Sexual Violence in the Field of Vision

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.

When believing can be seeing: The unregulated approach to video evidence in U.S. courts and the need for archival legal standards

“…It is in this context that Sharon Sliwinski (2018) argues that the history of our ways of seeing is centrally implicated in the global struggles for human rights. LaCharles further reminds us that the legal doctrine that emerged with the introduction of photography necessitated a witness to testify to the evidentiary meaning of images.…”

Ways of seeing: The power and limitation of video evidence across law and policy

“…John Berger (1972) famously coined the phrase ways of seeing to describe how what people see is affected by what they already know and believe. Visual culture scholars have long shown how gendered, racial, and anti-colonial struggles are centrally implicated in the social history of the different ways of seeing (e.g., Browne, 2015;Mirzoff, 2011;Moore, 2022;Sliwinski, 2018;Ward, 2022). In this context, Frantz Fanon's (1967) widely cited example of a white boy who felt frightened just by looking at a Black man speaks to a longer history of seeing that has framed Black people as less than human.…”

The Need for Visual Information Policy

“…This need is only amplified by the fact that looking has never been intuitive. An extensive body of scholarship has tackled the interpretative visual battles in and beyond the courtroom through the prism of critical race, gender, and postcolonial theories, unpacking how our various ways of looking operate as a kind of parallel to the history of the struggle for human rights itself (e.g., Butler 1993;Crenshaw 2012;Sliwinski 2018). In other words, our ways of looking are reflective of different social practices that place images in systems of social power (e.g., Berger 1972;Mirzoeff 2011;Sturken and Cartwright 2018).…”