Subjectivity: Graduate Student Conference and Keynote Lecture by Veena Das

How are legal subjects made through a braiding of fact and fiction? In this paper, I explore the hinges and meshes through which power and knowledge flow bringing events in the neighborhood before the law and the contingencies through which sexual violence is episodically propelled into publicity or allowed to remain unacknowledged into the interstices of life in the neighborhoods I have studied. I ask how questions of intelligibility pose themselves in the scene of the courtroom, in contrast to that of the neighborhood? While I show that skepticism  about that which is before one’s eyes is not ever extinguished once and for all, there are moments of overcoming through enactments that I name as an ordinary realism.