Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 Patriarchy K
Patriarchy K
Patriarchy K...................................................................................................................................1 1NC (1/5) ........................................................................................................................................3 1NC (2/5).........................................................................................................................................4 1NC (3/5).........................................................................................................................................5 Alternative- ....................................................................................................................................5 1NC (4/5).........................................................................................................................................6 Link: Military.................................................................................................................................7 Link: Military ................................................................................................................................8 Link: Vulnerability .......................................................................................................................9 Link: State Services.....................................................................................................................11 Link: Bureaucracy ......................................................................................................................12 Link: Infrastructure....................................................................................................................14 Link: Political Body ....................................................................................................................15 Link: Philosophy ........................................................................................................................16 Link: Disease ...............................................................................................................................17 Link: Disease ...............................................................................................................................18 Link: Disease ...............................................................................................................................19 Link: Disability ...........................................................................................................................20 Link: Disability ...........................................................................................................................21 Link: Medical Care......................................................................................................................23 Link: Democracy .........................................................................................................................24 Link: Social Services .................................................................................................................25 Impact: Scarcity ..........................................................................................................................26 Impact: Scarcity ..........................................................................................................................27 Impact: Scarcity ..........................................................................................................................28 Impact: War.................................................................................................................................29 Impact: War.................................................................................................................................30 Impact: Nuclear Holocaust ........................................................................................................31 Impact: Violence..........................................................................................................................32 Impact: Social Death*..................................................................................................................33 Impact: Social Death ...................................................................................................................34
1
2 Patriarchy K
Social death is worse then physical death because it causes a loss of value to life that turns murder into genocide ...............................................................................................................................................................34 Card 02 Claudia Card, Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin, 2002, Hypatia, Genocide and Social Death, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hypatia/v018/18.1card02.html........................................................34
Impact: Social Death ...................................................................................................................37 A2: Impact Calc ..........................................................................................................................38 Alt: Poner el Cuerpo ...................................................................................................................39 Alt: Poner el Cuerpo (1NC) ......................................................................................................40 Alt: Poner El Cuerpo .................................................................................................................41 Alt: Rethinking the Body* .........................................................................................................42 Alt: Rethinking the Body ...........................................................................................................43 Alt: Rethinking the Body............................................................................................................44 Alt: Rethinkng the Body ............................................................................................................45 Alt: Rethinking the Body............................................................................................................46 Alt Solves Case.............................................................................................................................48 Alt: In Round Solvency ..............................................................................................................49 Alt Solves Violence ......................................................................................................................50 Alt Solves Social Injustice ..........................................................................................................51 A2: Perm .....................................................................................................................................52 Framework (1NC)........................................................................................................................53 Framework ..................................................................................................................................55 A2: Women Have Power Now....................................................................................................56 A2: Deconstruction Bad..............................................................................................................57 A2: Deconstruction Bad..............................................................................................................58 A2: Nilism Bad.............................................................................................................................59 A2: You Create Identity Categories ..........................................................................................61
3 Patriarchy K
1NC (1/5)
LinkThe social service system views those in poverty as embodying femininity because of their dependence and vulnerability. This dependence in combination with gendered discourse causes victimization and expendability within the current system of patriarchal oppression Thomson 02 Rosemarie Garland- Thomson, Associate Professor in the Women's Studies Department at Emory University,
2002, National Womens Studies Association Journal, Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v014/14.3garland-thomson.html
Female, disabled, and dark bodies are supposed to be dependent, incomplete, vulnerable, and incompetent bodies. Femininity and race are performances of disability. Women and the disabled are portrayed as helpless, dependent, weak, vulnerable, and incapable bodies. Women, the disabled, and people of color are always ready occasions for the aggrandizement of benevolent rescuers, whether strong males, distinguished doctors, abolititionists, or Jerry Lewis hosting his telethons. For example, an 1885 medical illustration of a pathologically "love deficient" woman, who fits the cultural stereotype of the ugly woman or perhaps the lesbian, suggests how sexuality and appearance slide into the terms of disability. This illustration shows that the language of deficiency and abnormality simultaneously to devalue women who depart from the mandates of femininity by equating them with disabled bodies. Such an interpretive move economically invokes the subjugating effect of one oppressive system to deprecate people marked by another system of representation. Subjugated bodies are pictured as either deficient or as profligate. For instance, what Susan Bordo describes as the too-muchness of women also haunts disability and racial discourses, marking subjugated bodies as ungovernable, intemperate, or threatening (1993). The
historical figure of the monster, as well, invokes disability, often to serve racism and sexism. Although the term has expanded to encompass all forms of social and corporeal aberration, monster originally described people with congenital impairments. As departures from the normatively human, monsters were] seen as category violations or grotesque hybrids. The semantics of monstrosity are recruited to explain gender violations such as Julia Pastrana, for example, the Mexican Indian "bearded woman," whose body was displayed in nineteenth-century freak shows both during her lifetime and after her
Race, gender, disability, and sexuality augmented one another in Pastrana's display to produce a spectacle of embodied otherness that is simultaneously sensational, sentimental, and pathological (Thomson 1999). Furthermore, much current feminist work theorizes figures of hybridity and excess such as monsters, grotesques, and cyborgs to suggest their transgressive potential for a feminist politics (Haraway 1991; Braidotti 1994; Russo 1994).
death. Pastrana's live and later her embalmed body spectacularly confused and transgressed established cultural categories.
