Scene of the crime: News discourse of rape in India and the geopolitics of sexual assault

Abstract

The brutal gang rape and murder of a young woman on a New Delhi bus became a media spectacle, flooding the news stream worldwide with articles, commentaries, blogs, and images. Drawing on theoretical insights from transnational feminism and social geography, this analysis focuses on the mediated deployment of space and place as potent signifiers of gender and sexuality in news coverage of the event. Using feminist critical discourse analysis to interrogate the verbal and visual texts in mainstream US news media during the first two weeks of coverage, this analysis found that the American news media invoked archetypes of the Third World as a primitive and undisciplined place populated by savage males and subordinate women, a space in which women's mobility is constrained and where state authority is complicit in rendering women vulnerable to sexual assault due to its incompetence. The study found that through this limited and ethnocentric lens, the US news media reinscribed social geographies of power in terms of sex and gender. The overall tenor of the coverage obscured the incidence of sexual violence in the First World/global North, effectively countermanding transnational feminist praxis and collective action against the worldwide problem of sexual violence against women.