ABSTRACT
The book’s Conclusion, “Gestures of solidarity,” explores how the counter-normalizing/counter-humiliating characteristics of and effects generated by the forms of political protest analyzed in Chapters 3 and 4 can be and in fact are being cultivated within the context of daily life. Drawing upon the work of Butler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I present gesture as an everyday expression of solidarity. As verbal and embodied expressions, gestures facilitate victims’/survivors’ making sense of their experience and meaningfully expressing it within a context of normalization generally and gendered relations of power more specifically. Gestures of solidarity make possible connections that are forged on a shared experience of becoming other to oneself that takes the form of a transformative disclosure, the effects of which cannot be known in advance. These gestures neither merely reflect nor therefore merely reproduce existing ways (even feminist ways) of constituting, understanding, and relating to either sexual violence or to victims/survivors. Rather, gestures of solidarity require mutual risk, courage, openness to transformation, and willingness to fail. In short, these gestures and the practices onto which they open confront, (critically) engage, and ultimately affirm rather than disavow the interconnection of self-relation and other/world relations.
