Painful Spectacles and their Links to Creativity

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’.

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.

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