Interrupting the Conditions of Sexual Violence: Towards a Critical Literacy Approach to Pedagogy

Abstract

This essay is concerned with sexual violence against women. Taking a cultural studies approach, I focus particularly on the re/production of a culture of sexual violence in the South Asian region. Drawing upon Slavoj Žižek’s work, I argue that we need to discuss and disrupt objective forms of sexual violence if we want to resist its subjective forms. Then, I turn to Judith Butler’s work to show how violence occurs under certain conditions. To interrupt the conditions of sexual violence, I propose that teachers and students take a critical literacy approach to pedagogy. Finally, I propose four pedagogical principles that, I hope, will provide teachers with an actionable framework for use in school contexts.

Keywords

Violence women South Asia critical literacy pedagogy

Introduction

Sexual violence is not, by any means, unique to South Asian societies. It is not only Indian mythology where we see narratives and discourses of violence against women but other mythologies such as the Greek and Roman abound with examples of such accounts. From a historical perspective, women have been subject to sexual violence in times of both war and peace. Settler colonialism is one of many examples that led to the endemic of sexual violence. For instance, thousands of aboriginal women have been abducted since European settler colonialism began in North America. Many of these women were found raped and murdered (Brownridge 2009; Jiwani and Young 2006). The prevalence of sexual violence is not any less in places that are not impacted by settler colonialism. In the UK alone, 43,579 serious sexual offences were counted in 2009–10, and this count shows a 7 per cent increase compared to the previous year that counted 40,748 offences (Brown and Walklate 2012). Although sexual violence is a global crisis, in recent years India has notoriously attracted the world’s attention. Since the gruesome rape and murder of a medical student on a public bus in Delhi in 2012, India has been severely criticised for its ‘rape culture’ (Faleiro 2013).

It is possible to discuss the ‘rape crisis’ from a variety of perspectives, for example, feminist, psychological, economic, anthropological, historical and so on. In this essay, I take a cultural studies approach to understanding how a culture of rape/sexual violence is produced, distributed and consumed. Then, I draw upon Judith Butler’s work and discuss why we need to understand the conditions under which an offence such as rape takes place. Such conditions make up what Butler (2010) would call recognisability. There is always a differential at the level of how some lives are recognised as liveable and their loss as grievable. This differential decidedly recognises other lives as non-liveable and, thus, their loss as non-grievable. In order to understand the politics of recognition and to oppose the consumption of cultural meanings that support such politics, I propose a pedagogical framework for use especially in higher secondary school contexts. Premised on the Freirean tradition of critical literacy (Freire 1970), this pedagogical framework may be helpful to nurture in students a sociological imagination (Mills 1959[2000]), which is necessary to counter the re/production of the culture of sexual violence.

The Cultural Re/production of Sexual Violence

So, now go tell, and if thy tongue can speak,

Who ‘twas that cut thy tongue and ravish’d thee.

(Shakespeare 1954: 54)

Traditionally, gender inequality has been discussed as a major cause of sexual violence (Yodanis 2004). However, the case of sexual violence is much more complex than some literature suggests. A comprehensive review of why such violence takes place is beyond the scope and aim of this essay. I begin with the general consensus that sexual violence such as rape is an unpleasant reality in human societies. It has happened across historical times and geographical locations. Our historical, mythological and literary texts contain gruesome accounts of rape. In literary history, one of the horrific accounts of sexual violence is found in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In this play, a young woman named Lavinia is raped by two brothers—Demetrius and Chiron—who are sons of the Empress. The assault itself happens offstage; however, its consequences are clear as Lavinia appears onstage after her tongue is cut and hands sliced off. The words quoted above are of Demetrius, who asks Lavinia to tell others about the rape if she can. His brother—Chiron—joins him and says to Lavinia: ‘Write down thy mind, bewray thy meaning so,/And if thy stumps will let thee play the scribe’ (Shakespeare 1954: 54). This Shakespearean account of rape depicts a familiar picture of sexual violence against women: rape along with cruel torture, leading oftentimes to murder. It is important to note that ‘the mocking tone adopted by the young men [in Shakespeare’s play] suggests a vicious pleasure, not only from sexual gratification but also from the erasure of female agency’ (Bell et al. 2012: 56).

