Surviving Beyond Fear
Bunster, Ximena. “Surviving Beyond Fear: Women and Torture in Latin America”, pp. 297-325. In Women and Change in Latin America. Edited by June Nash and Helen Icken Safa. Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1986.
Bunster looks at the gender specific forms of institutional violence under Pinochet's dictatorship, which operated as a punishment for women's involvement in political activity: in the Southern cone this kind of punishment was administered in a systematic, methodical (scientifically) and bureaucratic ways and under discourses of "security". [Pero se me cayó doña Ximena, por qué usa Kathleen Barry, una feminista anti-prostitución, como marco teórico? :(] Bunster departs from the idea of a universal patriarchal oppression, and of Machismo/Marianismo as a local expression of a global schema. Under this cultural paradigm, women are recognized and valued only as mothers, and they themselves have internalized this pattern. The torture of female political prisoners is seen by Bunster under this frame as a form of sexual slavery in the context of a military state (which is in itself the logical extension of a male patriarchal state).
The application of electricity and in general pain inflicted in genital parts is documented to have been used both in men and women, but the specific nature of female sexual torture relates to the meanings of virgin/whore associated to these practices: women are being specifically punished for transgressing the model of passive, sacrificial motherhood promoted by Marianismo and therefore categorized as whores who deserve (and were looking for) physical abuse. Other practices described such as the use of animals in sexual torture, torture of children in front of parents affected both men and women too so I do not quite see how they are part of a system of female sexual slavery. Testimonies of these practices reveal that even though sexual violence in torture practices cut across class lines, they did present differences in their nature and degree depending on the perceived class/racial extraction (and thus respectability? See Salazar: working class women as intrinsically immoral).
Bunster looks at the gender specific forms of institutional violence under Pinochet's dictatorship, which operated as a punishment for women's involvement in political activity: in the Southern cone this kind of punishment was administered in a systematic, methodical (scientifically) and bureaucratic ways and under discourses of "security". [Pero se me cayó doña Ximena, por qué usa Kathleen Barry, una feminista anti-prostitución, como marco teórico? :(] Bunster departs from the idea of a universal patriarchal oppression, and of Machismo/Marianismo as a local expression of a global schema. Under this cultural paradigm, women are recognized and valued only as mothers, and they themselves have internalized this pattern. The torture of female political prisoners is seen by Bunster under this frame as a form of sexual slavery in the context of a military state (which is in itself the logical extension of a male patriarchal state).
The application of electricity and in general pain inflicted in genital parts is documented to have been used both in men and women, but the specific nature of female sexual torture relates to the meanings of virgin/whore associated to these practices: women are being specifically punished for transgressing the model of passive, sacrificial motherhood promoted by Marianismo and therefore categorized as whores who deserve (and were looking for) physical abuse. Other practices described such as the use of animals in sexual torture, torture of children in front of parents affected both men and women too so I do not quite see how they are part of a system of female sexual slavery. Testimonies of these practices reveal that even though sexual violence in torture practices cut across class lines, they did present differences in their nature and degree depending on the perceived class/racial extraction (and thus respectability? See Salazar: working class women as intrinsically immoral).
"this kind of punishment was administered in a systematic, methodical (scientifically) and bureaucratic ways"
ReplyDeleteI get this point, of course, but isn't there something perverse (in the broadest sense) in the sexualization of torture that in fact goes against the grain of bureaucratic rationality?