Body, Sexuality, and Symbolic Violence in Sexual Torture

This article is an approach to the phenomenon of torture, particularly sexual torture, and it aims to inquire into the common interpretative frameworks that are constructed in the sexual torture exerted over the individual bodies, as metaphorical representations of the social body, within the context of political violence. Through a phenomenological approach and a characterization of torture in its social, physical, psychological and sexual dimensions, it argues that sexual torture, as a communicative act, forces the subject to participate in its own victimization when its body orifices are used as tools of torture. It concludes that only the scream of the victim remains as an opportunity to articulate the pain with the experience of violence, the main purpose of which is to feminize the enemy as a strategy of symbolic domination by flooding the subject with sexual stimuli to alter its relationship with its own body.