Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
January 2018
Journal
Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice
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.
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Legal Studies Commons, Photography Commons, Political Theory Commons