Megha Devraj is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California. She has interests in philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of mind. Her dissertation is on spectacles: communicative acts that involve intentionally using the social significance of objects and spaces to a striking effect. Click here to visit her website.
A post by Megha Devraj
Content warning: mentions of sexual assault, descriptions of violence, mention of a gendered slur.
In 2004, in the Northeast Indian border state of Manipur, a group of middle-aged women collected to express their outrage at a gruesome incident of murder and sexual assault by members of an Indian paramilitary unit. They stripped all their clothing off their bodies and began to weep. A now famous photograph of the event shows them standing together in a row, completely nude, their bodies obscured by a large banner written in lettering designed to look like it was dripping blood: ‘Indian Army Rape Us’.
Image Credit AFP
What made these women choose to speak against sexual violence by putting their own naked bodies on public display? Why not use a more comfortable means to voice dissent? It seems that there was something about their spectacular display of vulnerability that was able to jolt its audience into experiencing the oppressive force of the violence that Manipuri women are subject to. The scene of the protest was a profoundly moving one. Many of those present, including police personnel, cried upon looking at the women’s lament. Sentries who had initially pointed guns at the women withdrew their weapons, presumably because they too felt sorrowful or ashamed. Baring themselves allowed the women to convey their feelings of being violated in a way that descriptive speech likely could not. Their protest asked the Indian public to reimagine violence against women not as a regrettable consequence of national security, but as a cause of irreconcilable grief and anger.
My work focusses on a communicative device with special connections to imagination and creativity: spectacle. I think of a spectacle roughly as a communicative act that involves intentionally using the social significance of objects and spaces to a striking effect. Spectacles are present in protests and performance art, in parades and pageants, in public displays of national or military glory, and even in some cases of interpersonal communication. Here, I discuss spectacles that evoke painful emotions and how women use them as a response to sexual violence.
In his book, The Epistemology of Protest (2023), Jose Medina argues that there are links between what a protest expresses and its creative power. The communicative act of protesting opens up new possibilities for identity, solidarity, and political action. I provide an account of how such transformation might work in my own published work on protest (Devraj, 2024), where I argue that spectacles are a key communicative device through which protests acquire their creative potential. Spectacles can lead audiences to creatively restructure their social world because they lift constraints on how we imagine our options for socio-political coordination. The soldiers who committed the sexual assault in Manipur were protected by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which grants the military wanton power over conflict-ridden border areas. The women’s protest demonstrated clearly that the collective Indian vision of national security was one willing to excuse acts of unthinkable brutality. Their display of sorrow and vulnerability enabled their audience to see new possibilities for action.
Zorana Ivcevic Pringle’s insightful discussion of the creative process on this blog can help to further illuminate the links between spectacular communication and social transformation. Pringle notes that being creative is not a matter of having ideas spring to mind spontaneously. Rather, it is an emotionally challenging process that involves “identifying problems, constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing them” (Pringle, 2024). When it comes to social creativity, we can think of spectacles as one way to make a first step in this progression. Spectacular protests bring to light entrenched patterns of social coordination, and they invite their interlocutors to participate in the collective endeavour of breaking down and reconstructing the world that they share with each other.
Painful spectacles are particularly powerful at unearthing and deconstructing deep-rooted injustices. Judith Butler astutely observes that re-enacting one’s pain in the face of violence can prompt onlookers to creatively transform the social significance of one’s injuries (1993, pp. 23–24). Butler’s point is specifically about the queer rights advocacy group ACT UP, who fought the US Government’s inaction against the AIDS crisis through its acts of public political theatre. The activists performed protests such as strewing the ashes of the dead on the lawns of the White House and laying down like corpses inside churches. Turning death into a striking, symbolic display in places central to American society allowed queer activists to give new meaning to their suffering. It paved the way for its audience to restructure their social and political institutions to give queer ways of life added legitimacy.
