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Ranjita Biswas
School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
'Rape: Victimhood, Agency and the Question of Justice'
Women's experience of sexual violence and its focus has been an integral part of feminist intervention and politics. Theoretical understandings of sexual violence have varied from it being an act of momentary sexual excess culminating in violent transgression, to an act of violence being canalized through the sexual mode. It is said to be as much about sex as it is about violence. Male physical, economic, sexual and political domination of woman has formed the basis of causal analysis of rape and other forms of sexual violence. Sexual violence is sought to be made intelligible through legal and medical discourses. Aggression is measured in terms of the violation that in turn can be discerned by 'evidence' – the marks (physical or psychological) left behind. Justice is sought through an objective scientific demonstration of victimhood – a victimhood that is undiluted, final and unbreakdownable – and the demonstration of guilt that proves the culpability of the accused. Justice is made possible through the verdict – 'punishment' of the guilty and the 'rehabilitation' of the victim. But how does subjective experience of violation get transformed into objective evidence? How does woman traverse the path from her personal private domain of self-respect to the open room of law to prove her sense of violation, her coerced participation, her innocence? Justice in its conventional terms can only be debated and delivered in the public domain where Science, Capital and Law are the main arbiters that grant legitimacy to woman's demand for justice. And, provided woman is able to traverse the private/public divide to articulate her sense of suffering, can justice be ensured through a system that functions by retaining and reinforcing categories like 'honour' 'chastity', 'provocation' and 'morality', and operating within binaries such as subjecthood/victimhood, consent/coercion, moral/immoral?
Feminists have time and again brought forward the unease at the interface of law and sexuality. They have critiqued and sought a redefinition of the act of rape in a bid to make the rape laws more gender just. Moreover, the law's incapacity to be just in feminist terms has not merely been the result of a personal bias, or the interpretation of the law in sexist ways. The institutionalized pursuit of justice seems to protect the interests of the male and masculine ideology, while appearing to protect the woman. Further, justice is delivered and woman is said to be empowered but at a price – her patriarchal feminine difference. Agency can only stem from victimhood not without it. The juridicolegal system seeks to fix meaning by reducing complex possibilities into rigid categories where law acts as the primary legitimating discourse that defines and gives credence to women's sexual experience, her transgression, her subjecthood and empowerment. Then again the question remains. Can one abandon the pursuit of institutional justice altogether? Does not the legal system also offer a forum to point out exclusions, to voice demands and rights, to walk the first step towards empowerment?
This paper seeks to reexamine hegemonic notions of justice, in an attempt to think a different justice that could perhaps be a feminist justice. Questioning the abstract, universal ideal of justice that is marked by a movement towards certainty and exactitude, can justice be rethought where the very condition of its possibility is that one has to address oneself to the other in the language of the other, marked by a sense of responsibility and other-sensitivity. Would it then be sensitive to the needs and aspirations of women? Taking into consideration the specific case of sexual violence, this paper would like to re-work categories such as, 'experience' 'agency', 'subjectship', 'consent', 'responsibility' and 'evidence', in an attempt to risk a better understanding of what it means to be a woman. Working past a discourse of law that presumes rights to be self evident and universally applicable, could a situational and phenomenological understanding of woman's experience of sexual violence forge a more meaningful empowerment, albeit contingent?
Bio: Member of the Editorial Collective of From the Margins: A biannual English Journal of Critical Theory in a Postcolonial Setting. Delivered lectures at Refresher Course on Philosophy and Psychotherapy, in Department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Calcutta in June-July, 2002 titled: 'The Antipsychiatry Movement and the Relevance of Psychotherapy.' Participated as an commentator on presented papers in a 4-day workshop on 'Feminisms in Asia' an international workshop organized by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in collaboration with the Women's Studies Programme, Jawaharlal Nehru University held in Bangalore on October 17-20, 2001. Participated in the Cultural Studies Workshop, Puri (February 2001) conducted by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta with a paper on Hysteria entitled: 'From Dora to Diana: Performances in Corporeality. 'Publications: 'Psychiatry and its Discontents: Voices From Within' (co-authored with Anup Dhar) in Bengal Journal of Psychiatry, January 2003; 'The Anorexic Body' in From the Margins, February 2002; 'Re-Viewing Rape: An Act of Survival' in From the Margins, August 1999.
<ranjitabiswas@rediffmail.com>