Kiran Grewal

Rape in Conflict, Rape in Peace: Questioning the Revolutionary Potential of International Criminal Justice for Women’s Human Rights

The advantages and the changes that have been brought about the international criminal justice in the human rights and status of women in the society are critically analyzed. The various issues that are related to the method of prosecution currently specified by the international criminal law are also discussed.

RECLAIMING THE VOICE OF THE ‘THIRD WORLD WOMAN’

While conservative Somali writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali has become a widely recognized and acclaimed figure in the West, she has generally been ignored or derided by postcolonial feminists. This has largely been due to her extremely provocative and often offensive statements regarding Islam and Muslim immigrants in the West. While Hirsi Ali is clearly problematic, in this essay I argue that engagement with her is both necessary and useful. On the one hand, an examination of Hirsi Alis success shows the implication of a particular discourse that postcolonial feminists have unwittingly endorsed: namely an essentialized and overly celebratory positioning of the authentic ‘Third World womans voice’. On the other hand, I argue that critical engagement with Hirsi Ali also opens up interesting sites of rejuvenation for postcolonial feminism and a means of developing a more nuanced and truly decolonized anti-racist, feminist politics.

Racialised Gang Rape and the Reinforcement of Dominant Order : Discourses of Gender, Race and Nation

This path-breaking book provides a comparative analysis of public discourses in France and Australia on a series of highly mediatised racialised gang rapes that occurred during the early to mid-2000s. These rapes led to intense public debate in both countries regarding an apparent ‘gang rape phenomenon’ associated with young men of Muslim background. By comparing the responses to similar instances of sexual violence in two very different Western liberal democracies, this book explores the relationship between constructions of national, gender and ethnic identity in modern, developed nations of the West. The impact of immigration and cultural diversity on communities has become an issue of central concern to Western liberal democracies in recent years. With greater movements of people than ever before, and large temporary migrant populations who have not ‘gone home’, the discourse of a ‘crisis of national identity’ is a feature of many democracies in the West. At the same time, in a supposedly ‘post-feminist’ age, the focus of debates around women’s rights in these democracies has increasingly been the extent to which the cultural values of immigrant and ethnic minority populations are compatible with the espoused gender equality of the West. Through an analysis of these rapes, Kiran Kaur Grewal identifies certain commonalities as well as interesting points of divergence within the two nations’ public discourses. In doing so she identifies the limitations of current debates and proposes alternative ways of understanding the tensions at play when trying to respond to acts of extreme sexism and violence committed by members of ethnic minority communities.

Can the Subaltern Speak within International Law? Women’s Rights Activism, International Legal Institutions and the Power of ‘Strategic Misunderstanding’

Since the 1990s, there has been a well-documented proliferation of international legal institutions as well as Rule-of-Law projects established in a variety of post-conflict settings. Advocates of this development argue that aside from assisting to build economically and politically stable and secure regimes, these interventions hold an emancipatory potential for marginalized populations across the globe. Meanwhile, critics point to the elitism and inefficacy of international institutions and law. They highlight the potential for these interventions to reproduce processes of cultural, political and economic domination.