Turning pain into a spectacular display allows women, too, to communicate in a way that is loaded with imaginative power and emotional significance. Another example is performance artist Regina José Galindo’s 2005 piece titled Perra, in which she used a knife to etch the Spanish word for the slur ‘bitch’ onto her leg. Her performance echoed the violence against murdered Guatemalan women whose bodies were mutilated with the same inscription. Galindo’s act of reiterating the pain that the women suffered and getting her audience experience it on film – to look upon her wincing and shaking as she cut her thigh open – allowed her to reconfigure the emotional distance that her audience felt from the Guatemalan femicide.
Bodies are potent vehicles for communicating pain to an audience. When asked about the rationale behind her actions, Manipuri protestor Soibam Momon Leima responded, “they had their guns, we only had our bodies” (The Quint, 2016). Galindo’s explanation for her artistic choices was similar: “my body was the tool I had within reach” (Black, 2021). Bodies are often the most readily available object of social significance for women to leverage. The sight of bodies in pain is often a clear indicator of a moral failure, and women’s bodies have the added social complexity of being sexualised and objectified. Their rich social meaning makes them particularly useful vehicles for expression that is aimed at creatively reconfiguring women’s social and political roles.
Yet it also possible for us to create immensely painful spectacles through socially significant objects and spaces other than our bodies. One of the most noteworthy accomplishments at the 2024 Paris Olympics was by the wrestler Vinesh Phogat, who defeated Japan’s Yui Susaki in an extraordinary first-round upset and went on to become the first Indian woman ever to win a wrestling semi-final. A year and a half prior to the Olympics, Phogat and other wrestlers had protested for months to demand the resignation of Wrestling Foundation of India president Brij Bhushan Singh, whom they accused of sexual harassment and intimidation. Bhushan is a politician in the country’s ruling Bhartiya Janta Party. Faced with relentless apathy from their government, the wrestlers travelled to submerge their existing Olympic medals in the Ganges River, where Hindus typically immerse the ashes of the dead. “These medals are our lives, our souls. There would be no reason to live after immersing them into the Ganga today,” they explained (Chakraborty, 2023). Though they were eventually convinced not to drown their medals, the wrestlers were ready to recreate the pain of their mistreatment for the public eye. They wished to visibly mourn the death of their achievements in the eyes of the country – not through their bodies, but through the medals that they saw as their life’s purpose.
Recreating the agony of sexual violence for an audience can be an immensely powerful act, and the notion of a spectacle is important to understanding the force of the examples in this piece. Appearing nude in public, carving one’s thigh, and drowning one’s medals are acts that come at grave costs to those who perform them. Manipuri protestor Laishram Gyaneshwari described the shame that the women felt during their protest: “Manipur is a traditional society, we don’t show our bodies. We are uncomfortable even showing our ankles” (Pandey, 2017). Galindo, on the other hand, made cuts on her body so deep that their scars were clearly visible even several years later (Mengesha, 2017, p. 140). And if the wrestlers had drowned their medals, they would have thrown away achievements that most can never hope to even dream of. Yet making communicative spectacles out of these sacrifices serves a distinctive function. When women use the social significance of their bodies or other important objects to evoke pain, they perform an important first step in the difficult process of creative social transformation.
References
Black, H. (2021, March 16). How Regina José Galindo uses her body in her art. WePresent. www.wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/regina-jose-galindo-selected-by-marina-abramovic, last accessed 2 August 2024.
Butler, J. (1993). Critically queer. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1(1), 17–32.
Chakraborty, A. (2023, May 31). Indian wrestlers postpone medal-immersion protest against chief. Reuters. www.reuters.com/world/india/indian-athletes-toss-medals-into-ganges-they-demand-officials-arrest-2023-05-30/, last accessed 12 August 2024.
Devraj, M. (2024). The role of imagination in protest. Analysis. Advance online publication.
Medina, J. (2023). The epistemology of protest. Oxford University Press.
Pringle, Z. I. (2024, May 15). From creative ideas to creative accomplishments. The Junkyard. www.junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2024/5/12/from-creative-ideas-to-creative-accomplishments, last accessed 1 August 2024.
The Quint. (2016, May 7). Mothers’ Day | The Quint Salutes the Brave Mothers of Manipur [Video]. YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tc9Uc998Og.