Punishment or Liberation? Rethinking Feminism’s Paradox in the Aparajita Bill

The Aparajita (Woman and Child) Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2024 (Aparajita Bill) is West Bengal’s aggressive response to the brutal rape and murder of a female trainee doctor at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. The incident triggered a mounting public response and political attention demanding accountability from the State that eventually culminated in the passing of the Bill. The Bill, grounded in retributive justice, is the state government’s inadequate attempt to address sexual atrocities through heightened punitive solutions.

More often than not, these punitive solutions manifest a structural narrative of sexual violence, that produces law’s properly injured subjects. Here, the victims of sexual violence become the subjects of analysis rather than the violence itself. As is apparent from the RG Kar rape case discourse, progressivist teleology of a helpless young doctor whose aspirations are thwarted is particularly well suited to mobilise an account of female subordination and victimisation with an imminent need for protection. Although the Aparajita Bill has been widely criticised as an ‘anti-feminist’, far-right, legally populist measure, in this piece I argue that the purported ‘anti-feminist’ Bill is a product of feminism after all. I attempt to do this by locating Janet Halley’s critique of ‘governance feminism’ within the contours of the RG Kar rape case discourse and the consequent enactment of the Aparajita Bill.

In her piece Take a Break from Feminism, Halley focuses on a particular strand of feminism: Governance feminism. Governance feminism materialises what Halley calls the ‘paranoid structuralism’ of feminism. Feminism has always been presented as an innocuous body of knowledge striving to achieve equality for women in a society perpetually dominated by men. In its attempt to do so, feminism responds to a totalising system, i.e. patriarchy, with a focus on the structural relationship between men and women (where men dominate women), and with an ultimate aim to undo this structural relationship. At this juncture, feminism enters a paranoid zone where the force of structuralist thinking operates so powerfully, that there seems no escape from it. Any deviation from the script of subordination is an abnormality displaced away from feminism. As a result, feminism starts mimicking the same exclusionary structure that it opposes.

The RG Kar protests, and the enactment of the Aparajita Bill is a manifestation of precisely this paranoid structuralism, where feminism enters the province of regulation and governance. It is not just confined to a movement, but seeps into the very structure of a regulatory State with the goal to enact ‘feminist’ regulations and laws. It is this feminism that Halley is wary of.

The ubiquity of the subordination script in every protectionist law as well as the Aparajita Bill is not just a manifestation of a far-right, paternalistic state. It is rather a representation of governance feminism’s paranoid structuralism, which saturates the regulatory frameworks of the state. This insistence on the subordination script perpetuates a vision of women as irreparably injured by sexual violence, framing their recovery as an impossibility and their agency as secondary to their victimhood. Rape here is seen as the paradigmatic injury within male-female relations, that is central to a victim’s experience. This narrative not only limits a survivor’s potential for healing but also positions rape as an act of unparalleled power—a power that emboldens perpetrators and reiterates the structures of dominance which feminism seeks to dismantle.

Moreover, a focus on the victim’s identity rather than the crime itself aligns with Halley’s critique of the script of feminism that fetishises the ‘ideal victim’ narrative. Here, the victim was a helpless, hardworking, young doctor who in her vulnerability fulfils the archetype of the ‘perfect victim’. Any deviation from this script of the ‘perfect victim’, i.e., someone who does not conform to the ideal archetype constructed by feminism, risks sequestering of such deviant victims from the protection of feminism. Thus, a victim who engages in frequent sex, prostitution, or adultery might be outside the protectionist circle of feminism. While this may not be true for all strands of feminism, this is the general brief that governance feminism through the language of law carries.

A product and an even more insidious consequence of governance feminism is what Elizabeth Bernstein refers to as carceral feminism: the feminism that allies itself with a criminalising state that purports to address systemic and social problems through punishment. Bernstein posits how feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas. The West Bengal government’s move in enacting the Aparajita Bill is demonstrative of this ubiquitous carceral logic underlying every feminist state reform coupled with the ‘paranoid structuralism’.

The Bill among other things, proposes the death penalty for rape cases where the victim dies or is left severely injured. While this has been severely criticised by certain groups of feminists, there has been no attempt at destroying the edifice of such protectionist Bills that lies in carceral feminism. The obsession with the subordination narrative intertwined with the politics of power has produced a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organised around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Here, ironically, the outcome of feminism conflates with an explicitly hard-right, putatively anti-feminist approach that is sustained by a reliance on punitive state power.

In this way, governance feminism’s paranoid structuralism paradoxically undermines its own emancipatory goals. By institutionalising the narrative of female subordination, it mirrors the paternalism it opposes, reducing feminist progress to a cycle of governance that reiterates victimhood over empowerment. The Aparajita Bill, then, is not an anomaly of far-right populism but a logical outcome of governance feminism’s infiltration into the state’s regulatory apparatus.

The Aparajita Bill may be labelled as an ‘anti-feminist’ solution, but its feminist foundations cannot be ignored. This post was an attempt to destabilise the binary of what is feminist and what is anti-feminist. Protectionist laws like the Aparajita Bill nestle at a peculiar position within this binary, converging feminist paranoia with far-right impulses. This results in a dangerous conflation of justice and control, where the desire for justice can be co-opted into reinforcing patriarchal systems of authority.

This piece does not attempt to reduce the panoramic movement of feminism into a single narrative of structuralism. Undeniably, feminism exists in a multitude of forms. Post-colonial feminism, queer theory, and sex-positive feminism, among others, have all critiqued this model of governance feminism, offering alternative frameworks that emphasise intersectionality, agency, and liberation. Yet, despite this self-critique, governance feminism remains a potent force, particularly in its alignment with state power and its tendency to centre punitive solutions.