Jauría : Documentary fiction and the transformative potential of sexual violence testimony

Abstract

In this article, we examine the various strategies that Jauría employs to bear witness to sexual violence. Jauría’s script is based on the official court transcripts of a trial for the gang rape of a woman at the San Fermín Festival in Pamplona, Spain. Our analysis focuses on how the narration of violence from new representational frameworks questions the hegemonic paradigms in which violence makes itself intelligible. We address how sexual violence testimony, in the form of documentary fiction, has the transformative potential of appealing to a shared responsibility with the audience. To that end, we analyze the mise-en-scène and conduct a long series of interviews with the play’s actors, director and playwright. To carry out this analysis, we use the framework of ethical testimony that we apply as an analytical model both to the mise-en-scène and to the interviews conducted, which have been categorized along four dimensions of analysis. This article contributes to the current studies around the transformative potential of sexual violence testimony and ultimately proves how the testimony’s ethical dimension can transform the discursive conditions in which this type of violence is typically interpreted.

Keywords

Documentary theater ethical testimony sexual violence vulnerability and resistance

Introduction

On 26 April 2018, the High Court of Justice of Navarra published a court ruling on the trial of five men, who called themselves ‘La Manada’ (The Wolfpack), for the gang rape of an 18-year-old woman during the San Fermín Festival in the Spanish city of Pamplona. The court ruled that the men’s crime was sexual abuse and not rape because the events had taken place without any violence or intimidation (the crime entailed 9 years of jail time). This set off a widespread social debate: Was there or wasn’t there any consent given by the victim (Lorente, 2017; Wiener, 2018)? In response to the ruling, numerous protests took form in different cities across Spain (Abrisketa and Abrisketa, 2020). Overall, 10,000 people gathered in Madrid to repudiate the fact that the victim’s account of the incident was called into question, an opinion that was also shared by most of the legal community, politicians and the media. On 6 May 2018, this was followed by a broad mobilization in social media that made the hashtag #IBelieveYou (#YoSiTeCreo) a trending topic in Spain (Cantó, 2018). All parties, including the prosecutors, the plaintiff and the defendants, appealed the initial ruling, and on 21 June the Supreme Court found the defendants guilty of rape, a felony that entails 15 years of jail time (Rincón, 2019a, 2019b).

Jauría (Pack of Hounds) premiered on 25 January 2019. The play is based on the official court transcripts of the trial of La Manada (Teatro Kamikaze, 2019). Written in 2019 by Jordi Casanovas and directed by Miguel Del Arco, the play had a successful run in Madrid’s Kamikaze Theater that lasted until 21 April 2019, which was followed by a Latin American tour in 2020. Jauría is a documentary fiction structured around testimony from the point of view of a collective memory that aims to give an ethical account of sexual violence (Abuín González, 2016; Núñez Puente and Gago Gelado, 2019). In analyzing Jauría as a transformative mode for narrating sexual violence, we employ the concept of ethical testimony as developed by Oliver (2001, 2004). Oliver argues that it is not enough to make explicit the horror of violence or to create individual stories that reduce acts of violence to isolated events (Kaplan, 2005; Kaplan and Wang, 2004; Radford, 2006; Sontag, 2003). Instead, it is essential to explore testimonial violence from new representational frameworks that question the hegemonic paradigms through which this type of violence makes itself intelligible. Ethical testimony has previously been used as a framework to investigate different cultural products ranging from audiovisual popular culture to digital discursive practices (Gámez Fuentes, 2021), as well as documentaries (Butchart, 2006; Duvdevani and Yosef, 2020; Hazou, 2009; Sinnerbrink, 2017). Using this framework, we reflect on the decisions that are made when it comes to representing sexual violence so that we can explore those ways of representing that can open new elements of analysis which allow us to advance in the interpretation of violence. Our analysis model based on the ethical testimony framework unfolds in four dimensions: (1) the means of politicizing testimony, (2) the concept of responsibility and the activation of the audience’s response, (3) the relationship between vulnerability and resistance: visualizing the revictimization process and (4) the connection between the individual claim and the feminist struggle against sexual harassment. We therefore seek to examine and critically assess Jauría through four analytical dimensions that situate testimony as a constitutive element of documentary theater. To do this, we will first analyze the mise-en-scène of Jauría from the ethical testimony as a general framework of analysis. Second, we will apply the four-dimensional model of ethical witness to a long series of interviews with the actors, playwright and director. We consider of special interest the discourses that make up the interviews conducted, since through them, as mediating witnesses and enunciators of the victim’s testimony, we can come to understand aspects of violence that would otherwise remain hidden. This is because ethical testimony provides the possibility of breaking with the hierarchical representation of the victim who bears witness to the violence suffered and the enunciative voice of the indirect witness, in this case the actors, playwright and director, who relate or enable the testimony of those who suffer such violence.

