A battleground of scars: Acid violence against women and girls in Indian news media

This dissertation examines the representations of masculine and feminine honor tropes as they appear within reports of acid attack cases in mainstream Indian newspapers. While examining modern-day news reports on acid attacks, the study simultaneously interprets the influence of Hindu Brahmanical patriarchy through ancient scriptural analysis to decipher the types of violent patterns that are revealed in acid attack reports. Through the process of analyzing socio-cultural, caste and honor-based dictums of hierarchies molded together through ancient Brahmanical scriptural history and combining it with the analysis of modern-day capitalist socio-cultural shifts emerging in India, the study reveals the intricately knotted ascendancy of suppressive gender and honor codes and ideologies that continue to govern and dictate the lives of Indians today. This analysis is done so through the study of explicit and implicit masculine and honor tropes that exist in the news media and discloses how violence can be promoted and justified through journalism.