Call for chapters – Our Bodies Our Terrain: A decolonial queer feminist approach towards understanding the social and legal politics of rape in Africa and Asia

Editors: Soma Chaudhuri and Dr Portia Loeto

Deadline: 1 June  2025

How to submit

Background

According to the latest UNICEF estimates, globally 370 million women and girls have faced sexual violence at some point in their lives. In sub-Saharan Africa over 1 in 5 or 79 million women and girls have faced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18, making it a region with the highest number of victims (UNICEF 2024). Elsewhere in Africa, including in regions and countries not at war, the numbers are dismal. For example, in South Africa, a country not at war, the rate of sexual violence is among the highest recorded in the world (66,196 incidents per 100,000 people). In Botswana 1,865 incidents of rape are reported per 100,000 people. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation engaged in decades of civil war, has been described by the UN as the “…rape capital of the world” (BBC News - UN official calls DR Congo 'rape capital of the world'). Elsewhere in Asia, the reports are equally staggering. In Japan, 1289 incidents of rape are reported per 100,000 people, while statistics of rape in South Korea and China are fuzzy, pointing to significant under reporting in these regions. In India while there are harsh anti-rape criminal laws following the public outcry against the Delhi-Nirbhaya rape case in 2013, rape continues at home, in the streets and in places of work: the most recent being the rape of a doctor on duty at a medical college in Kolkata. In Bangladesh, activists reported 975 recorded rape cases in the first nine months of 2020, a nation where anti-rape protests are prominent and death penalty against rapists are acceptable punishments.

According to one of the largest studies commissioned by the UN on the perpetration of rape, a quarter of the men participants in the study (N=10000) reported raping or having intercourse with a woman who was not in a position to give consent. Many of those surveyed reported committing the rape as teenagers (Jewkes et al. 2013). In this 6-country survey that covered Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka, that covered countries in Asia Pacific region, researchers found that perpetrators described a sense of sexual entitlement over women’s bodies irrespective of consent, as the major reasoning behind rape. Contextualized within this sense of sexual entitlement are conservative ideals regarding gendered roles in society, where masculinity and manhood were seen as “values.” Sexual domination, violence and toughness were ideals that are embedded within these visions of masculinity (Jewkes et al. 2013). For many researchers and activists it is the “rape culture” that drives the politics of rape in many countries in South Asia. Here despite a pro-active #MeToo movement that drove women lawyers to push for quick and secure institutional support for rape survivors and strong anti-rape laws that invoke the death penalty, the rape of Dalit and Adivasi women by upper caste men and police, army rape in conflict zones, “corrective rape” aka rape of LGBTQ+ individuals, and rape in the name of family and community honor continues. In Pakistan, like other Asian countries, the culture of shaming and victim blaming, discourages women from talking and reporting rape and sexual assault. Participants in the annual “Aurat Mach” or Women’s March against the culture of patriarchy and sexual violence, report being attacked by men’s groups and their allies as shameless, vulgar and obscene, qualities that do not represent “real Pakistani women.” (Kelso 2024). 

Thus, patterns that are contradictory, are emerging in the two continents: patterns that points to high numbers of rape, increased activism against rape, inconsistency in enforcing of rape laws, low reporting aided by a culture that punishes and blames victims and survivors, where sexual assault and rape, embedded in the hegemonic patriarchal culture are seen as entitlements to enforce masculine domination formales embed in the hegemonic patriarchal culture.

Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls is identified as one of UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (#5), where “end violence against women and girls” is a core focus. The UN describes this goal to be “not on track” by 2030 on its website. 

In this edited volume, we take an exclusive focus on rape, an act of sexual violence against an individual without their consent, to understand how this disturbing trend of sexual violence can be critically understood using a decolonial queer feminist lens. The goal of this edited volume is to bring researchers, activists, and center survivor voices in the forefront of the discourse around rape as a violation of global human rights, to move towards stronger legislation and structures of reporting, and provide informed ways to deliver equitable justice for victims and survivors. We invite chapters that looks at how changes in rape legislation in the global south was influenced by history, events and protests throughout the decades, and the challenges that still exists and what we need to do to move action forward. We invite contributions from scholars across disciplines who focus on cases in African and Asian context towards critically examining the changes in legislation, strategies that push legislations, historical events, and what leads to legislation failures. 

Chapter contributions may focus on one or more of the following topics:

1. The changes in understanding of rape: whose bodies can (or cannot) be raped; conceptual clarity on what is rape; decolonial queer feminist approach towards whose rape matters and whose doesn’t.
2. Feminist critique of colonial rape laws and how that influenced the laws of today in the global south.
3. Focus on corrective rape or homophobic rape using a queer feminist lens.
4. LGTBQ+ rape, hate crime, homophobia and legislations (or lack of).
5. War, ethnic conflict, religious and caste-based politics and rape of women, trans individuals and children.
6. Protests, strategies of organizing and push towards strong rape laws.
7. From blaming victims to embracing survivors’ resilience: Daring to speak up.
8. What’s in a name: Renaming rape victims and erasure of identity (example: Nirbhaya 2013; Tilottama 2024). Taking a critical feminist perspective.
9. When does the push towards strong laws and legislation fail?
10. Challenges to reporting and delivering justice: a critique of the patriarchal state and its institutions.
11. When does strong anti-rape laws fail?
12. How can rape culture and politics of sexual entitlement be combatted?
     

About the Editors

Soma Chaudhuri is Associate Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University whose research lies at the intersection of gender, development, social movements and violence. She is the author of Tempest in a Teapot: Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India (Lexington, 2013), a book that looks at incidents of witch hunts in an Adivasi labor community in India. With Jane Ward, Chaudhuri is the co-editor of The Witch Studies Reader (Duke University Press, 2025), a global volume that brings together 42 authors from all parts of the world. Chaudhuri’s research has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Mobilization; Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change; Sociology of Development; Contexts; and Sociological Forum among others. Her research has been funded by several external grants including the National Science Foundation and Social Science Research Council. At Michigan State University in addition to her academic appointment in the Department of Sociology, Chaudhuri is the Co-Director of Center for Gender in Global Context, the university’s hub for research, teaching and outreach for gender and sexuality, where she directs the Global Research, Outreach and Engagement portfolio. 

Dr Portia Loeto is a Gender Studies Lecturer, Consultant, and Researcher at The University of Botswana. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Gender and Cultural Studies from The University of Sydney, Australia among other qualifications. Her professional and research experiences straddle the broad areas of Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, as well as Teacher Education Studies. As an academic, Loeto’s teaching philosophy is centered on building and mentoring well-rounded teachers/professionals who will champion feminist, intersectional, inclusive, and anti-oppressive education in schools and various work environments. In the year 2025-26, Loeto has been awarded a residential fellowship through the African Futures Research Leadership Program, under the African Alliance for Partnership center at Michigan State University, where she will be giving public lectures and collaborating with interdisciplinary scholar across campus on topics of interest like race, colorism, rape and femicide in Botswana.