This article builds on the analytic model of ethical testimony, but also on existing studies that approach sexual violence testimony through an ethical lens: as ways of coming forward that involves the active participation of witnesses (Banet-Weiser, 2020; Mendes et al., 2019a; Núñez Puente and Fernández Romero, 2019). Through this specific framework, we can shine light on how documentary theater can politicize sexual violence testimony through the recognition of the Other (Butler, 2005). Finally, we argue that the articulation of a model for analyzing the function of testimony in documentary theater as a tool for social change can be potentially useful for exploring counterhegemonic testimonies of sexual violence.

Documentary theater: the mise-en-scène of Jauría as a break from the representational legacy of sexual violence

Del Arco points out that for the accused the victim was ‘a hole to satisfy their desires’, which ‘they pounced on like a pack of wolves’ (Romo, 2019). This metaphor makes a direct reference to the title of the play and recognizes the active presence of various packs (jaurías) in the story. Therefore, beginning with its title and through the very mise-en-scène of the play, Jauría has the explicit aim of destabilizing traditional representational frameworks by reassessing the role of the audience, as well as reexamining the role of different social structures, like the courts, that in many cases reaffirm a hegemonic concept of violence. Miguel Del Arco, the director, acknowledges that directing documentary fiction entails engaging with extremely stark texts like Jauría (personal interview, 22 January 2020). For Del Arco, the staging plays an important role because of the aggregate of signs that it implies and because of the logic that governs this aggregation in relation to the choice of the thematic, dramaturgical and scenic referent (Araiza Elizabeth, 2000). The concept of staging has been extensively discussed in literature (Bordwell, 2005) and has been widely used as a form of analysis for documentaries (Araiza Elizabeth, 2000; Gröndahl, 2017; Hammond and Steward, 2008). The staging attends to the bodily attitudes of the actors or to the harmony of a gesture with their space. Other authors such as differentiate staging from mise-en-scène. The first refers to the theatrical situation that emerges when bodily actions are carried out between actors and spectators in a unique and unrepeatable space-time. However, the mise-en-scène focuses on the production process and planning a set of strategies that can be changed before and after staging. For Del Arco, mise-en-scène means working according to the director’s intention in order to excite the audience. In this way, Del Arco makes it clear that there is no desire for equidistance in his production (Vidales, 2019).

The director’s staging follows one of the goals of documentary theater: to give a voice to marginalized groups. The language used in documentary theater inhabits a discursive space ‘devoid of mediatic noise or epiphanies of the present, finally revealing its true nature to us’ (Abuín González, 2016: 286). Martin defines six key functions in documentary theater, ranging from a critique of the justice system to the narrative reconstruction of events, the inclusion of the audience in accounts of violence in order to provoke a reaction based on questioning the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and the incorporation of oral traditions (Martin, 2006: 12–13). Abuín González (2016: 285) calls attention to the fact that ‘theater serves the noble purpose of communitas through the creation of an inter-subjective space shared by all members of the audience’. As a result, documentary theater becomes an act of political engagement with the Other; it searches for an acknowledgment that goes beyond alterity by creating new discursive forms and forms of resistance that endow it with an ethical dimension (Weber, 2006: 126). As Singleton argues (2010: 291), it is important to consider that documentary theater builds alternative forms of citizenship centered on the ideas of encounter and exchange. The dialogic function that determines testimony is essential within the framework of constructing an encounter, which is made possible through drama. At the same time, this dialogic function is in conversation with the strategies that must be deployed in documentary theater, as Hazou notes, to ‘position audiences as active participants’ (2009: 68). Keeping in mind that the mise-en-scène is a decision of the director that accounts for the assemblage of the different signs oriented to produce meaning, we will analyze how the staging in Jauría determines a specific way of bearing witness to sexual violence. The staging of Jauría shows us that, through the narration and beginning with the title of the work, new interpretative keys of violence emerge that place it outside hegemonic accounts.