The cutting off of the tongue is a powerful symbol of the erasure of female agency. Too often, we hear news about girls/women being raped and then murdered. The logic may seem simple: The woman is murdered so that she cannot name the perpetrator(s). Such acts of cruelty involve not only sadistic gratification but also an element of hegemonic masculinity, which severely restricts gender democracy and the agency of women (Connell and Messerschmidt: 2005). In such hegemonic acts, certain culturally dominant frames of masculinity are at play.

Despite policy measures and increased public awareness, sexual violence against women continues to rise in the South Asian region. Women face such violence both in and outside of home. For example, one study finds that one out of three married men in Bangladesh were reported abusing their wives physically and/or sexually (Silverman et al. 2007). Sexual violence against women occurs not only physically but also discursively. For example, in the summer of 2014, a Member of the Parliament in West Bengal threatened his political opponents by saying that he would let loose his men to rape the female relatives of his political rivals (BBC 2014).

When sexual violence against women is so rampant, how do men in power view this issue? Many blame the victim for such offence. During the countrywide protests against the brutal Delhi gang rape in 2012, an Indian-American film-maker talked to a police officer who said, ‘No good girl walks alone at night’ (Pandey 2014: para. 4). Similarly, in a documentary on gang rape in Bangladesh, a police officer blames women who do not follow ‘proper’ dress code and, thus, ‘arouse’ sexual desire in men. In the same documentary, a religious cleric says that women should stay home. If they ‘roam around’ outside, then they must be blamed for being raped (Rashid 2014). In this way, some men in authority try to rationalise rape and shift the blame onto women who are victims of heinous crimes. This shifting of blame, I argue, is one of the root causes of why it is so difficult to disrupt the hegemonic masculine beliefs and tendencies in societies.

Historically, sociology demonstrated little interest in examining sex-based violence committed to women. It was only since the 1970s that sociologists paid careful attention to such violence. From numerous studies informed by the theory of symbolic interactionism, we know that sexual violence functions as an expression of control. We also learn that sexual violence has profound impacts for families and communities. Furthermore, we know that despite changes in legislations, sexual violence against women is on the rise across the world (Jones 2012). Various women’s rights movements have been demanding social and legislative changes to resist sexual violence. In India, such movements gained prominence in the 1970s, especially after the Mathura rape case in Maharashtra. Today, we see public outcry through protest tactics such as sit-ins, marches, rallies, candlelight vigils, street theatres and campaigns on social media (Sullivan 2015). These protest tactics are mobilised once an incident of sexual violence becomes known to the public, mainly through media coverage.

As a result of large-scale protest movements and popular demands, the governments in the South Asian region have taken policy measures to reduce sexual violence against women. Yet, there is no indication that the occurrence of such violence is reducing. I argue that protest movements and the media frenzy focus too much on the subjective forms of sexual violence and fail to address the roots of this social ill. As Arundhati Roy (2013) said,

By expanding the law and cranking up the punishment what you are getting is a lynch mob after a few high-profile cases—but the phenomenon is not being addressed…. Everyone cannot be sentenced to death or life in prison or hounded in the public eye. We need to calibrate our responses, calm down and think about it a bit.

While the protest movements as a resistance tactic have their relative merit, I would argue that we need to dig deeper and address the objective forms of violence that prepare the ground for subjective violence (the distinction between subjective and objective violence is discussed below in the section Theorising Violence). I concur with Roy’s suggestion to ‘calm down and think about it’. This is important because we have seen that the century-old efforts through changes in legislation have failed to stop sexual violence against women. As a thinking exercise, I take a cultural studies approach to understanding sexual violence against women.

