Economic Marginalization and Female Crime in India: An Intersectional Analysis of Gender, Economy, and Crime

Abstract: This paper analyses the crossroads of gender, crime, and economic culture in an intersectional reading of Indian women's true crime stories. Stepping away from the individual pathology approach that has characterized criminology, it brings to the fore how systemic disparities patriarchy, caste, class, and economic marginalization condition both women's journeys into crime and the world's understanding of female offending (Smart, 1976; Chesney-Lind, 1989). Through close engagement with Indian true crime documentary films like Indian Predator, and Kulpreet Yadav and Sushant Singh's Queens of Crime (2020), this research points to the ways in which representations of women offenders both reinforce and challenge prevailing cultural definitions of law, justice, and gendered deviance. Referring to feminist legal theory, postcolonial critiques, and intersectional analyses (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Spivak, 1988), the analysis highlights the way that literature and media record crime and also serve as cultural spaces where law's authority and gender's fragility are in dispute. The research illustrates that economic complexity and gender inequality are intrinsically intertwined (Hartmann et al., 2017; Ben Saâd et al., 2019), debating how Indian true crime storytelling provides vital analyses on the negotiation of silence, stigma, and agency, locating women's crime within socio-economic and cultural contexts. Keywords: Gender, Crime Narratives, Intersectionality, Economic Marginalization, Indian True Crime, Queens of Crime