Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

women; violence against women is not just the effect
and symptom of lust, ethnic cleansing, of militarism, and
all kinds of fundamentalism; instead, violence against
women is the very CENTRAL FABRIC that creates
and maintains patriarchal and phallocentric cultural
regimes. In armed conflict situations like war, “women
of the enemy side are the objects of targeted aggression.
They are raped in order to destroy their dignity as women
and to demoralize and humiliate the male enemy.” (Sajor,
1997)
According to Filipina feminist counselor Dr. Sylvia
Estrada-Claudio (2006), 4 one of the mechanics of
sexualized torture is dehumanization: to render a person
as non-human. For instance, during the time of Marcos,
priests were more likely to be raped (before being
tortured). This was probably because priests, being
sacred in Philippine culture, must first be feminized and
not seen as persons, before they can be tortured. The
same principle of dehumanization-through-feminization
of the body (male and female) applies in recent alleged
rapes by women on men in prison conditions like Abu
Ghraib, where roles have been reversed—the female is
the alleged perpetrator; and in same-sex violence, which
according to Estrada-Claudio, is a subject that has yet
to be satisfactorily addressed by feminist scholarship.
However, pending more research and refining of the
still underdeveloped feminist theorizing on the poetics
of trauma and shame, I would like to suggest: where
violence is systematically perpetuated and tolerated,
there are still a large number of women and children
who are raped in refugee camps, in their own families,
are driven to self-murder (actually wanting to die), and
are subjected to shame—shame at being born, shame at
being violated, and even shame at having survived at all,
knowing that others have died.
The greatest shame however, is THE SHAME OF
TURNING ONE’S BACK ON CRIMES COMMITTED
AGAINST OTHERS. And Art, at its most powerful,
reminds us that the world should be shamed by its ability
to tolerate, to look away, to forget and turn our backs
on crimes committed against humanity. And at its most
honest and evocative, a gendered and feminist-inspired
reading of art can challenge the regimes that inflict the
wounds of violence in a warring and warlike present. As
public intellectuals, as others-who-are-not-other enough,
feminist art historians and artists are perpetual exiles
who do not “respond to the logic of the conventional but
to the audacity of daring, and to representing change,
to moving on, not standing still.” (Said: 1994, 47) In
this paper, I hoped to show how such exilic stance can
interrupt the official stories about who women are—as
ENGAGING MODERNITY: RELIGION, GENDER, AND ART 117
in for instance, “brown women being protected from
brown men by white men”—or what they want and
what they say and do not say—as in the justification
“Women actually wanted to die”—by providing that
transport-station, the space and possibility for those
wounded by trauma and shame—to speak.
EPILOGUE
Upon completion of my fellowship, I have planned
and initiated an exhibit-conference-workshop entitled
“trauma, interrupted: Art as transport station of trauma,
healing and mourning.” It aims to gather an international
group of women artists, cultural workers and scholars
from other disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, medical
anthropology, dance, film, theater) for a conference
and exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of the
Philippines, November 2006. As part of the preparations
for the this November event, a series of workshops are
being held in March, April and May, where women artists
from Japan, the US, Ireland, Thailand, Indonesia, the
Philippines, among others will liaise and interact
subaltern communities, such as:
1. Children survivors of rape and incest nurtured by
CRIBS Philippines, a Non-Government Organization.
Alma Quinto, Filipina artist has been conducting
creative visual autobiography workshops with them;
2. Children with cancer, children in conflict situations,
street children;
3. those displaced as migrants, migrant workers, and
internal refugees, such as Moro Women of Marawi,
Mindanao;
4. those traumatized and stigmatized by illness like
Hansen’s disease, AIDS, depression, among others;
and
5. those traumatized by armed conflict situations, like
survivors of sexual slavery and torture.
This project is an outcome of a ten-year research on the
women artists of Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam,
Malaysia, Philippines, China, South Korea, Japan). The
focus on trauma is a significant thread that emerged
from the research I conducted recently (2004-2005) in
Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Japan, as a Senior
Asian Public Intellectuals (API) Fellow of The Nippon
Foundation Fellowships.
Drawing from the network, empirical spadework and
discursive energies of this lifework, this project brings
together women artists from countries covered by my
research, as well as from the United States, the United
Kingdom, Spain, Australia, among others. However,
participation is not limited by gender, since male
anthropologists, dancers, composers, choreographers,
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows