Women, Violence, Sovereignty: “Rakshasa” Marriage by Capture in Modern Indian Political Thought

Nineteenth-century colonial jurists, sociologists, and Indian nationalists revived the ancient Indian legal concept of rakshasa marriage by bride capture after vanquishing her kinsmen, which the Hindu “lawgiver” Manu condemned but permitted to the warrior caste alone. Only the Kshatriyas, India's designated sovereigns, could break patriarchal and brahmanical authority in this way. But rakshasa marriage was also identified with the demon Ravana, who abducted Sita in the epic Ramayana, and with Hindu nationalism's Muslim enemy. Preoccupied with the loss of kshatriyahood, Hindu nationalism uniquely premised sovereignty on the power to dispossess enemy Fathers of their women: from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's celebration of epic hero Arjuna and Krishna's own rakshasa marriages, to the appropriation of this supposedly Muslim method by the architect of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1967). Transcending the “sexual contract” in the Indian case, rakshasa marriage's association of bride capture and miscegenation with sovereignty sheds new light on gendered Partition violence, beyond brahmanical notions of (defiled) purity and honor.

Social Contract as Domination

Social contract theory aimed to provide the philosophical vindication of a democratic, just, and liberal society that utilitarianism had aspired to. However, one important strand of normative criticism is that, in effect, contract theory underwrites domination rather than emancipation, in respect of race and gender. A proper understanding of contract theory can admit that, in empirical terms, contracts can be partial rather than general, underwriting the domination of particular social groups. However, insofar as the argument relies upon a distinction between empirical and normative contracts, it relied upon assumptions that are auxiliary to the core of contract theory. The argument from the sexual contract is more radical, not least because it claims that the effect of contract theory is to distort a truthful understanding of human relations. However, it has to assume that the contract theorist is committed to libertarianism and it neglects the extent to which domination has to be sustained by force rather than the free assent that contract theory requires.

Feminists II

This chapter continues the evaluation of ideas about property amongst feminists. Feminists have always been concerned with questions of the (female) body and who owns it. I begin by outlining two sharply contrasting views of this relationship. Cecile Fabre argues that, once sufficiency has been secured for all, women should be free to use (and sell) their bodies as they see fit. By contrast, Carole Pateman argues that seeing women’s relationship to their own bodies in contractual terms will always disadvantage them over against men who have already set the terms of exchange in their prior agreement (amongst themselves) of a Sexual Contract (of access to women’s bodies). I follow through the consequences of these opposing view in three key policy areas much discussed in recent feminist work: prostitution, pornography, and surrogacy. I focus on the work of Donna Dickenson and Anne Phillips. Finally, I turn to the radical utopian alternative posed in Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now.

Rethinking the sexual contract: The case of Thomas Hobbes

Feminist scholars have long debated on a key contradiction in the political theory of Thomas Hobbes: While he sees women as free and equal to men in the state of nature, he postulates their subjection to male rule in the civil state without any apparent explanation. Focusing on Hobbes’s construction of the mother–child relationship, this article suggests that the subjugation of the mother to the father epitomizes the neutralization of the ancient principle of ‘governance’, which he replaces with a novel concept of ‘power’ as formally authorized command. This scrutiny leads to three main conclusions: (1) a radicalization of Pateman’s concept of ‘sexual contract'; (2) the acknowledgement that patriarchy is inseparable from the logic of political authority constructed by Hobbes; and (3) the claim that criticism of patriarchal rule requires an overall problematization of the mainstream conception of political participation we have inherited from modern political science.