The gendered space of death
Frazier, Lessie Jo. “Gendering the Space of Death: Memory, Democratization and the Domestic”, in Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence. William French and Katherine Elaine Bliss (eds.). Pp.261-281. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007
Frazier builds on Taussig's notion of the "space of death" and thinks of it as a site of both production and destruction of subjectivities in the context of the Chilean dictatorship, a space where acceptable and unacceptable —perverted and monstrously embodied— subjects are defined. She points out that this space can be perpetuated or dismantled by practices of memory, as it is a contested field, critical for struggles over political power. According to Frazier, "[i]n authoritarian regimes of state terror, the space of death is a patriarchal, bourgeois, and domestic space." (262)
Through the experience of torture, a perverse kind of intimacy between oppressor and oppressed emerges. And because in the Chilean transition governments have promoted "reconciliation" instead of justice, they have failed to address this effectively and terror continues to shape and structure social life. The military regime organized the disciplining and domestication of the national body, a sort of purge from ideological contamination, by the depoliticization of the body (as a surgical procedure). The body was in fact at the core of the organizing metaphors of the doctrine of national security: the nation as a body that reacts to contamination by fighting the disease (ideology, politics, the foreign Marxist cancer) with its antibodies (the military); along with the language of wounds, scars and healing in the post-dictatorship, this language contributes to the consideration of state violence as natural and necessary —if yet painful— for the greater good of neoliberal restructuring. Opposing political practice to national security, political subjects were constructed in the military's discourse as contaminated by ideology and a threat to the continuity of the nation.
Torture itself represented a cult of masculinity and "security personnel who refused to torture were themselves interrogated about their (homo)sexuality and allegiance to the fatherland." (264) Under this doctrine, a relationship between heterosexual masculinity and violence was produced, through the promise of security in both the domestic (house) and the public space (nation). Chilean feminists, specially Kirkwood, had already argued that there was a defining connection between an authoritarian rule (public) and a patriarchal domestic space (private). Dismantling authoritarism in the post-dictatorship requires to challenge domestic authoritarian and patriarchal relations. A gendered analysis of state violence is necessary to understand how the domestic and the national space are mutually constructed. For example, in her analysis of her fieldwork in Chile, she concludes that mental health programs operated in the post-dictatorship have tended to depoliticize domestic violence, by precisely domesticating it: by reducing it to a "cultural" problem as opposed to a political one, and by treating women as the object of intervention as opposed to challenging hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal relations of power.
Frazier identifies a gothic trope in these narratives, in the modernist dichotomy human/monster and the misrecognition of who is the monster. The narrative that needs to be challenged here is precisely the demonization of political practice and the distinction between deserving and undeserving victims that it supports. Frazier proposes the use queer theory and methodology to read against the grain and interrogate gendered representations of subjectivity. This would enable a kind of agency that derives from the position of the "last girl" of horror films analyzed by Judith Halberstram, that girl who succeeds to survive the horror of the violence she faces only when able to re-appropiate the phallic weapons used against her. By embracing perverted subjectitivies as a subject position, one could resist the characterization of political practice as monstrous, and reclaim a subjectivity and agency in these terms: "...who is able to look in the mirror to assemble the pieces of her memories, reconnect them with her scarred body, unpack the structure of domestic discipline and the story imposed upon her, and ultimately, by recognizing the gun, reclaiming the capacity to act". (277)
It might help if you explained what exactly Taussig means by "space of death."
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, there seems to be a lot here and I'm not sure about all the connections. So just picking up one of the concepts out there, I wonder about the implications of the "perverse kind of intimacy between oppressor and oppressed" generated in the torture scene. (This, of course, is what Dorfman's Death and the Maiden is all about.) Is this the same kind of perversity as the "perverted subjectitivies" celebrated in the final paragraph here?
OK.
ReplyDeleteFrom my reading of Taussig, the space of death is the rather irrational, mythical construction of evil which operates as a medium of domination and political practice. It helps me to understand and explain political violence beyond any rational/utilitarian explanation. Now, I have to admit I found this article quite difficult to follow and Frazier's argument is rather confusing at times, but to sum up in a more organized ways the points made by Frazier that I find useful:
1.In Chile, under the ideology of doctrine of national security, the space of death articulated viable and unviable (political, monstrously embodied) subjectivities. And I agree with Frazier that this is something that has not been challenged in the transition. Moreover, the apologetic tone of the discourse of some actors in the left that were involved in politics just keep reproducing this idea that “lo político” is something shameful and negative.
2.The space of death operating in the Chilean dictatorship is gendered, domestic and patriarchal. This is for me first, a reminder that the public and the private as sites of authoritarianism are mutually constructed. And second, that these distinctions between who is human and who is not are attached to gendered notions, where men are supposed to protect the home and the nation (through violence), and women are expected to remain in the domestic familial space (which Frazier describes as an ominous space), so that transgressions to these gender distinctions result in a de-humanization of them.
The perverse intimacy happens in Chile because survivors of political violence have to live in an unwanted closeness to their perpetrators. Frazier seems to suggest then that actors who were subjected to this kind of violence can articulate their agency through perverse subjectivities (not perverted, that was my slip) by embracing political practice and their revolutionary projects of social and cultural transformation instead of denying them, and reclaiming their political practice as subject positions. For instance, I think one implication of this would be to abandon the apologetic tone and the narratives that only construct them in their victimhood or as idealized “sanitized” subjects.