Visual Practices, Affect, and the Body: The Story of a Night-Vigil in Kerala, India

This paper analyzes the unfolding of a protest in the form of a night-vigil in India in which bodies and acts are rendered sensational through the workings of media technologies. This paper moves away from a national frame and demonstrates that the regional can open up new ways to conceptualize the body and the affective formations of the public. It explores the key question of the public and the political as they are formed in the interstices of visual regimes. By drawing on a wide range of vernacular print and visual culture materials, it analyzes the manner in which bodies and acts caught in the mesh of visual technologies complicate one of the central conceptions of feminism: visibility as intertwined with claiming agency in the public sphere. The intersections of caste, gender, and organized party politics in the sensory regimes of the night-vigil gesture toward the precariousness of publics not as a threat but as a productive possibility. It puts forward the conception of the body as a porous and unstable site and allows for an engagement with scenography of protests in which resistance and embodiment is imagined anew.