The Pluriverse of Human Rights: The Diversity of Struggles for Dignity (Epistemologies of the South) by Boaventura de Sousa Santos & Bruno Sena Martins

Author:Boaventura de Sousa Santos & Bruno Sena Martins [Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Bruno Sena Martins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2021-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Identification and Misrecognition

The Delhi protests in 2012–2013 addressed different kinds of publics—retributive, reformative and pornographic. Equally it made visible different kinds of male bodies—rapacious, castrating, raped and castrated. For the first time, many progressive male friends talked about how hurt they were by what had happened. They marched against sexual violence, wrote about affect and biography, and spoke publically about what it meant to be a man. Now, the Delhi gang rape hurt many progressive men friends, teachers and colleagues. Yet, the same men did not walk with us then in our protests against sexual violence. The complicated story of identification and misrecognition that followed offers many provocations.

It was argued that an identification was forged with the victim and her friend, Awindra Pandey—and there seemed shock that such exceptional violence could follow a perfectly routine affair of going to see a film and using public transport in the evening. There was an articulation of a collective sense of shock regarding that brutal gang rape; mutilation of body parts and intolerable sexual humiliation in public spaces was no longer confined to zones of emergency inscribed on bodies of Dalit, tribal, religious or sexual minorities. Dutta and Sircar wondered:

whether this sense of collective mourning and outrage would have emerged had she been tortured and killed by other means and not penetrated by the penis; that is, if the incident was just as brutal but the violence not sexual in nature. The outrage signals the continuing primacy that is placed on sexual violence generally, and on penile-vaginal penetration in particular, as the ultimate form of violation.

(Dutta and Sircar, 2013: 300)

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