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The chapter is a reflection on the “unsafe” and “painstaking work” of observing rape trials. The author, Pratiksha Baxi, a leading sociologist of gender, learned Indian law and medical jurisprudence on her own during her fieldwork, through conversations with lawyers, observing trials, and reading books. However, her outsider status as a non-lawyer and as a woman led various people in the courtrooms where she conducted fieldwork to “scold” her for studying rape trials. The out-of-place feeling from fieldwork followed her long afterward, like a trauma. Though her fieldwork took place two decades earlier, the “anger and grief” never went away. However, she concludes, that, “If law’s attachment to cruelty continues to mark the self, then the ability to love and be in solidarity is the necessary condition for living with the field.”
Pratiksha Baxi chapter’s focuses on what has been popularly characterized as the “two-finger test” (clinically known as bimanual examination) in Indian rape cases. During her fieldwork in the rural District and Sessions Court in Ahmedabad, Gujarat (1996-1998), Baxi found that references to bimanual examination as a means of designating whether the rape survivor was “habituated to sexual intercourse” or “used to sex” were commonplace. The category of the habituated woman is deployed to transform a rape testimony into a statement of consensual sex. Baxi characterizes this movement as the medicalization of consent, mediated by the canonical space inhabited by medical jurisprudence textbooks, which bear the signature of scientific authority. Baxi argues that all raped victims—irrespective of age—are subjected to an invasive mimicry of the act of sexual violence via the technique of the two-finger test. This is the cost that is exacted from the raped survivor for testifying against rape.
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