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2 pERFORMATIVE DELIBERATION AND THE NARRATABLE WHO Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek world archein, “to begin,” “to lead,” and eventually “to rule,” indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere). Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. . . . The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition On 26 March 2011, bursting the boundaries between Libyan citizens and Western journalists at the Rixos Hotel, Libyan lawyer Eman al-Obeidi reported her repeated gang rapes, two days of captivity, and assault by fifteen Gaddafi soldiers. She told the foreign press corps, “Look at what Gaddafi’s militia did to me.” Her distress, demonstrably scratched face, and binding marks on her wrists—behavior, mark, and gesture—worked as testimony as much as the narrative within her accusations. Responding to her situation, televised internationally, the world quickly deliberated on her fate, on justice, on the place of rape in war, on the future of Libya, on international responsibility , on the nature of journalism, and on the disappeared. It responded with petitions (a million signatures gathered), blogs, Facebook pages, news analysis, and engagement from many governments and NGOs. Dragged out of the hotel and held for ten more days, now in official government custody, she was released on 3 April in response to world pressure. Al-Obeidi, despite her legal education, did not choose a textual representation of injustice; she did not file a complaint with the police or blog about her captivity. Rather she came to a particular position to a particular audience and sat her bruised body down at the breakfast table. In the many following scuffles—involving herself, government minders, hotel staff, and journalists—the embodied pERFORMATIVE DELIBERATION 67 acts of authoritarian government demonstrated its will to violate and its relationship to Libyan people in moving bodies for the world to see. Through changing her position, al-Obeidi changed the potential of her situation. Her position and potential were different in the Rixos Hotel than in the Libyan streets or Gaddafi’s courts. As she redefined the event from state power to state assault, al-Obeidi’s testimony offered a new norm of political speech in Libya, a norm of embodied, positioned politics toward which revolutionaries and advocates work and which in turn works upon them. In testifying to rape as a war crime, al-Obeidi first refuses the norms of rape warfare and then rearticulates them, remaking the silence of attack and the devastating feminine shame into the voice of an attacked people and the shame of the patriarchal state. In positioning herself at the Rixos Hotel, she initiates the events, for all events are human creations, constructed from raw experiences into rhetorical arguments and identity narratives. Her argument and narrative, dramatically performed, offer physical evidence and a demand that the world recognize her and reciprocate. Even though journalists at the Rixos responded to her accusations, their recognition and reciprocity could only be asymmetrical: al-Obeidi speaks only for minutes before she is abducted again, but even her brief speech has perlocutionary effect. As a speech act, however, her testimony does more than persuade. It makes the event, the citizen herself, and a worldly response. Her testimony performs a ritualized act, such as those performed by baptisms, legal sentences, or warnings , but as well it potentially confers a binding power on itself, in that she refigures the cultural norms of the shamed woman. If a baptism renames a child, then al-Obeidi’s testimony renames shame, shifting shame from the silenced woman to the shame of the abusive state, moving the norms of degradation , death, and repentance to the state. As the norms are repositioned, al-Obeidi’s refusal of the position of shamed woman potentially renames the position of the state as shamed and unjust. In refusing the expected position, her testimony forms new, unstable relationships among herself, the state, and international communities, redefining their relationships and raising questions about the nature of agency in transnational advocacy. Although the international communities recognized her, one of the considerations is how they recognized her. How does a lone speaker garner such immediate and...

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