From the outset, the mise-en-scène engages the spectator because, as Del Arco (personal interview, 22 January 2020) maintains, ‘this is a dramatic fiction made completely out of the transcript of the trial, so the fidelity to the text works as a theatrical convention that makes the actual process of empathy a more direct one’. In Jauría, Del Arco creates a symbolic space of harassment and intimidation where the victim is at the center. This makes the spectator not only rally around her as a victim (Vidales, 2019) but also helps comprehend the violence exerted against her in a framework that goes beyond empathy, which in turn challenges the hegemonic forms of narrating violence (Núñez Puente and Gago Gelado, 2019). For his part, Casanovas highlights the importance of making sexual violence testimonies better known to other sectors of society. The play was born out of the need to share more than the limited information shared by the press. Not only does it show characters that are part of the story but it also creates ‘a male chauvinist model that can be very close to us’ (telephone interview, 14 February 2020).

The cast is composed of María Hervás, who plays the victim, Álex García as Jesús Escudero, Raúl Prieto as Alfonso Jesús Cabezuelo, Martiño Rivas as Antonio Guerrero, Ignacio Mateos as Ángel Boza and Fran Cantos as José Ángel Prenda. Each actor plays two roles: the victim or one of the members of La Manada, as well as the defense lawyers, the judges and the district attorney. The same few props and décor generate different spaces for the action. For example, the street where the victim and the attackers meet becomes the entrance where the rape takes place, and subsequently transforms into the courtroom where the trial is being held.

The minimalist set design is limited to six gray metal chairs that are often used to indicate noisy and violent moments in the play. Del Arco (personal interview, 22 January 2020) convinced Meloni, the artistic director of costume and set design, of the importance of displaying on stage the entrance hall where the rape took place. In this regard, Del Arco emphasizes that he ‘needs the spectator to feel in his or her own skin what it is like to be a woman surrounded by five men’ (personal interview, 22 January 2020). In contrast to the grey cement that covers the walls and floor throughout the stage, the small white tiles that cover this space are lit up by six spotlights that project a very warm light. Even though six people fit in it, the extremely limited space portrays how vulnerable the victim felt. The director did not want to show the actual scene of the rape because he thought it would be more interesting to recreate the space and have the spectator fill in the rest of the violent details (García Mingo and Svetlana Antropova, 2019). The language of the mise-en-scène adds an extra layer of meaning to the experience of the audience. Del Arco (personal interview, 22 January 2020) even states that ‘it was important for the space to be visually subjugating’. In addition, the integrated lighting becomes a narrative element in the story. Juan Gómez Cornejo, who was in charge of the scenic lighting, knew that it was essential for the director to fully illuminate the hall, without any shadows. When the characters enter the hall, there is a single ray of light that shines in through the side, but afterwards all the spotlights focus on the space, turning it into ‘the only place on earth, as if it were an eternal punishment, a place where you will be locked in forever’ (García Mingo and Svetlana Antropova, 2019).

At the beginning of the play, a voice over by Israel Elejalde contextualizes the incident for the audience. The stage is completely dark and, as the text is narrated, the woman, the hall, and the approaching five men begin to be illuminated. This reminds the audience of a cage. The victim is looking toward the public. The only light focuses on the hall where the rape took place. On the left side of the stage, the audience sees La Manada as they surround the victim while clapping and dancing. After the voice over ends, they leave the hall and cheer the victim on as if they were partying. From here on out, the victim’s testimony is narrated from a first-person point of view. The five defendants’ story will alternate with the victim’s account, providing the rhythm and precision to tell the story. Del Arco wants to captivate the spectator through the use of words and silences, variations in rhythm, and the speed of the character’s speech because ‘there are two different stories being told by six people. The story is the same, but you’re clearly realizing that one account belongs to the victim and the other one to the aggressors’ (personal interview, 22 January 2020).