A cultural studies perspective may be helpful because it enables us to see how certain norms and beliefs are produced, circulated and consumed in a given society. What does ‘culture’ mean in this cultural studies approach? Traditionally, culture has been defined as a way of life of a group of people. Departing from this familiar anthropological definition of culture, I conceptualise culture as ‘the production and the exchange of meanings—the “giving and taking of meaning”—between the members of a society or group’ (Hall 1997: 2). Culture, understood as sharing meanings or shared meanings, focuses on how a group of people make sense of their life and activities as well as those of others around them. In this sense, ‘cultural meanings are not only “in the head.” They organize and regulate social practices, influence our conduct and consequently have real, practical effects’ (Hall 1997: 3). We are now confronted with the question of ‘where’ meanings are produced. Cultural theorists generally agree that meanings are produced at different sites and get circulated through various media. Representation of meanings through media is, therefore, of central importance if we are to understand how meanings are produced, circulated and consumed.

Many authors have written about how the meanings that rationalise sexual violence and shift the blame onto the victims are produced in religious fundamentalism and in the activities of culture industries such as Bollywood. Film critics are worried about how women are portrayed in the Bollywood movies. For instance, one critic raises concerns about the

recurring narratives suggesting that Indian women don’t really mean what they say when they resist sexual overtures…There is one sequence [in Sholay] in which a woman very strongly rebuffs the aggressive advances of a man. Eventually she succumbs and the impression is given that although she was saying ‘no’ what she meant was ‘yes’. (Brook 2014: para 7)

We see similar concerns raised by researchers who study Bollywood films. For example, Ramasubramanian and Oliver (2003: 327) analysed the contents of nine Hindi films that were box-office hits during 1997–99. Their study found that

moderate sexual violence is depicted as fun, enjoyable, and a normal expression of romantic love. Victims were more likely to be women rather than men, and sexual violence committed by heroes was a common portrayal, particularly moderate violence such as harassment of women with whom the heroes ultimately became romantically involved.

Films are just one of many media that circulate meanings. Although the movements of cultural meanings are circular and more complex than they appear to be, for a moment, let us think in terms of linearity. If the starting point is, for example, the film-makers who produce certain meanings, then the films are the carrier of meanings. The viewers of those films are the consumers, who may accept the meanings as presented, reject, resist or reconstruct them. The focus of this essay is on the viewers, that is, the consumers of cultural meanings carried by films and other media. How can we nurture in the consumers what Mills (1959 [2000]) calls the sociological imagination so that they may be able to develop frames of mind to resist and reconstruct meanings delivered by media and to treat their social others with sensibility? The notion of the sociological imagination is helpful because it may enable the individual to locate herself/himself within the larger society. With the sociological imagination, people may ‘achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves’ (Mills 1959 [2000]: 5). To understand the implications of sociological imagination with regard to the consumption of cultural meanings and to mobilise appropriate resources to resist and disrupt discursive and material practices that attempt to rationalise sex-based crimes, I now turn to a brief discussion of violence.

Theorising Violence

Scholars, theorists and activists hold radically different opinions about violence and its causes. Some notable philosophers who have written extensively about violence include Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Fanon, Arendt, Foucault and Sen. For example, Hobbes (1651) believed that the state of nature in which human beings lived was an ideal place for war and enmity. He wrote that in the state of nature, ‘every man is Enemy to every man’, and that this state is a place of ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes 1651: 70). People were constantly in a war of all against all. Therefore, Hobbes recommended a strong government or a sovereign that would reflect the commonwealth. The only way, for Hobbes, to avoid perpetual violence was to enter a social contract and surrender one’s power to a sovereign.

I argue that such a natural theory of violence, that is, human beings are inherently violent, is limiting. Much has been written against the Hobbesian theory of violence. For example, Douglas Fry (2007) presents convincing arguments that challenge the Hobbesian view that humans are by nature violent and warlike. Fry shows that humans possess great capacity to prevent, limit and resolve conflicts in non-violent ways. For my purpose in this essay, I take a contextual approach to understanding violence. As Lawrence and Karim (2007: 10) believe, ‘There is always a context, or a structure, to violence, and the reader-observer-participant must be alert to how her own life experience, location, and options frame the violence that seems to mark both her individual and collective existence.’ Such a contextual approach to violence asks us to understand violence through its practices, and to avoid any one general theory of violence.

