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3 - The Sex/Age System

Boy-Grooms, Young Rapists, and Child Protection in Hindu Liberalism

from Part II - Queering Age Stratification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2020

Ishita Pande
Affiliation:
Queen's University, Ontario
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Summary

Building on the scholarship that traces how changing age of consent laws did not so much protect girls as define the boundaries and norms of girlhood, this chapter shifts the focus to the boy child – a figure who was often evoked during discussions of child marriage and the age of consent in India. This chapter uses the boy child as a heuristic device to study a cluster of Hindu patriarchal anxieties that congealed in a discourse of boy protection and compares Har Bilas Sarda’s Hindu Child Marriage Bill with other bills concerned with the ages of marriage and consent. It showcases how adjustments to the ages of consent and marriage also affected the boundaries of boyhood. This chapter shows how patriarchal considerations were articulated along the axes of age as well as sex and gender; it traces the Hindu patriarchal considerations that underwrote the Child Marriage Restraint Act; and finally, it analyzes the seemingly peculiar logic of “boy protection” as discussed by Hindu reformers to reflect on peculiarities of the liberal sex/age system that have become invisible to us.

Type
Chapter
Information
Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age
Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937
, pp. 123 - 165
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • The Sex/Age System
  • Ishita Pande, Queen's University, Ontario
  • Book: Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age
  • Online publication: 13 July 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779326.004
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  • The Sex/Age System
  • Ishita Pande, Queen's University, Ontario
  • Book: Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age
  • Online publication: 13 July 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779326.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Sex/Age System
  • Ishita Pande, Queen's University, Ontario
  • Book: Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age
  • Online publication: 13 July 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779326.004
Available formats
×