The script is full of short phrases that speed up the scenes. The director emphasizes how essential it was for the text to be composed like a musical score, alluding to the dynamics of sound and movement that inform the play (Del Arco, personal interview, 22 January 2020). According to the director, it was essential to create plausible characters ‘through the use of words, through their statements’, stressing the function of language precisely because characters here are put together from what they said (Del Arco, personal interview, 22 January 2020). According to Del Arco, the defendants didn’t blame themselves; for them, the sexual violence was an inherent part of the party. Thus, Jauría constitutes, from an ethical dimension, a testimony to the misogynistic legacy in addressing the systemic nature of sexual violence that permeates the actions of the defendants (Del Arco, personal interview, 22 January 2020).

The scene turns back to the moment when the aggressors brought the victim to the hall. Standing up and looking toward the stage, she describes the sexual acts she was forced to do, how they grabbed her face, forced her to perform fellatio on them, and tugged on her hair to indicate the following steps. We see the actress through the cracks between the actors who, with their backs to the audience, surround Hervás. In the background, the audience can hear faint music. All of the sudden, the victim says, ‘and they suddenly left’. The actors leave. The victim lies naked and alone in the hall. Without it being overly explicit, the scene feels overwhelming. Casanova contends that even if many people in the audience expected to see the rape acted out on stage, he still considers that ‘it’s because they lack theater culture. Theater can portray many cases without being exploitative and crass, like the media’ (telephone interview, 14 February 2020). This decision that Casanova makes in his playwriting contributes to the possibility of reflecting on the structural conditions from which violence emerges, and thus avoids recreating the most graphic aspects that would have placed the testimony in the hegemonic speculative space of violence.

During most of the play, and especially in this particular scene, the male characters’ performance is quite menacing. If we were to apply the different categories of analysis of proxemics to Jauría, for instance, the spatial relations between actors, their postures, or their physical contact and its meaning, it is possible to conclude that the aggressors never respect the victim or her personal space. The same can be said of the sexual encounter or how they move closer when she relates her account of the incident. The performance of the play shows how the victim was persistently attacked through what Lyman and Scott (1967) would define as the three modes of intrusion: rape, invasion and contamination. With that in mind, let us now analyze the scene where the actors, dressed as the judges, embody the defense, while the actress, sitting frightened on center stage, embodies the victim. The defense lawyers, who are also five men, move all over the stage, launching questions as they try to persuade the audience by indicating that the victim answers in a timid manner. In unison, they yell phrases like ‘yea’, highlighting their clear ironic intention. Through their reactions and phrasing of their questions, the defense thus challenges the victim’s testimony. Furthermore, they also ask her to explain some of her comments, like ‘puffy drugged-out eyes’, playing out, once more, the constant harassment that she was subjected to through the defense attorneys’ use of hegemonic discourse. The actors also move constantly around her, reminding us of the title of the play: They are a pack of wolves stalking their prey. The selection of the title generated several discussions between the playwright and the director. Casanova suggested Jauría because he wanted to show that there are two types of assault or rape going on. The first one, that the audience does not get to see played out, is the one in Pamplona, but there is also one as portrayed in the trial, which is perpetrated by the defense lawyers (Casanovas, telephone interview, 14 February 2020). If Casanova were to have used Manada, the title that Del Arco favored, perhaps he would have reached a wider audience or have had more commercial success, but for him ‘that was a political option that he could not validate, for the title is also an important part of the play, it goes in the billboard and informs the audience’s experience even before they come into the theater’ (telephone interview, 14 February 2020). Del Arco ultimately realized that Jauría is the perfect title because it ‘not only has a corporeal element of physical violence; aside from the rapists, the defense and the trial process also continuously attacked the victim as a pack of wolves’ (personal interview, 22 January 2020).

Del Arco insists that ‘the healing process of any victim involves leaving behind the assault, forgetting it in order to close the wound, while every instance of the legal process forces the victim to start over because they always tell her “I don’t believe you”’ (García Mingo and Svetlana Antropova, 2019). If you do not behave like the perfect rape victim, this makes you suspicious, and they contend that the incident was not rape (Del Arco, personal interview, 22 January 2020). Casanovas poses the following question: How can the judicial system not protect the plaintiff? Therefore, he explains,

I don’t use the word victim anymore, instead I use plaintiff. I mean, why do you need to find out more about her personal life? Why is this whole process so twisted? I wanted to point that out so that we question why the judicial system does not even protect the victim from this constant, unwarranted harassment. (Casanovas, telephone interview, 14 February 2020)

Prieto claims (Vidales, 2019) that ‘the imagination of the spectator is another main character because the story takes shape in their mind’.

