(Re)Defining Rape: The Crippled Body as a Site of Power By Sukshma Vedere B.A in English, November 2007, Sri Aurobindo Internation Centre of Education M.A in Engish Literature, June 2010, The English and Foreign Languages University A Thesis submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts May 19, 2013 Thesis Directed by Kavita Daiya Associate Professor of English Table of Contents Introduction: Understanding Rape ...................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: The Structure of Torture .................................................................................... 4 Chapter 2:Bandit Queen: Recasting Rape as Agency ....................................................... 16 Chapter 3: Recasting Rape in Draupadi ........................................................................... 32 Chapter 4: Conclusion: Performing Sexual Violence ....................................................... 39 Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 41 ii Introduction: Understanding Rape “Rape is a form of social performance. It is highly ritualized”, argues Joanna Bourke in Rape: Sex, Violence, History. She argues that the script of violence includes both the sexual brutality of the perpetrator and the (un)articulated anguish of the victim. Rape and sexual violence spawn from “specific” political, economic, and cultural milieus. Drawing upon this I argue that the two components defining sexual abuse, i.e. sexed bodies and coercion, are created through a combination of discursive practices. There is nothing natural or permanent about the body and its sexuality. The “sexual” is constructed through a host of discourses including the legal, penal, medical, psychological and linguistic practices. Similarly, abuse has its own evolving history. I argue that the script of rape involves a flux of transforming masculinities and femininities, which destabilize the national rhetoric of gender. Rape shatters the sociological construct of gender to foreground the biological components of sex. Some of the questions which I intend to explore in my thesis are: How does physical violence translate into psychological trauma? How do women recast rape to acquire agency? How does is the representation of rape translate a theatrical feat? Taking the discursive notions of rape into consideration, I discuss the theoretical framework of rape and the social construct of the body and pain, the violated body as a site of pain and of shame, representation and spectatorship. I will pitch my work on genres in fiction and film to analyze the social and cultural scripts written over the body and the violence of representation and spectatorship. This thesis is a study of the life of Phoolan Devi and her representation in Shekar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen (1994) and in her autobiography entitled I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India's Bandit Queen. I hope to explore how in each text, Phoolan recasts rape as an agency to overcome patriarchal structures. I also study Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi” to underscore how in the story, the raped female body exudes a power that displaces the male gaze. I wish to uncover the multiple voices of traumatized and traumatizing subjects, to revise the definition of rape through the specifics of cultural representation and individual histories. In the first chapter I introduce the theoretical perspective on sexual violence while deconstructing the familiar conceptions of the body, suffering and gender. I explore how the violated body becomes a social disgrace and examine the nationalistic implications of the body and its peculiar affinity to femininity. Elaine Scarry, Javier Moscoso and Joanna Bourke are some of the key critics who deconstruct the body, torture and pain, by tracing the history of violence. They sketch how subjective suffering is objectified with time and how subject hood is a constructed self. Some of the questions that I look into include: How is rape different from non-sexual assault? What are the dynamics of sexuality and nationalism? What are the discourses that sustain a politics of shame? In the second chapter I examine the assaulted woman’s body through the lens of disability and trace how the violated body transforms itself from a site of shame to a sign of power. I place the Bollywood movie Bandit Queen in conversation with Phoolan Devi’s autobiography and analyze how the mutilated female body becomes an embodiment of power that defies the structure of patriarchy. I also examine how certain representations of raped victims can empower women. The third chapter discusses 2 “Draupadi” by Mahasweta Devi and explores how the gang-raped victim defies her perpetrators with her mutilated/crippled body. It also illustrates how nudity can be a spectacle of resistance displacing traditional conceptions of nation, woman and able- bodiedness. The concluding chapter analyses the representation of rape as a theatrical performance. This chapter discusses the representations of rape in Bandit Queen and “Draupadi” and provides concluding thoughts on volatile bodies and transforming identities which recast violence to acquire agency. It underscores how gender, violence and performativity are connected to the politics of power. 3 Chapter 1: The Structure of Torture Rape is a social performance that abuses the construct of the female body either as a property, or an “object of trespass”. By invading and striving to conquer the female sexual terrain, the rapist expands his sexual agency. (Bourke, 6) In order to examine the structure of violence, it is essential to analyze first the construct of physical pain, its “political and perceptual complications”, and the fictionalization of the experience. (Scarry, 3) Scarry argues that the discourse of pain bridges private experience to the shared public realm. She elaborates, “the interior facts of the bodily sentience out of the inarticulate pre-language of ‘cries and whispers’ into the realm of shared objectification”. (Scarry, 11) Pain is directly related to power. Verbal representation of pain directly influences its political image. Scarry also argues how often verbal strategies describing pain revolve around the weapon which serves as a language of agency, and how the weapon invoked coaxes pain into visibility. (Scarry, 13) The weapon objectifies violence and becomes the referent for “attributes of pain”. Scarry underscores the import of interrogation in the context of corporeal punishment and traces the translation of the physical act into a voice. She argues how the questioning and answering process in the interrogation is often mistaken to be “the motive” and “the betrayal” respectively. Violence becomes the motive to elicit an answer, which foregrounds the import of the voice over the pain: The first mistake credits the torturer, providing him with a justification, his cruelty with an explanation. The second discredits the prisoner, making him rather than the torturer, his voice rather than his pain, the cause of his loss of self and world. These two misinterpretations are obviously neither accidental nor unrelated. The one is an absolution of responsibility; the two together turn the moral reality of torture upside down. (Scarry, 35) The distance between the physical realities of the torturer and the prisoner is immense. The utter lack of pain of the torturer distances him from the shredded world of the prisoner, making verbal realities an important link to connect disparate phenomenological experiences. The absence of pain in the torturer affirms a “presence of the world”, while in the prisoner the presence of pain leads to an absence of the world. Across these inversions, pain becomes power. Subsequently, the greater the prisoner’s pain, the larger the torturer’s world. The perpetrator strives to eliminate the sentience of the prisoner, crushing all that he/she lives for; the self-amplifying process of the torturer is dependent on the prisoner’s absence of world. (Scarry, 37) Violence is an unmaking of civilization and the world, which often becomes itself the cause of pain to the victim. This pain gets objectified as power through verbal medium. The body transforms into voice in part through a dissonance of the two, and the consonance of the two. The victim experiencing the body and pain, and oblivious to the voice, world and the self, is separated from the perpetrator who is insensible to the body and pain but who has access to voice, world and self. These oppositions highlight the distance between the body of the violator and the violated. Interrogation is the only verbal medium that connects the two bodies. (Scarry, 46) 5 Scarry discusses how pain is a complex experience which is real, subjective, and invisible to anyone else. Pain engulfs the violated individual, but is unsensed by the world. Although the victim’s internal pain may be identical from one who is suffering from a stroke or cancer, it is unlike any disease, and objectifies itself in unique ways. Aversion and negation is one of the major traits of pain. It is viewed as an alien element, as something other than oneself. This alien element is projected on the perpetrator who is dehumanized of all his psychological characteristics to become “the rapist/the animal”. Scarry also elaborates how pain is a double experience of