I believe that Slavoj Žižek’s work on violence is helpful to explore and understand violence through its contexts and practices. He classifies violence into two primary types: subjective and objective. He then discusses two sub-types of objective violence: symbolic and systemic. Subjective violence is easily visible because it is ‘performed by a clearly identifiable agent’ (Žižek 2008: 1). Symbolic violence, the first kind of objective violence, is ‘embodied in language and its forms’ and pertains to language’s ‘imposition of a certain universe of meaning’ (1). Finally, systematic violence, the second kind of objective violence, emerges from the ‘catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’ (1). Žižek (2008) argues that we cannot perceive both subjective and objective violence from the same standpoint because while the former is seen as a disturbance of the normal state of things, the latter is inherent and embedded in the normal. Acts of subjective violence, such as a terrorist attack, a rape or a suicide bombing, often blind us to the objective violence that plagues our societies. In fact, objective violence is the precondition or the foundation of subjective violence. Yet, it remains invisible to the naked eye. For this, Žižek (2008: 2) compares objective violence with ‘the notorious “dark matter” of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence’.

Recognising the Conditions of Violence

If we want to resist violence, we have to understand the conditions under which it occurs. For this, Butler’s works prove to be helpful and instructive. Butler traces a schism in our responsiveness to violence and suffering. This schism often prevents us from responding equally and ethically to violence committed to others. It divides humanity ‘between those for whom we feel urgent and unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all’ (Butler 2010: 50). Butler argues that there are regulatory powers that create a differential at the level of affective and moral responsiveness to violence and suffering. There are certain frames that recognise some lives, not all, as lives and, thus, their loss as grievable. This means that there are some other lives that are not recognised as lives and their suffering and loss do not qualify as grievable.

Although Butler discusses the notion of recognition in relation to wars and counter/terrorism, especially in the post-9/11 context, I believe that her thought holds valuable implications for understanding sexual violence against women. Her work is important because it shows how certain ‘norms operate to produce certain subjects as “recognizable” persons and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize’ (Butler 2010: 6). These norms, when historically articulated and enforced, make up the general conditions for what she calls ‘recognisability’. As she describes,

If recognition characterizes an act or a practice or even a scene between subjects, then ‘recognizability’ characterizes the more general conditions that prepare or shape a subject for recognition—the general terms, conventions, and norms ‘act’ in their own way, crafting a living being into a recognizable subject…. (Butler 2010: 5)

Butler’s distinction between recognition and recognisability is one of her theoretical contributions that have been taken up with much interest in the field of contemporary political philosophy (Schippers 2014).

How does the politics of recognisability work when it comes to sexual violence against women? Here is an example: the caste system in South Asia created a condition that would later deny the recognition of lower caste women as full human beings whose suffering and loss are worth grieving. If a man from a higher caste rapes a lower caste (untouchable) woman, then the society at large becomes concerned more about the prestige of the upper caste man than the suffering of the lower caste woman. Many would reject the woman’s accusation by saying that it is impossible for an upper caste man to rape her because she is simply ‘untouchable’. How can he rape her if he cannot touch her? Under such condition, lower caste women are routinely harassed when they go to law enforcement authorities to seek justice. For example, in 1995, a Rajasthan court ‘acquitted five men of rape, saying upper-caste men couldn’t have raped a Dalit [an “untouchable” woman]’ (Pokharel and Lahiri 2013: para. 7). Therefore, it is important that we pay attention to the objective forms of violence that make up the condition for a foul play of recognisability that denies the liveability and grievability of certain lives.

The objective forms of sexual violence are rarely addressed by the mainstream media, activist organisations or various protest movements. While organisations such as Mahila Samakhya (a group advocating women’s equality) and Nari Adalats (informal women’s courts) do commendable work to combat violence against women (Kethineni et al. 2016), they focus primarily on subjective forms of violence. When an act of violence is reported in the media, then they take actions to protest the act of violence. In the words of Roy (2013), this kind of work often mobilises an angry mob after a few high-profile cases, but the roots of the phenomenon of sexual violence remain largely unaddressed. Therefore, it is important to disrupt the foundation of sexual violence, which is often invisible to the naked eye (Žižek 2008). For such disruptive work, I now turn to the potential contributions of formal schools.