Finally, the montage includes sound bites of demonstrators on the streets. Del Arco wanted to highlight the impact that social demonstrations have had on the trial’s verdict. As a work of documentary fiction, the responsibility that Jauría places on the audience is ultimately bound to the demands of the feminist movement. It is precisely through this affiliation that the play promotes a change of paradigm in the representational legacy of sexual harassment (Del Arco, personal interview, 22 January 2020).

Ethical witnessing: the transformative potential of sexual violence testimony

The interviews conducted with the writer, director and actors allow us to approach this performing arts project in its capacity to bear witness to how, as Banet Weiser (2020) argues, rape culture enables the abuse of privilege and the position of power. That is why the director’s decisions about the performance and the playwright’s dramaturgy in Jauría are relevant to explore how sexual violence is testified to, from a witness position and from an ethical dimension, even though both are men. When there is no direct testimony from the victim and, therefore, violence is spoken of from an enunciative position embodied in third parties – in this case the writer, director and actors – we must inquire about the modes of representation of the victim. Oliver (2001, 2004) develops the concept of ethical testimony by linking it to a review of processes in the construction of meaning aimed at overcoming hegemonic representations. Approaching the stories from the framework of ethical testimony allows us, on one hand, to investigate new ways of accounting for sexual violence outside the dominant representational frameworks and, on the other hand, to rethink the role of the witnesses of the narrative and what responsibility they assume when faced with the narrated fact.

With the goal of analyzing the complex, nuanced modes in which sexual violence testimony is presented through the gaze of the witnesses who forward the victim’s account in Jauría, we will now explore the data we compiled from a series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with the cast, playwright and director. Cast interviews took place during the month of April 2019 and consisted of 20 questions. Each interview lasted between an hour and an hour and a half. Miguel Del Arco’s in-person interview in January 2020 consisted of 12 questions and lasted 46 minutes, while Jordi Casanovas’ telephone interview in February of the same year included 14 questions for a total of 30 minutes. Interviews began with scripted questions that had shared themes but were also grounded on the particularities of each individual. This encouraged the subjects to express themselves freely and fostered flexibility in the order in which issues were broached (Corbetta, 2007). We have chosen to classify their answers according to four dimensions of analysis that focus on the discursive construction of Jauría as a documentary fiction that bears witness to sexual violence. The following four dimensions of analysis of the ethical testimony allow us to critically engage with the discourse of sexual violence as it is recounted in Jauría.

Jauría as a means of politicizing testimony

In the first dimension of analysis, we examined whether the artistic team perceives Jauría as a means of endowing sexual violence testimony with a transformative potential. The politicization of the testimony that we address in this first report has to do with the concept of testimony as something born of a particular experience that, however, transcends it to approach the problem from a perspective removed from the individualization of that experience. The type of dialogical approach to such testimony through the role of witnesses can either allow or hinder the emergence of new thinking on violence. In this regard, Cantos indicates that the play ‘calls into question sexual violence against women’, insisting on ‘the hierarchal position that places women’s liberties below that of men’ (personal interview, 21 April 2019). Jauría supports, according to Mateos, making systemic sexism visible, arguing that

it is true that the case of La Manada is being told, but I believe that it is a context-pretext to tell how a habit becomes a crime; how those men, like me and you, like all of society, are accepted by society and have behaved like this their whole lives. (Mateos, personal interview, 21 April 2019)

For her part, Hervás focuses on the role of the witness when she assures that ‘the spectator can’t avoid this real-life commitment’ (personal interview, 20 April 2019). Therefore, in the case of Jauría, the narrative and the staging of the work transform the audience into a witness who validates or refutes a hierarchical and moralizing position when confronted with the victim’s story (Gámez Fuentes, 2021: 5). Thus, García states that the play ‘manages to make us hold a mirror up to the darkest part of ourselves’, intending at the same time ‘to seduce the public so that they are interested and listen to and reflect on the story’ (personal interview, 20 April 2019). The responsibility that the ethical testimony demands of the witness is linked to how that witness responds to the ontological condition of the woman as victim. In Jauría, women overcome the condition of ontologically vulnerable subject to which they are reduced in hegemonic accounts of violence (Gámez Fuentes, 2021). In this sense, Prieto asserts as follows:

