Performing Pain, Reclaiming Flesh: Erotics of Humiliation and Dalit Embodiment in Pornography, Performance Art, and Media Activism

Abstract

This research paper critically examines the complex relationships between caste, sexuality, and embodiment by exploring the various ways the Dalit body is depicted as a site of eroticisation, abjection, and political reclamation within the liminal realms of pornography, radical performance art, and digital media activism. Positioned at the intersection of biopolitical analysis, affect theory, and anti-caste epistemologies, the study investigates how pain and humiliation, historically embedded in the Dalit corporeal schema as tools of caste control, are both sensationalised within regimes of visual and sexual consumption and reimagined as strategic forms of resistance, affective re-inscription, and epistemic disobedience.

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, Giorgio Agamben’s theory of homo sacer and bare life, and B.R. Ambedkar’s radical redefinition of dignity and emancipatory ethics, this paper examines the conditions under which the Dalit body navigates its hypervisibility and structural precarity within hegemonic representational economies. Through critical analysis of caste-coded pornographic tropes, the performative dramatizations of pain enacted in contemporary Dalit performance art, and the insurgent aesthetics of media-based activism, this inquiry highlights the erotics of humiliation as a volatile discursive field—at once disciplinary and transgressive. Refusing to reduce the Dalit body to a passive symbol of victimhood, the paper proposes an alternative hermeneutic of embodiment in which corporeality itself becomes a creative site of aesthetic resistance, emotional counter-production, and political re-signification. By reclaiming the very flesh historically marked with stigma and shame, Dalit artists and activists mobilise a radical erotics of caste abolition, one that redefines the body as sovereign, sensate, and subversive of the normative moral imaginaries that sustain caste hegemony.