The paper begins with a brief commentary on the criminalization of emasculation with the codification of the penal code in 1860. Juxtaposing these discourses on crime and punishment, I point to the curious lack of engagement with castration as a punishment with emasculation as a crime in protest discourse. In this paper, I juxtapose the demand for castration as a law reform measure with the parallel legal discourse on “emasculation” as the crime of grievous hurt. This discourse on castration as punishment did not intersect with how section 320 (1) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) defines the crime of “emasculation” as grievous hurt. 3 It erased how sexualized violence is used to communicate a message to all women and some men-coded in the expression “teaching a lesson” (Baxi 2014). 2įeminists opposed both the death penalty and castration, for the demand for the death penalty and castration essentialized the penis as a primordial weapon, negating the material and symbolic realities of sexual violence. Although the demand for castration was not accepted when the law was reformed in 2013, these protest images continued to circulate in years to come. The demand for castration as a punishment was made in addition to death penalty in aggravated rape cases. The camera acted as a phallocentric substitute that amplified the now broken promise between the male-defined state and its male subjects as the demand on the state to avenge male subjects unable to protect their women (P.

The cry for death penalty or castration became a dominant vocabulary of protest framed shrilly by 24/7 news channels. Rape was psychologized to states of mind (Agnes 2015 Roychowdhury 2013). The collective mourning and outrage that followed the Delhi gang rape was unprecedented. 1 These protests addressed multiple publics simultaneously (retributive, reformative, and pornographic) and made visible different kinds of male bodies (rapacious, castrating, raped, castrated). The protests against sexual violence in 2012–2013 that led to comprehensive law reform in India met with global publicity (Durham 2015 Dutta and Sircar 2013).

Hot castrated men