Increasingly, more women dare to speak out and are bold enough to ‘dare to tell what others dare to do’. And until now the victim herself was held responsible, blamed herself and that was something that looked normal because machismo is very established within society. Not so much anymore, where it is denounced and talked about because those behaviors are not normal. (personal interview, 19 April 2019)

For Prieto, Jauría ‘literally collects testimonies that can make us aware of two things: how the incident came about and how a social problem is defined and transformed’ (personal interview, 19 April 2019). In this way, the politicization of the testimony is made evident, given that after a play like this, ‘you really see that theater can make a difference’ (Mateos, personal interview, 19 April 2019).

Responsibility and the activation of the audience’s response

The framework of ethical testimony underpins a new relationship of the witness with the testimony and with the elements of accusation that are revealed. It is therefore essential to activate the responsibility of the witness. The witness not only receives the testimony but also activates in it a responsibility that is located within the political dimension from the moment of reception (Gámez Fuentes et al., 2016: 837). The activation of the responsibility of the witness, in this case the audience, contributes to a paradigm of understanding sexual violence that not only lends an ethical but also a political dimension to the play. Through Jauría, Del Arco also explores the nature of theater, intrinsically linked to the role of the audience. For him, theater is a group of people that have the imperative not only to comprehend but also to empathize with what is happening on stage and, more importantly, to keep asking questions (personal interview, 22 January 2020). Del Arco directed rehearsals with this in mind, so that the spectator had to eventually question ‘how much of La Manada is in each of us’. Mateos says that ‘it wasn’t what we expected as a response, but sometimes there’s people in the discussions that would retell their stories, sharing whether they have been raped or not’ (personal interview, 19 April 2019). Prieto adds that audience members leave in a state of unease because many of them favor the feminist discourse. What would be needed, though, is for the other part of society to see the play, those who distrust feminism and don’t believe that the movement is needed to obtain equality. Most of these people also have reservations about the victim on account that she kissed one of her aggressors. Even Prieto remarks, ‘I too have doubted her. But after deeply analyzing the text I have concluded that there’s no way to condemn her. She’s the victim’ (personal interview, 19 April 2020).

In addition, Casanovas explains that Jauría transcends theater. It has gone as far as to impact the production team and the audience emotionally: ‘There is a transformation process, a self-analysis that goes on after watching the performance’. Hervás also mentions that as an artist, ‘I have an ethical responsibility to place the spotlight on something that must be seen’ (personal interview, 20 April 2019).

It is revealing to hear Cantos describe the testimony of an angry spectator who had confessed to the actors at the end of the performance that he was like ‘one of the aggressors’ (personal interview, 21 April 2019). In this sense, Jauría can be interpreted as a dramatic form of testimony that seeks to activate the audience’s responsibility toward how testimonies and symbolic violence are articulated. In Del Arcos’ words, ‘theater can’t change the world, but it can alter a worldview’ (personal interview, 22 January 2020). It is precisely this change of focus on how we narrate sexual violence, which, according to Del Arco, Jauría advances, that generates an affective force in the audience. The ability to share testimony about the experience of violence is what lends both the response, and the audience’s role as a witness, what Mendes et al. (2019: 124) call ‘affective solidarity’. The ethical testimony is based, therefore, on the interpellation of the witness, or of the audience, through the shared stories that favor an ethical recognition of the subjects of violence through an affective solidarity. The concept of affective solidarity contributes not only to making violence visible but also to forming a response based on a will to act, identified as something that is felt in the very process of bearing witness (Mendes et al., 2019: 142).

Vulnerability and resistance: visualizing the revictimization process

In this third dimension of analysis, we examine the theme of vulnerability as a means of resistance. Thus, from ethical testimony, the story must contemplate the role of vulnerability in constructing the subject’s agency (Gámez Fuentes, 2021: 5). Vulnerability is understood not only as the lack of agency or the injurability of the subject but also as the condition from which to generate resistance and contribute to changing the intelligibility of sexual violence. In this way, as Gámez points out, interdependence with others stands as the only space from which the subject’s agency can be restored (Gámez Fuentes, 2021: 5).