What Can Schools Do?

Schools are powerful institutions that often reproduce norms and practices that create conditions for recognisability and, in this way, maintain the status quo. However, schools also provide opportunities for resisting physical and psychological inculcations (Giroux 2011; Willis 1977). They can be a site of hope and promise for social change as well as a site of opposition to forces that close off the sociological imagination needed to recognise all bodies as equally grievable bodies. To shed light on recognisability as a way of opposing sexual violence, I propose that teachers and students take a critical literacy approach to pedagogy. The concept of pedagogy is often used as a synonym for teaching. When used as synonymous with teaching, pedagogy may be misinterpreted as a method of transmitting information. To avoid this transmission view, I follow Loughran’s (2006: 2) conceptualisation of pedagogy as ‘the relationship between teaching and learning and how together they lead to growth in knowledge and understanding through meaningful practice’. This view of pedagogy encourages the teacher to create conditions in which the teacher and the students become aware of their own and others’ learning, engage in meaningful and transformational learning experiences and reflect upon those experiences.

In this conceptualisation of pedagogy, critical literacy provides an alternative perspective to functional literacy, which is concerned merely with reading and writing. In contrast, critical literacy seeks to analyse, critique and redefine texts of all kinds. The word ‘text’ is used in its widest possible sense to encompass not just written words but any scripts that are encoded and decoded with specific individual, social and political effects. The principles and practices of critical literacy emerge primarily from Paulo Freire’s works. Freire (1970: 53) described a banking method of education in which ‘the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor’. By showing this binary opposition between students and teachers, Freire discussed how a banking method of education reinforces oppressive and colonial social structures. For example, ‘the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she or he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students’ (Freire 1970: 54). Thus, the banking method of education projects ignorance onto those who want to learn, and this projection of ignorance negates education as a process of critical inquiry.

While there is more than one antecedent to critical literacy, my conceptualisation of critical literacy is premised on Freire’s notion of ‘reading the words and reading the world’ (Shor and Freire 1987: 135). What this view of literacy means is that one does not merely read or write texts but she/he remains aware of how literacy practices position the reader and the writer. Critical literacy encourages one to ask questions such as What am I to do next? What does the text want me to do? Whose interest do I serve through my literacy practices? These are some of the questions that emerge from the works of Freire (1970) and those who have followed his intellective lead. Pedagogical activities that are based on this tradition of critical literacy

encourage students to use language to question the everyday world, to interrogate the relationship between language and power, to analyze popular culture and media, to understand how power relationships are socially constructed, and to consider actions that can be taken to promote social justice. (Lewison et al. 2015: 3)

Thus, critical literacy takes ‘a practical approach to curriculum’ and ‘melds social, political, and cultural debate and discussion with the analysis of how texts and discourses work, where, with what consequences, and in whose interests’ (Luke 2012: 5). In order to enable students to examine how cultural meanings are produced, disseminated and consumed (Hall 1997), educators may find helpful pedagogical insights in critical literacy practices. Additionally, critical literacy has the potential to bring to light the conditions that enable/disable the recognition of certain subjects as human beings that deserve to be protected (Butler 2010). After all, critical literacy has ‘an explicit aim of the critique and transformation of dominant ideologies, cultures and economies, and institutions and political systems’ (Luke 2012: 5).

The space constraint of an essay does not permit detailed elucidation of critical literacy as a rich pedagogical tradition; therefore, I briefly describe one form of critical literacy that is central to my argument and proposal. This form of critical literacy is known as critical language awareness, which seeks to ‘increase consciousness of how language contributes to the domination of some people by others’ (Fairclough 2015: 229). Critical language awareness is in sharp contrast with an instrumental view of language education, which is based on the transmission of skills, such as writing clearly, for successful communication. Fairclough (2015) suggests two guiding principles for the curriculum and pedagogy of critical language awareness: first, the learner’s language awareness and discourse practices have to be put together, and second, critical awareness has to be built upon the learner’s existing language capabilities and experiences.

