The Politics of Pity and the Individual Heroine Syndrome: Mukhtaran Mai and Malala Yousafzai

• In Event: Political Storytelling: Feminist Cartooning, Performance, and Digital Authorship

Abstract

Using Lilie Chouliarki’s questions regarding the ethical responsibilities of spectators toward visual suffering in our mediatized age as a start-off point, , I will look at a recently-staged operatic performance in NYC about the story of Mukhtaran Mai’s rape called Thumbprint, as well as the performative memoir I am Malala to ask how far these performances of individual women refusing victimhood feed into a neoliberal politics of redemption which is intertwined with the politics of US Empire in the 21st century?

Presenter

• Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Montclair State University