For Hervás, the victim shows her vulnerability by calling into question her own story and placing herself at the center of a social structure that is visibly biased in favor of the aggressors and extends to include women in different fields because ‘we are originally much more vulnerable in the system than men are’ (personal interview, 20 April 2019). Hervás (personal interview, 20 April 2019) also argues that the play clearly shows the process of vulnerability that the victim is subjected to through the defense’s interrogation tactics. According to García, by questioning her story and her own behavior after the rape, the victim opens up a space of vulnerability. For García, they ‘not only rape you, they also want you to act like the perfect rape victim’ (personal interview, 20 April 2019).

Jauría’s treatment of vulnerability and resistance creates a space within the story for survival strategies that endow the victim with agency. Cantos recalls the woman’s honesty: ‘she has been rigorous in her account of that night’s incidents. If she doesn’t remember a detail, she doesn’t mention it, and if she does mention something, it’s exactly how it was’ (personal interview, 21 April 2019). Prieto contends that her story is believable, that she ‘doesn’t embellish or exaggerate to incriminate them. She could have said many other things, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to blame them for anything other than what they did, which wasn’t a small thing’ (personal interview, 19 April 2019). Jauría, however, gives an account of the difficulties that victims face in order to be considered as subjects with agency without having to previously submit to a judicial system that sometimes revictimizes them (Martinez, 2020). Del Arco (personal interview, 22 January 2020) wonders in this regard how this group of lawyers can be allowed to put the victim through the whole ordeal again and subject her to a battery of brutally humiliating questions, always from a heteropatriarchal perspective. Jauría highlights ‘the disarticulation of victimhood from those who suffer and [its reallocation] to the privileged’, following Banet-Weiser (2020: 175). In this way, according to Banet-Weiser, it contributes to revictimizing the victim by trapping them in the space of the loss of agency brought about, among other things, by a process of revictimization by the judicial system.

The fact that the victim came forward means that ‘there is a crack in the system. Unfortunately, if this incident hadn’t happened, the crack wouldn’t have been open for all to see’ (Cantos, personal interview, 21 April 2019). In this respect, García underscores the resistance that emanates from vulnerability: ‘it’s exhilarating, honest, and inspiring when the victim says that she’s 20 years old and she still has a long life to live’ (personal interview, 20 April 2019). The hegemonic discourse of the victimized woman has been constructed around the concept of ‘injurability’, that is, the constant state of being injured (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013), and the need to be saved by others. Jauría calls into question this model when the victim explores her own agency – her final words at the end of the play are ‘I still have a long life to live’ – by challenging discourses around the decisions that women make in vulnerable circumstances and exploring how such vulnerability is directly linked to the material and cultural conditions that hinder or enable decision-making.

The connection between the individual claim and the feminist struggle against sexual harassment

The fourth analysis of the framework of ethical testimony is concerned with revealing whether the account links the violence suffered with references to the genealogy of the feminist struggle or whether it articulates some kind of dialogue with contextual social struggles. In Cantos’ words, Jauría makes us question the systemic violence that pervades cultural narratives (Cantos, personal interview, 21 April 2019). Cantos also emphasizes that the demands of the feminist movement, which frequently appear in the play in the form of the voice over, take on a central role, for they contribute to politicizing sexual violence testimony. The goal of this strategy is for the audience to connect with the message. Indeed, as Hervás remarks, ‘after listening to the voiceover that describes the incident, the spectator immediately empathizes with the story’ (personal interview, 21 April 2019). For Hervás, the play engages the symbolic and structural inequalities that foster violence, promoting ‘a dialogue around the cultural breeding grounds that kids of all ages are exposed to’ (personal interview, 20 April 2019). The victim’s claim and the rape charges brought against La Manada open the possibility of using critical tools of analysis that advance our understanding of violence, and they help connect this particular case to the general demands of the feminist struggle. Furthermore, they make us reflect on our role in propagating hegemonic narratives of violence and help us understand how to promote social action against violence through transformative testimonies (Prieto, personal interview, 19 April, 2019).

