[Discussion] bk rev.: Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Arturo J. Aldama, ed. Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the
State. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. 452 pp.
Illustrations, bibliography index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-2533-4171-X;
$29.95 (paper), ISBN 0-2532-1559-5.
*Reviewed by:* Alec H. Balasescu, Department of International
Communications, American University of Paris/EHESS.
*Published by:* H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(November, 2004)
Specters of Derrida: Citizenship Tattooing Bodies

Derrida's recent death marks the beginning of the controversy on
Derrida's life (and work), in the absence of the very subject of this
controversy. Appearing this past year, Violence and the Body bears the
mark of Derrida's name that traverses, sometimes as an absent referent,
the texts gathered together in this volume edited by Arturo Aldama. The
volume's second, explanative, title is "Race, Gender, and the State," an
all-inclusive invitation to lecture for those who are theoretically and
practically involved in research on these topics. The overarching
question traversing this volume may be: "How do state technology (or
governmental ideology apparatuses, to paraphrase Althusser, I will
explain in a minute) create and rearrange racial and gender borders and
how are these borders branded on bodies practicing subjectivation?"

De Certeau's observation that any law is inscribed upon the body
constitutes the argument for collecting a wide variety of texts in
reference to modalities in which law marks bodies, and ultimately, I
would argue, how bodies are designed and subjectivities informed through
legal practices and the correlative resistance. The political stakes of
the volume are high: "To resist the violence of predatory capitalism, we
must learn to forge transnational and transethnic opposition coalitions
that are fluid, multilevel, and sustained without being autocratic" (p.
5). Violence and the Body proposes a global mapping of legal and
representational technologies that shape body conduits and reinforce
structural inequalities, sometimes offering alter-natives to "discourses
of otherization ... reinforced and interanimated through violence on ...
'intensities' and 'flows' of the body" (p. 7).

The three-sequence face of violence as identified by Derrida is
discussed by Elizabeth Grosz in its relation with temporal structuring
of the social dynamic and may constitute the grid of lecture for the
entire volume. The sequences are: the passage from the fluid existence
of the thing in itself to the representation and fixation of the thing
through "writing/violence" that takes away the "thingness" of the thing.
"This violence is the containment and ordering of the thing to give up
its 'thingness' and to submit itself to the leveling of representation,
a mythical and impossible leveling that assumes a self-identity the
thing itself never possessed" (p. 137). In simpler words, the formation
of any meaningful representation (the basis of culture in its
anthropological sense) constitutes the primordial violence. The second
sequence is the violent erasure of the traces of this primordial
violence, and it is usually called "law," "reason," or "right." This
counter-violence asserts itself as non-violent and gives itself the
power of qualifying subsequent violence. It rules over the third type of
violence, the "mundane and viscerally horrifying" violence (p. 137). The
axiologic relation between these three sequences of violence is capital
in understanding why some "horrifying violence" is deemed horrifying,
while other is lawful, reasonable, or even not perceived as violence but
as normal (f)act--in conformity to the norm.

All chapters of this volume are in a more or less explicit manner
involved in the critique of the articulation of representation
formation, violence, and subjectivation. The volume is divided in four
parts addressing, from various perspectives, the technologies of body
inscription and subject formation. Violence and the Body may be read as
an(other) argument that the body is the subject, argument emphasized in
chapter 18, "Re/membering the Body," which analyzes from a
psycho-therapeutic perspective the traces of domestic violence on Latina
women. The selection is eclectic, inviting readers from a wide range of
disciplines. However, not all essays stand on the same theoretic
standards set by the editors, nor are they necessarily "grounded in
U.S./Mexico border and Latin American cultural studies" as the back
cover would have it.

The first part, "Global Crossings: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts,"
gathers together seven essays that analyze the display of conflicts on
bodies, the global perspective being conveyed by the geographic variety
of the topics' location. Chicana/Chicano subjectivity formation is the
editor's opening chapter that emphasizes United States institutional
technologies deployment that undermines attempts to imagine and
represent Chicana/Chicano subjects as fully constituted persons. From
INS and border patrol officers' practices to cuts in educational support
and opportunities for 'minorities' in the United States, these are as
many ways to designate "subjects as abjects" and to ascribe them into
the space of otherness. Fear of (sexual and ethnic) otherness emerges in
Catherine Raissiguier's chapter on PaCS (the national form of domestic
partnership in France). This form of legalizing couples is open to
same-sex and different-sex persons deciding to share daily life together
for a while. It gives rights of residency to foreigners "pacs-ing"
French citizens. For these two reasons, i.e., the attempt to legislate
(legitimate) same-sex couples and to give inclusive rights to those who
are not fully fledged citizens, biting rhetoric mechanisms have been
deployed in order to demonize this initiative, and to conflate in one
overarching threatening identity those who decide to "PaCS." The author
finds the expression of this rhetoric branded with graffiti on a city
wall: Islam=SIDA. The chapter approaches the texts of the parliamentary
debates preceding the voting of PaCS law, and shows how the terrain for
this populist and discriminatory rhetoric is already is incumbent in
some parliamentary addresses. Far from celebrating this new legal form
of subjectivation, Raissiguier warns us against "its many flaws and the
differential forms of exclusion they are bound to engender" (p. 108).

