The City of Sorrow: Sexual Violence and the Culture of Impunity in Dimapur

Venue: Seminar Room, Australia India Institute

Presenters: Dr Dolly Kikon

Focusing on women’s testimonies of sexual violence, this talk discusses Dr Kikon's ethnographic experience in Dimapur, the largest city in Nagaland. Dr Kikon traces the everyday experiences of structural violence in militarized societies and examine how they are produced in intimate spaces like the family unit and within the community.

Using the framework of ‘culture of impunity’, a term Dr Kikon borrows from her ethnographic investigation, she explain how there is a direct relationship between the rising cases of sexual violence and the culture of impunity in contemporary India.

By carefully weaving political history, interviews of rape survivors, and the spaces of competing authorities (state and non state actors) in the city of Dimapur, she will assert that women’s testimonies of sexual violence offers us an important lens to track how violence and trauma are alloted values, meanings, rarified, or turned into mundane incidents. Some of the questions Dr Kikon explores in this talk are; how do social relationships, otherwise presumed to be secure and familiar, such as families and kinship networks, become fraught with violence and insecurity? What does the city of Dimapur tell us about militarization, trauma, and violence in contemporary India? These questions, as she will highight in her talk, are significantly connected with issues of governance, citizenship, sovereignty, and justice.

Dr. Dolly Kikon joins the University of Melbourne in the Arts department. Prior to joining Melbourne University, Dr Kikon was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University.

from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/6383-the-city-of-sorrow-sexual-violence-and-the-culture-of