UC San Diego

This thesis deploys Partition, as produced through testimonies, in order to investigate how intimate violence is produced and narrated. Partition, here, is not the object of analysis; rather, given the associated symbolics and imaginaries that recuperate violence from its abstraction, Partition is used as a site for investigating the analytics of violence, specifically intimate violence, as they operate within, and across, the evental and the everyday. In this thesis, I offer a critique of social scientific readings of intimate violence that merely allow for inclusions and reconfigurations of the figure of the woman without addressing the global/historical structures that produce her exclusion in the first place. Consequently, using testimonies of violence from Partition, I demonstrate how, far from disregarding gender, discourses on intimate violence often self-consciously reproduce gender subjugation. By following what Michel Foucault calls an archaeological analysis, I argue here that the objects of discourse that appear consistently in Partition testimonies - home, religion and nation - render the universal signifier of Partition as always already gendered. Next, using psychoanalytical theory, I assert that unless testimony is treated as an active political production, the figure of the woman in Partition will continue to remain an object of cultural contention, always already susceptible to a social scientific inclusion-exclusion paradigm. Thus, I examine testimony at the level of enunciation in order to open up possibilities for the figure of the woman to emerge as a political subject and hence inexcludable from the event.