Such pedagogy involves a four-part cycle: reflection on experience, systematising experience, explanation and developing practice. First, students reflect upon their experiences and share their reflections with others. Second, the teacher shows them how to express their reflections in systematic forms. Third, the knowledge produced through systematic reflections is further analysed individually and collectively. Finally, the critical awareness resulting from these activities is used to develop students’ capacity for purposeful critical practices. In other words, the notion of critical language awareness, when applied to school education, suggests that ‘the development of [students’] language capabilities should proceed through bringing together their existing abilities and experiences, their growing critical awareness of language, and their growing capacity to engage in purposeful discourse’ (Fairclough 2015: 238). In summary, a critical orientation to education—informed by critical literacy—asks us to examine the role of language, text and discourse in maintaining or transforming the existing social orders. It also ‘help[s] us to name and interrogate our practices in order to change them’ (Janks 2014: 349).

Critical literacy can be a powerful pedagogical approach in the contexts of crucial social and political events. For example, Michell (2006) discusses how critical literacy facilitated his transformative teaching focused on events such as the 9/11. He shows how such teaching ‘prepares students to be critically aware of the content, intent, and context of the many texts they encounter and compose’ (Michell 2006: 41). Drawing from the works of critical literacy scholars and educators, I propose that school teachers take a critical literacy approach to pedagogy in order to throw light on the objective, symbolic and systemic forms of violence that prepare the ground for subjective violence (Žižek 2008). Thus, formal schooling can play an important role in nurturing a kind of sociological imagination in students that is necessary to understand the conditions under which sexual violence against women occurs. This kind of imaginative understanding is necessary for students if they want to oppose acts of violence. As Greene (1995: 22) writes, ‘imagining things being otherwise may be a first step toward acting on the belief that they can be changed.’

In the remainder of the essay, I propose four pedagogical principles. These principles are based on the four dimensions of critical literacy that Lewison et al. (2002) have described. The first dimension is disrupting the commonplace, which denotes ‘seeing the “everyday” through new lenses’ (382–83). The second dimension is interrogating multiple viewpoints, which invites ‘us to imagine standing in the shoes of others—to understand experience and texts from our own perspectives and the viewpoints of others and to consider these various perspectives concurrently’ (383). The third dimension—focusing on sociopolitical issues—pays attention ‘to how sociopolitical system, power relationships, and language are intertwined and inseparable from our teaching’ (383). The fourth and final dimension of critical literacy is taking action to promote social justice. It is my hope that these principles will provide educators with pedagogical resources for what Cooper and White (2006) describe as critical literacy in action.

Principle One: Disrupting the Commonplace

This dimension of critical literacy asks us to identify the ‘implicit modes of perception’ and to use new frames to understand them (Lewison et al. 2002: 383). In other words, there are certain theories and patterned beliefs about life and society, which form certain ideologies. These ideologies organise ‘the tremendous complexity of the world into something fairly simple’, and, thus, they provide ‘the believer with a picture of the world both as it is and as it should be’ (Sargent 2003: 3). Ideologies impact our actions and choices such as the social groups we join, the careers we choose, the friends we make and so on. Oftentimes, the theories and beliefs that form certain ideologies seem to be innocent as people take them for granted. A critical literacy perspective requires that we step out of these everyday taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions, and interrogate them in order to reveal what is beneath them (Lewison et al. 2015).

Suggested classroom activity: One way to disrupt the commonplace view of girls/women is to examine stereotyped and gendered constructions of the female body in popular films. Teachers may find a film that portrays women as vulnerable and subject to sexual harassment/violence because of their social standing and choices they make, for example, wearing certain kinds of clothes. Students should be provided with guidelines for a critical examination of the film so that they can shed new light on what is taken for granted.

