Illocutionary Effects of ‘Bad Speech’: An Account of Attitudes of Rohingya Men on Gender-Based Sexual Violence in Balapur Refugee Camps

Abstract

All events of violence, barring their specificities, have one thing in common: they are indeed forms of othering. Violence is a relationship; logically, it cannot be self-sufficient because it is a phenomenon involving a dyad. Violence is an effect that seeks to annihilate the other, and hence an ‘other’ is a precondition for violence. Hence, to understand the mechanism behind a violent event, it is necessary to understand the phenomenon of othering. Othering is a political project enabled by history, and an ‘other’ is a consolidation of everyday historical performances. The paper aims to phenomenologically deconstruct the ‘historical Other.’ The popular conception of an ‘Other’ is a category ratified in norm and stabilized by power. Its truth is subject to conditions that precede itself. This paper looks at identity formation and aims to grasp the politics of epistemology, which is the dimension of speech responsible for creating knowledge. It uses speech act theory to evaluate speech and its generative potential. The paper evaluates the colloquial speech used by the Rohingya men, describing events of domestic violence in the Balapur refugee camps, to establish speech’s complicity in war recruitment. Through this evaluation, the paper aims to understand the mechanics of heteronormative power in legitimizing the status of the Other. It tries to expose the nature of infelicity, slander, and hate speech in a context of subordination. The paper shifts attention from the contents of the speech to its force capable of action. And argues that the dominant conception of the Other is in fact a speech act, a slur that reiterates a historical point and borrows from it the force requisite for violation; it has nothing to do with the truth of the Other, the Other that ‘is.’