Colonial reform discourse re-encoded Indian women’s practices as criminal categories.

Evidence

Amrita Srinivasan advances an affirmative answer to this question. She offers a challenge to the critical imagination when she “anthropologizes” colonial reform and asks us to consider the ways in which it rewrote its object: “If sacrificial infanticide and sati had been banned earlier as ‘murder,’ then by the late nineteenth century temple dancers were being presented as ‘prostitutes,’ and early marriage for women as ‘rape’ and ‘childmolestation’” (“Reform,” 178-79). — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2029

Categorization

• QUESTION: Feeds the genealogy question: how do diagnostic/legal labels function as anti-essentialist or essentializing moves by the state, parallel to Spivak’s worries about institutional codification of subaltern identity?
• XREF: connects to: Reading Muslim women’s plight as cultural corruption has colonial roots — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 209; Reform discourse recast women’s domestic power as backwardness to be disciplined by the state — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 365; Winning over women gave colonial power over men and destructured culture — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 135 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial courts prosecuted customary practices like compensation payments as crimes. #exemplifies (0.95)
• Reform discourse recast women’s domestic power as backwardness to be disciplined by the state #corroborates (0.85) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 365
• Reading Muslim women’s plight as cultural corruption has colonial roots #expands (0.78) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 209
• Colonial feminism used saving Muslim women to justify imperialism #complicates (0.74)
• Winning over women gave colonial power over men and destructured culture #corroborates (0.72) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 135
• Female Muslim monsters arose in the colonial era from sexualized body imagery #expands (0.72)