Sexual Violence, Extra-Legal Justice, and the Vigilante Woman in Contemporary Hindi Cinema

This thesis reads the figure of the vigilante woman in Hindi cinema as affectively resonant assemblages that convey a sense of the ongoing present and participate in the conversation about sexual violence in contemporary India. It studies how the vigilante’s figuration of sexual violence as a pervasive threat interacts with anxieties borne out of such peculiar responses to neoliberalism in India as ascriptive values of caste-Hindu merit, aspirational ideals of mobility, revised ideas of youth and femininity, the abstraction of sexuality as part of a private personhood, and unequal claims to safe public space.