Curating consent: sexual violence, moral politics and gendered agency in Sudan

Abstract

This article seeks to move beyond the impasse between the anthropological tradition (that remains cautious to condemn human rights violations defined by “universal” standards), and the international community (which advocates such “universal” norms). In line with feminist anthropological work in northeast Africa that has advanced understandings of gendered agency in Islamic and patriarchal cultures, I suggest that a careful analysis of plural local normative structures is necessary to understand any practice of women’s subordination and potential for agency. Two registers of justice are in circulation, in which ideals of feminine agency are made explicit. Women and girls who cannot identify their experience through either register of justice may not seek to report it. This helps account for why neither register of justice is useful to the majority of Sudanese women, but this seemingly impossible situation does not determine their capacity for agency. I draw inspiration from post-colonial feminism and Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches where the “culture” of sexual violence in Sudan is arguably a “translation” of Sudan’s national and transnational moral politics into the micropolitics of power among women and men in an inevitably plural post-colonial setting. Thus agency here is also “doing postcolonial gender.”.