Under the same umbrella of "Global Crossings," the reader may find a
richness of reflections and well-documented research. Aniko Imre writes
about the difficult translation of feminist theory in Eastern Europe,
approaching the question of "Poetic Nationalism" and/as pornography in
Hungary. In her chapter, based on textual analysis of male poets writing
in cross-gender voices, the author shows how the "compassionate"
male-disguised-in-female literary voices perpetuate representation of
women as exotic, over-erotic others portrayed against the non- marked
self of the "Hungarian Woman" serving national reproductive interests.
Aniko Imre's essay is compelling, bringing to public attention the way
in which post-colonial theories, post-third worldism feminist theories,
and women of color writings might be employed in an effort to understand
gender dynamics in Eastern Europe. The author sees Eastern European
transition (as any transgressing instance) as a moment that "provides an
opportunity to foreground the discursive tools of oppression, which
national political and intellectual elites inadvertently expose in their
increased effort to maintain the status quo" (p. 53).

Literary text analysis is replaced with image and text analysis in
Yamuna Sangarasivam's research on "Militarizing the Feminine Body [and]
Women's Participation in the Tamil Nationalist Struggle." The
incorporation of women in the military body fighting against Sri Lankan
government subverts gender expectations in the villages from which the
new recruits come. However, a new gendered inscription is visible in
texts and representations of women's militarized bodies. Military
incorporation transforms women's bodies (subjectivities) from passive
victims to active participants in organized resistance against an
occupying state. A different form of gendered resistance is discussed in
Leila Neti's chapter on "Blood and Dirt." In the 1980s, Irish women
prisoners started a protest against their loss of status of political
prisoners. Bodily secretions spilled on the walls of prison inscribed
their protest. The author uses Mary Douglas's structural approach on
dirt in order to emphasize the disruption of British modern systemic
order the menstrual blood on the prison's wall introduces. Blood traces
on the prison's wall indicate gender matters there where it should not,
because ideally the processing of bodies by the modern prison machine is
un-marked by gender (or it relates to the standard un-marked gender/race
category, the white male).

This first part of the book also contains the analysis of representation
of presidential body in the Philippines during Marco's regime. The
over-signified, hyper-sexualized presidential couple in the media is
contrasted with the citizen body represented through lack of valorizing
characteristics.

Grosz's essay on "Time for Violence" ends this section only to open the
next one dedicated to colonial advent and the consumption of the other:
following Derrida's lead, Grosz observes that the violence of
coloniality "rests upon, indeed is made possible by, the logically prior
two senses of violence" (p. 138). Each of the following three parts of
the book tackles the three sequences of violence as coined by Derrida.
Hayes's reflection on cannibalism proposes the deconstruction of one of
the "favorite" metaphors of colonialism not as "a process of reducing
everything to words, as if this will eradicate the metaphysical, but
[as] a reading of the stratification of metaphors and metaphysics and a
criticism of the reason why some metaphors gain dominance" (p. 155).
Thus, the Western moral economy (the second level of violence) is both
the generator and the justifier of marking the other as (solely) cannibal.

The colonial encounter proves rich in material for analysis and critique
of violent inscription on the body--read violent subject re/formation.
If up to this moment the eclectic rather than the unity seemed the
underlying characteristic of this volume, an attentive reading would
recover the threads linking chapters among them. Thus, Margarita Saona's
critical study of Carmen Boullosa's novel that is organized on three
levels of translation and spread across three timeframes (the American
colonial past, the failed utopia of the present, and the projected
speechless future) reveals the successive inscription of law on the body
through language (or its absence for that matter). In Boullosa's novel,
the inscription through Latin language learning replaces the inscription
of the law through tongue piercing in the life of Hernando, a colonial
subject of America's conquest; this sends us back to Derrida's
discussion about the margin of violent traces of the legal or moral
justificative (but unjust) system. Dennis Childs's essay on Angola (an
ex-slave plantation turned prison in the United States) recalls into
question the racial body and its reinscription into the space of
otherness. Slavery is replaced with imprisonment while the rhetoric of
the slave body is turned into the fear-based rhetoric of crime that
relies on the same type of signifier: the skin color. The black body is
covered in a process of semiotic layering in which metaphors of
abnormality look like tectonic plaques of subjectivity: "what is clearly
at issue is the degree to which the trusty's possible homosexuality is
linked with abnormality and added to the normative grid that projected
guilt onto the victim of violence" (p. 202). A trace comes to mind:
"Islam=SIDA." Markovitz's analysis of Goetz trial (Goetz, a white
37-year-old man shot four young black men who asked him for five dollars
in a subway ram in New York in 1984) shows how the "normative grid"
projecting guilt on victims functions in the legal system. Black bodies
are always already marked as criminals in the signifying system of the
United States, a socially accepted and significant metaphor. Bearing the
trace of the crime to which they have been subjected (the crime of being
signified as other), black bodies are called upon to legitimize an
already existing verdict of law against them. Fear is racialized and
justifies crime in the process of metaphoric creation of the criminal
other.