According to Cantos, after the performance ‘the male members of the audience, in particular, feel that something deep inside their discourse has changed’ (personal interview, 21 April 2019). Mateos indicates that ‘each audience member asks themselves how much of La Manada they have’ (personal interview, 19 April 2019). Tracing a representational genealogy of violence allows Jauría to become a transgenerational and transnational experience that connects it to other systemic inequalities. The audience must come face to face with a testimony of sexual harassment in which the victim is shown ‘from another point of view, one that allows the woman to speak while focusing on her side of the story’ (Prieto, personal interview, 19 April 2019). We can now determine that the reconstruction of the account of violence in this play makes the victim surpass the limits of a mere denouncement of the crime by proposing strategies aimed at taking action, that is, at a collective resistance that inevitably activates our responsibility as witnesses.

In this sense, as García (personal interview, 20 April 2019) indicates, ‘Jauría is an explosion in the center of machismo, but unfortunately one can choose not to see it’. The actor points out that we must stress education as well as fiction as spaces of political intervention.

Conclusion

In this article, we have argued that Jauría politicizes sexual harassment testimony by calling on the audience through more than just empathy. The ethical testimony on sexual violence offered by the work is constructed fundamentally through the appeal to the audience as a witness, thus activating a kind of ‘affective solidarity’ that compels them to reconsider the presumed nature of events. A detailed analysis of the mise-en-scène and in-depth interviews through the framework of ethical testimony have allowed us to delve into the potential transformative function of sexual abuse testimony, especially in its capability to appeal to the audience’s responsibility in establishing a dialogue that reveals the systemic character of violence.

We have also explored how vulnerability creates a space of resistance that lets us reconsider Jauría as a documentary fiction centered on a process of collective transformation in relation to the way violence is narrated (Hervás, personal interview, 20 April 2019). The careful examination of the stage design has revealed the ways in which the victimization process can be articulated through modes of resistance that break away from a representational legacy that has traditionally relegated women to the role of the victim. Consequently, La Manada’s victim appears subjected to a process of vulnerability in the final scenes, but the place of the victim is also simultaneously represented symbolically by her making decisions that indicate resistance strategies. In this sense, the mise-en-scène makes visible the cornering of the victim ‘by the pack that initially attacks her, which was later followed by the pack of defense lawyers, and the whole trial process’ (personal interview, 22 January 2020) that Del Arco has highlighted. The end result of this representation was to create an ethical and political framework to hold each one of these packs (jaurías) accountable, as well as the audience, through a discourse that defies the hegemonic ways of narrating violence (Casanovas, telephone interview, 14 February 2020). In this way, the new view on stories about sexual violence through the framework of ethical witness gives us the opportunity to challenge the individuality of the stories by orienting them toward a truly shared narrative. This helps us learn lessons about how to delve into contested testimonies that explore the contours and meanings of sexual violence while dismantling hegemonic representational legacies.

Ultimately, we seek to point out how Jauría applies an ethical dimension to the testimony of violence that turns documentary theater into a tool for social change by unveiling symbolic and structural violence. The application of the analytical model of the four dimensions of analysis of ethical testimony to the interviews with the actors, director and playwright confirm how Jauría breaks with hierarchical representations of the victim as a subject that testifies on the experienced violence, while having the audience, actors, director and playwright become the potential voice for the indirect witness (Cantos, personal interview, 21 April 2019; Hervás, personal interview, 20 April 2019). According to Del Arco (personal interview, 22 January 2020) and Casanovas (telephone interview, 14 February 2020), the recognition model of sexual violence in Jauría is articulated through the elimination of the hierarchical relationship between the victim and the witnesses to her testimony. The responsibility is thus collective, as well as the transformative potential of testimony. As Prieto declares, the ethical framework behind Jauría brings the audience into the story and makes them consider testimony in multiple, complex ways that hopefully will lead to the creation of alternative conditions of representational visibility for sexual violence (personal interview, 19 April 2019).

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Grant PID2020-113054GB-I00

ORCID iD

Sonia Núñez Puente

Biographical notes

Sonia Núñez Puente is Professor of Gender and Media at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain). Her research focuses on the analysis of social media and feminist digital activism.

Rocío Gago Gelado is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at Nebrija University (Madrid, Spain). Her research interests include digital media and audiovisual practices.

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