Sexual Violence in the Field of Vision

• In Event: Visual Epistemologies and Human Rights

Abstract

Working closely with a contemporary Canadian example, this paper explores how sexual violence functions as a suturing force of sovereign power. I address the visual strategies that activists, artists, and human rights investigators have used to make this form of violence register in the visual field. In the Canadian context, sexual violence has become one of the established technologies of sovereignty—a perverse kind of governance that has been designed to disenfranchise the Indigenous population’s claim to basic dignity and rights. This situation presents human rights workers with a unique kind of crisis: How to provide evidence of this violation in a way that manages to safeguard the dignity of the subjects in question? Inspired by Jacqueline Rose’s signal assertion that disturbances at the level of sexuality will leave their mark in the visual field, my paper identifies a few of the strategies that activists have used to reveal this pervasive form of human rights violation. I will also explore various strategies that artists have used to resist this sovereign inscription.

Author

• Sharon Sliwinski, The University of Western Ontario