The abstraction of bodies to signs (the DNA code) is the theme of
Guerrero's essay on "Biocolonialism and Global Genocide" (pp. 171-188).
Biotechnological projects encode bodies and populations in amino-acid
sequences, "a eugenistic assumption that genes equal people, an
assumption that threatens the self-determination for survival among
these groups. Also inherent in this scientific jargon is the blatant
disrespect for human life by implying that these indigenous peoples are
already on their way out as soon-to-be-extinct cultural entities and
therefore warrant this kind of commercial exploitation" (pp. 178-179).
While using promising material that point to racist theories bordering
Nazism that are "taken for granted" in biotechnological research, this
essay does not engage (but should it?) with theorists like Paul Rabinow
or Bruno Latour who have a "long record" of analyzing biotechnologies
and ethics.

The multiple facets of contestation of the concepts of "truth,"
"reasonable," or "normal," in other words, the resistance to the second
sequence of normalizing violence, appear in the third part of the
volume, "Performing Race, Gender, and Sexuality." Rimke's opening essay
on the constitution of interiorities during the development of
psychiatric sciences in the nineteenth century tackles the issue of
normality and abnormality, the standards against which the "deviant"
classed, gendered, and exotic bodies are judged. The author identifies
the social genealogy of interiority that echoes Derrida's sequential
view of violence, in that it does away with ontological non-violent
existences: "Instead of presuming the a priori existence of
interiorities and the meanings of bodies as prediscursive, the
interiorization thesis emphasizes how the interior, as a distinct
characteristic of human beings, is itself a product of cultural and
historical forces warred upon the body" (p. 248). Madness and
abnormality describe the "normal" middle class bourgeois subject, but
also pathologize the lower classes (see pp. 254-255). Thence the
author's proposal for an "[a]n alternative understanding of the normal
and pathological emphasizes not 'the social control of deviance' but
rather the cultural production of difference as pathology through the
practice of reading the body" (p. 257). While rich in references of
nineteenth century textual production, the essay, surprisingly (or
intentionally) avoids any reference to Foucault and his history of
madness; I prefer to think that this is done in the Foucauldian spirit
of continuation of an intellectual project (as Michel Foucault himself
avoided references to Marx's writings). The section continues with the
exploration of forms of "deviance" as forms of resistance to the
dominant discourse on sexuality, gender, race, and citizenship.

Sel Whang's "Double Cross" is a deconstruction of the hetero-normative
mapping of the social space in the United States (including the
designation of homosexuality and transgender as fixed, and thus
manageable, categories). The hetero-categories are based on mono-axial
genetic assumptions, as the author argues, under which "transsexual
bodies are conveniently elided. Thus, according to this logic, a person
who was born a genetic female, for instance, and is attracted to males
must be heterosexual. This kind of limited erotic system cannot take
into account that perhaps a genetic female identifies as a gay man, and
so desires men as a gay man--and does not desire men as a heterosexual
woman" (p. 291). Wahng explores the kaleidoscopic variety of sexual and
gender practices starting from the analysis of a FTM (female to male)
film director's documentary Trappings of Transhood (1997). Mapuche
shamans also challenge Chilean-state hetero-normativity (as argued in
the essay by Anna Mariella Bacigalupo) who sail among gendered
identities and confront thus Chile's modernizing project. Posing as
non-governable bodies, they offer social and spiritual healing to
indigenous bodies hurt by state representations of the "un-civilized,"
and dispossessed of land in the name of progress. Following the
Foucauldian understanding of power, the author shows how "power lies not
only with those who impose gendered structures but also with those who
creatively transforms them" (p. 339), an argument that is reworked by
Elaine H. Kim in her essay on Korean American women (pp. 311-321).
Elaine Kim problematizes the subject position of Korean American women
feminists, questioning their favorite subject choice: the supposedly
non-voiced subaltern Korean woman. "Just as it may not be useful to
think solely in terms of class consciousness leading to class struggle
leading to structural change along a linear trajectory, Korean American
and Korean women's identities may overlap in many places, making it
difficult to place one as the sovereign and opportunistic voyeur and the
other as idealized or victimized and completely without agency" (pp.
316-317). Identification in front of the sexual moralism of the
"fatherland" is the link between the Korean American women derided as
"Western Princess" or "whores of the West" and their fetish "object of
study," that is the military prostitution.

