The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compacts are too terrible to utter aloud; this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Hence, to think or categorize the sexual violence on women and the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and discrimination of minorities are two separate things are artificial. Both are about power, oppression, and control, hence both are political and have to be encountered politically. The Feminist Method is consciousness raising by which one will eventually understand social oppression and discrimination are all structural and not a one time thing.
My series will alternate between speaking of some feminist aspects of sexual violence and of the above of Bengali Hindu minorities in Bangladesh. Here is an interesting take on rape by Catharine Mackinnon. According to Mackinnon, ..a rape is not an isolated event, or a moral transgression or an individual interchange gone wrong but as act of terrorism, a torture within the systemic context of group subjugation, like lynching. The fact that the State calls rape a crime opens an inquiry into the state’s treatment of rape as an index to its stance on the status of sexes” (Mackinnon, On Coercion and Consent, Marxism, Feminism, Method, and the State).”