1 We propose that this stereotype was an ideological hangover from the Victorian era and that commonly held beliefs about South Asian women and sexuality were influenced by the attitudes of the British authorities formed in colonial India. Philippa Levine, who has 75 E. Smith et al., Race, Gender and the Body in British Immigration Control