Deviation from morality and normality, deviation from standards of
governable subjectivities is also what justifies "lawful" violence
against these subjectivities. The essay that reveals the violence of the
making of "normality" in its connection with visual technologies
explores Rita Hayworth's road to stardom. The landmarks of her strenuous
path to glory are marked upon her body by medical technologies used to
transform her image from a "latina" to an "all American woman" "so
'American' [that] her image graced the first atomic bomb" (p. 271).

Part four of the book deals with violence in its mundane understanding,
sanctioning at the same time the previous pages of the book. With the
exception of Peacock's essay on domestic violence among South Asian
immigrants in the United States, all other essays in this section
revolve around Latin American and Chicana/Chicano studies. The same
variety of topics, ranging from state violence in Latin America and the
response of victims' mothers, to constricting hetero-normativity as
depicted in Arturo Ripstein's film El Lugar Sin Limito offers a fertile
ground for reconsidering theories of violence. This last section starts
with a welcome article from an "academic clinical psychologist," Yvette
Flores-Ortez who presents the clinical path to healing from the trauma
of domestic (and domesticated) violence among Mexican families in the
United States. In one case, metaphors of colonialism equate a victim of
domestic violence with Malinche, the "presumed collaborator in the
conquest of Mexico" metaphor that "situates the narrator as one of the
countless women, who according to Mexican history and popular culture,
have betrayed her race," and that justifies violence in the eyes of the
male perpetrator (p. 355). This moment resonates with the text analysis
of the relationship "between language, violence, and the entire American
continent as utopia" (p. 227) from "Pierced Tongues" (see above) by
Margarita Saona. State violence in dictatorial regimes and its
perpetuation through technologies of governance (human rights discourses
and/or medical complex of managing population) are the foci of Lessie Jo
Frazier's essay.

David William Foster's analysis of Ripstein's film serves as support to
challenge the binary upon which Queer theory is based, that is, the
marked/unmarked binary questioning the logic of this "logic"
organization of thought. This is in fact one of the issues that gives
unity to this otherwise eclectic volume. Technologies of governmentality
(a post-nation-state echo of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses)
combine the management of signs with their inscription on bodies
practicing subjectivation, and creating marked/unmarked bodies and
consequently docile subjects. While thinking through governmentality and
the inscription of the law on the body, one cannot help but be reminded
of Giorgio Agamben's philosophical inquiry in his three volumes
generically entitled Homo Saccer.

As this collection shows, the state does not magically disappear from
the global scene but may be conceptualized as an actor among others that
violently inform subjectivities in terms of race, gender, or class
scripted (tattooed) on the body. An important point is the emphasis put
on the body not as a possession of an ontologic subject, but as
coincident with the subject, thus opening up the possibility of
understanding subject formation through body practices. A "big absence"
in this volume is Marcel Mauss, whose essay on "Techniques of the Body"
and on personhood might have provided an even more solid ground for
these explorations. While bridges between Anglo-Saxon and French
theories are sometimes difficult to bridge (with few notable
exceptions), I would signal Jean Pierre Warnier's work on material
culture as presented in his book Construire la culture materielle:
L'homme qui pensait avec ses doigts (1999) as a starting point for the
re-problematization of the relationship between body conduits (fluid
bodies) and practices of subjectivation.

While Judith Butler is widely quoted in the essays pertaining to gender,
and Derrida's theory on violence is the organizational backbone of the
volume, Foucault's approach on body and subjectivity is almost
neglected. Might it be because many readings of Foucault strip him of
his deeply engaged position and imagine resistance as a futile action?
However, many spaces of resistance depicted in this volume are congruent
to what Foucault imagines as practices of resistance in the system based
on capillarity of power. As Foucault put it: "In this central and
centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power
relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of
'incarceration', objects for discourses that are in themselves elements
for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle."[1] Violence
and the Body is a volume that brings to the front and makes audible, in
different intensities and sound qualities (if I am allowed), the "roars
of the distant battle" of resistance and subjectivation.

Note

[1]. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 308.