As a powerful medium of cultural re/production, South Asian films often construct a particular view of the female body, which is ‘responsible’ for being raped because it ‘incites’ men. Therefore, film analysis can be an effective way of contesting hegemonic social and cultural inscriptions that result in a subordinate status for women. Films that are oppressive to women usually take a discursive approach to the social construction of the female body. This kind of discursive approach is also evident in fields other than films. For example, Makoni (2011: 340) shows how taxi inscriptions are used in African cities to ‘construct the female body as a subject of intervention or social control and clothing as a means of maintaining inequality and asserting male dominance’. Makoni’s study also reveals that women are warned against wearing miniskirts because doing so may incur rape. We have noticed this kind of reasoning in South Asia with regard to sexual violence against women. Oftentimes, women are blamed for wearing dresses that ‘incite’ men to rape them. As a result of such discourses, ‘the criminality of rape is rhetorically and grammatically erased, and sexual violence against women is used as a reiterative, punitive measure to sustain patriarchal control’ (Makoni 2011: 354). Thus, classroom pedagogies that utilise a critical literacy approach to analysing such hegemonic discourses may help students understand the kind of symbolic violence that occurs through everyday linguistic and social practices (Žižek 2008).

Principle Two: Interrogating Multiple Viewpoints

This second dimension of critical literacy asks us to stand in the shoes of others. When applied to classroom pedagogies, this dimension encourages the juxtaposition of multiple and contradictory accounts of a text or an event. For instance, ‘readers might interrogate a text by paying attention to whose voices are heard and whose are missing and by considering how a story would be different if it were told from a different perspective’ (Lewison et al. 2015: 10). By taking this approach to pedagogy, teachers may shake the very foundation of a subjectivist way of perceiving the world, that is, how people hold firmly onto their own beliefs and refuse to understand others’ experiences and opinions. Such a pedagogy invites students ‘to continue to grapple with fundamental issues, thus disrupting our tendency to provide easy answers to complex problems’ (Vasquez et al. 2013: 12).

Suggested classroom activity: Instructional activities informed by this dimension of critical literacy may ask students to interrogate any recent case of sexual violence from the victim’s point of view. The first condition of such activities should be to encourage students to give up their subjective beliefs formed by their sociocultural locations and identities. Here, the pedagogical purpose is not to nurture naïve sympathy for the victim, which often turns out to be about the subject’s self-centred desire to be thought of as a compassionate person. On the contrary, the purpose should be to co-suffer with the sufferer (Spelman 1997).

Pedagogies informed by this dimension of critical literacy should aim to cultivate a sociality of affect (Ahmed 2004; Anwaruddin 2016), which points to ethical dilemmas in our responsiveness to the suffering of other bodies. According to the sociality of affect, the victim does not remain the object of the sympathising subject. Rather, the subject strives to enter a relation of affective equivalence with the victim. A critical literacy approach is helpful for this purpose because it sheds light on the social dimension of normativity that governs the acts of recognition, which ‘confer “humanness” on some individuals’, while ‘deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status’ (Butler 2004: 2). Thus, by co-suffering with the victim, students may learn to develop the kind of sociological imagination (Mills 1959[2000]) necessary for standing against sexual violence in societies dominated by hegemonic patriarchy.

Principle Three: Focusing on Sociopolitical Issues

When critical literacy focuses on sociopolitical issues, it interrogates power, domination and access. It tries to uncover forms of oppression that seem to be normal or part of the status quo. When teachers adopt this approach to classroom instruction, they shall have students ‘study a wide scope of power relationships’ and ‘gain an understanding of the complexities surrounding power relationships and begin to imagine how things might be different’ (Lewison et al. 2015: 11). However, unpacking the power relationships may be difficult because it involves making connections among things, events and discourses that are not immediately obvious (Vasquez et al. 2013). For this reason, adopting this dimension of critical literacy may be helpful to understand the symbolic and systemic forms of violence that are usually invisible to our eyes (Žižek 2008).

