Description
A particular photograph from the infamous riots in 1983 also known as Black July in Sri Lanka was widely circulated. The picture showed a naked Tamil man on a bench trying to hide himself while several young Sinhalese men around him stand laughing and jeering. As one of the Sinhalese men prepares to swing a kick at the crouching man, the photographer captures the iconic moment of vulgar display of cruelty, racism, perversity. Leaked pictures or video footage of torture has now been commonplace since the Abu Ghraib episode, making it ‘normal’ to circulate pictures of tortured prisoners/inmates. While sexual torture has been legitimised and rationalised as a strategy, the techniques used are deeply intertwined with processes of racialisation, sexualisation and queering the victims. Camera thus works as an extension of the phallus that captures, penetrates, allowing the voyeur to get closer to the object of gaze, while maintaining a physical distance. By analysing in person interviews and testimonials of torture survivors from two conflict zones – Kashmir and Sri Lanka – this paper explores two critical aspects of sexual torture. First, it interrogates and disrupts the dominant narrative that positions sexual torture merely as a method of strategy or war tactic. Second, it examines the role of camera in constructing hierarchies that transcends the perpetrator-victim power dynamic, thereby transforming it into a voyeuristic spectacle. These images and footage become commodities, circulating as pornographic fodder for social media and markets, legitimising violence against bodies branded as terrorists/traitors. The perpetrator and camera, both acting in tandem, do not merely extract information; but inscribe the tortured bodies with racialised and sexualised markers of deviance. This results in queering the tortured body, rendering them as sites of subjugation and stripping them of any possible resistance against the state.
