In the teeth of the legal process, I realised that politics are always of the body, not just when we fight for reproductive rights or against sexual violence. Power is enacted on and through flesh and blood, muscle and sinew. It is the truth that underwrites everything, from the hierarchy of where bodies are positioned in a courtroom, to the way bodies are written about in jurisprudence.
It exists in who gets to be described as a great mind, and who is reduced to a sum of violated body parts. Power decides whose bodies are afforded the dignity of care, privacy, safety and which ones are scrutinised, surveilled, and treated as disposable. It is why the bodies of millions of struggling students are described as cockroaches, why the bodies of sewage workers who descend into drains that suffocate them to death are forgotten everyday. Bodies are deemed pure and polluted in the name of caste, and these bodies are then mutilated in the name of protecting social order, forced into straitjackets of belonging and otherness: male, female, trans, disabled.
Power ranks bodies, and it is served by binaries. Hindus and Muslims, men and women. Good and bad victims, heroes and liars, liberal and conservative actors. All of these are disguises slapped onto the naked truth: power pits bodies against one another. Power manufactures binaries because our complexity, our full humanity is difficult to govern.
~ Nish
Shadow Twin
On rage, binaries, power and an eclipse