Suggested classroom activity: Teachers may use newspaper reports about how individuals from ‘lower’ caste are often discriminated by the law enforcement agencies such as the police. It has been reported that when the families of victims seek help from the police, they are discriminated and ridiculed by the police (see, e.g., Arya 2014). Such news-reports can be a powerful text for pedagogical activities because students may get an opportunity to examine power relationships embedded in the fabric of the society. Students may be put in small groups and asked to analyse the discourses used in selected news-reports.

Acts such as police discrimination create conditions for a differential between human and less-than-human lives. They recognise some lives as liveable, while others as non-liveable (Butler 2010). A critical literacy approach to pedagogy challenges the students to not only interrogate the police inaction in cases of sexual violence committed to ‘lower’ caste women but also locate this form of violence in the broader sociocultural milieu. In light of Žižek’s (2008) work, the police discrimination—which is a typical systemic violence—prepares the ground for subjective violence. People are often touched (and sometimes furious) by the subjective violence, but very few seem to pay attention to the systemic violence. Therefore, a critical literacy approach to teaching is important so that students can learn to examine the systemic forms of violence.

Principle Four: Taking Action and Promoting Social Justice

What good is knowledge if it does not translate into action? As Freire wrote, reflection without action is nothing but verbalism. Without its dimension of action, a word becomes ‘idle chatter’ and it ‘cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action’ (Freire 1970: 87). Therefore, with the fourth dimension—that is, taking action for social justice—critical literacy comes to a full circle. When teachers adopt this dimension of critical literacy, they encourage ‘students to use critical social practices to rewrite their identities as social activists who challenge the status quo and demand change’ (Vasquez et al. 2013: 17).

Suggested classroom activity: One way of incorporating this fourth dimension of critical literacy into pedagogical activities is to invite students to examine popular culture. For example, students working in groups may identify a film that discursively constructs certain identity positions for women. Discursive constructions may include portraying the female body as vulnerable and prone to sexual violence. Students should be encouraged to discuss how such portrayals bypass the criminality of sexual violence and instead shift the blame onto the female victim. As a culminating activity, students can rewrite the film and perform it in their school or community theatre.

By engaging in such pedagogical activities, students may become social activists and interrupt the cultural reproduction of discourses that create and perpetuate women’s ‘subordinate’ status within various sociopolitical structures. Students may gain awareness about how certain beliefs and ideologies are produced and circulated through popular media. They may also take actions to deconstruct these beliefs and ideologies. Additionally, through their theatrical performance, students can educate others about the detrimental consequences of cultural reproduction that prepare the ground for both objective and subjective violence against women. By working for social justice, they may get an opportunity to transform their knowledge—gained through the first three dimensions of critical literacy—into action. In this way, they will be able to respond to a fundamental question that violence studies ask: ‘How can one apply knowledge about violence to advocate strategies that either reduce its incidence or deflect its force?’ (Lawrence and Karim 2007: 10). Through this action-oriented critical literacy pedagogy, teachers may support students to become actors, instead of mere spectators, in the world (Freire 1970). In this way, both teachers and students may engage in praxis, that is, ‘reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’ (Freire 1970: 33).

Conclusion

In this essay, I have discussed that sexual violence against women is one of the unpleasant realities that have existed in human societies across historical times and geographical locations. Drawing primarily upon Žižek’s (2008) work, I have argued that while responding to subjective forms of sexual violence is important, what is more crucial and necessary is to examine and understand objective forms of sexual violence. The latter forms of violence, both symbolic and systemic, prepare the ground for subjective violence, which is clearly visible. Objective forms of violence are difficult to identify and they often go unnoticed because they occur in the state of ‘normalcy’. Why should we look for evidence of violence when things are normal and smooth? However, as I have discussed above, objective forms of violence that are often invisible to the naked eye constitute the conditions for the more obviously visible subjective forms of violence. Echoing Butler (2010), I have argued that there are certain conditions under which sexual violence against women occurs. We have to know the conditions if we want to oppose such violence. To propose an oppositional pedagogy, I have presented four principles drawn from critical literacy education. It is my hope that these principles will encourage teachers and students to use critical social practices to identify and disrupt the conditions that allow sexual violence against women to take place.

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