Spatial terror: Towards a feminist theory of gendered space in postcolonial India

This Interchanges piece proposes the concept of spatial terror as a contribution to feminist theory's engagement with gendered violence and space. Spatial terror names the systematic, discursive production of uninhabitable public space for women through the normalisation of sexual violence as an ambient governing risk. Drawing on Foucauldian disciplinary theory, feminist geography and postcolonial feminist critique, the piece argues that spatial terror functions as a governing technology that operates not through the prohibition of women's spatial freedom but through its disciplinary internalisation. The concept challenges feminist geography's dominant framing of women's spatial constraint as constrained access, arguing instead for a more radical account of spatial foreclosure that demands transformation of the conditions of spatial production rather than amelioration within them. The postcolonial specificity of spatial terror in India is traced through the colonial and nationalist construction of gendered space, illuminating how the postcolonial state inherits and amplifies rather than dismantles the spatial governance of women's bodies.