Contribution to Book
Sexual Violence in the Field of Vision
Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice
(2018)
Abstract
Meditating on a single photograph from a recent Human Rights Watch report concerning police violence in Northern British Columbia, Canada, this paper pursues two lines of questions about the visual politics of human rights. One concerns how our ways of seeing—our modes of attending to the vulnerability and integrity of particular persons—can itself be understood as a form of human rights practice. The other aims to widen space in contemporary political theory for thinking about how sexual violence functions as a central technology of sovereignty and how we might make this phenomenon more perceptible. The paper explores the ways photographs can become evocative objects—tools that can help spectators digest the ways sovereign forms of power are brokered across and through women’s bodies.
Keywords
- sexual violence,
- sovereignty,
- visual culture,
- human rights,
- dignity,
- Indigenous women
Disciplines
Publication Date
2018
Editor
Sandra Ristovska and Monroe Price
Publisher
Palgrave
Citation Information
Sharon Sliwinski. "Sexual Violence in the Field of Vision" Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice (2018) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sharon_sliwinski/34/