However, this metaphorical invocation seldom acknowledges that these figures often refer to the actual bodies of people with disabilities. Erasing real disabled bodies from the history of these terms compromises the very critique they intend to launch and misses an opportunity to use disability as a feminist critical category. Such representations ultimately portray subjugated
bodies not only as inadequate or unrestrained but at the same time as redundant and expendable. Bodies marked and selected by such systems are targeted for elimination by varying historical and cross-cultural practices. Women, people with disabilities or appearance impairments, ethnic Others, gays and lesbians, and people of color are variously the objects of infanticide, selective abortion, eugenic programs, hate crimes, mercy killing, assisted suicide, lynching, bride burning, honor killings, forced conversion, coercive rehabilitation, domestic violence, genocide, normalizing surgical procedures, racial profiling, and neglect. All these discriminatory practices are legitimated by systems of representation, by collective cultural stories that
shape the material world, underwrite exclusionary attitudes, inform human relations, and mold our senses of who we are. Understanding how disability functions along with other systems of representation clarifies how all the systems intersect and mutually constitute one another.
4 Patriarchy K
1NC (2/5)
ImplicationKeeping the victims of patriarchy invisible and powerless causes in violence in every aspect of life, empowering feminine body is the only way to escape the threat of nuclear proliferation at the hands of masculine discourse Hope 91
Barbara Hope, 1991, Center for Peace Resources, Class of Nonviolence, Patriarchy: A State of War, http://salsa.net/peace/conv/8weekconv5-5.html
It is significant that, after the accident at Three Mile Island, women were more concerned about the danger than men; women felt they were being lied to about the real-life effects of nuclear technology. Women were resistant to the repeated declaration of the makle decision makers that everything was under control, that there was nothing to be alarmed about, that nuclear engineers could solve any difficulties. Women felt the lies. Women know and feel the lies that maintain nuclear technology because we have been lied to. We are the victims of patriarchal lies. We know the deceit that grounds patriarchal colonization of women. We know, feel and intuit the deep truth that falsehoods, deceptions and lies form the very character of male rule. Women are the first victims of the patriarchal state of war. Violence to our bodies: A women is raped every three minutes. A woman is battered every eighteen seconds. Women are physically threatened by a frightening social climate structured in male might. Women are depicted in pornography as objects to be beaten, whipped, chained and conquered. The myth prevails that women like it. Violence to our hearts: The positing of male comradeship as the model of human relationships. The systematic separation of women from one another. The degradation of women's culture. The erasure of women's history. The sanctifying of the heterosexual norm with its rigid understanding of the giving and receiving of affection. Violence to our spirit: The dismemberment of the goddess and the enthronement of the male god. The ripping of women away from a life in tune with natural patterns of rhythm and flow in the universe. The ongoing patriarchal work of rendering women unconscious to ourselves. Violence to our work: The exploitation and devaluation of women's labor. The regulation of women to supportive, maintenance roles. The deliberate structure of women's economic dependence. Violence to women. Under the patriarchy, women are the enemy. This is a war across time and space, the real history of the ages. In this extreme situation, confronted by the patriarchy in its multiple institutional forms, what can women do? We can name the enemy: patriarchy. We can break from deadly possession by the fathers. We can move from docility, passivity and silence to liberation, courage and speech. We can name ourselves, cherish ourselves, courageously take up our lives. We can refuse to sell our bodies and we can refuse to sell our minds. We can claim freedom from false loyalties. We can band with other women and ignite the roaring fire of female friendship.This much we have learned from our living: life begets life. Life for women, life for the earth, the very survival of the planet is found only outside the patriarchy. Beyond their sad and shallow definitions. Beyond their dead and static knowledge. Beyond their amnesia. Beyond their impotence. Beyond their wars. Wars which unmask the fear, insecurity and powerlessness that form the very base of patriarchal rule. To end the state of war, to halt the momentum toward death, passion for life must flourish. Women are the bearers of life-loving energy. Ours is the task of deepening that passion for life and separating from all that threatens life, all that diminishes life. Becoming who we are as women. Telling/living the truth of our lives. Shifting the weight of the world.
5 Patriarchy K
1NC (3/5)
AlternativeThus the alternative is to reject the 1AC representations of the feminine body as vulnerable and dependent in favor of opening space to envision the body as a place of political resistance This act, referred to in Argentina resistance as Poner el Cuerpo, is allows us to overcome oppressive depictions of femininity and deconstruct patriarchal oppression
Sutton 2007
Barbra Sutton, assistant professor of women's studies at the State University of New York at Albany and she holds the Ph.D. in sociology, 2007, University of Miami, Latin American Politics and Society, Poner el Cuerpo: Womens Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina, 1 July 2009, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/latin_american_politics_and_society/v049/49.3sutton.html These narratives also suggest that poner el cuerpo connotes togetherness, engaging other bodies in the project of creating social change, of building power together from the bottom up. From this perspective, poner el cuerpo as a practice of resistance is not a lonely or individual task but a collective, embodied process that sprouts solidarity and valuable knowledge. As Luz, a young and dedicated activist, proposes, "we go together, we do it together, and we learn." When activists call on others to poner el cuerpo, they are asking people to take a stand, to act in solidarity, to make an embodied commitmentand in doing so they point out the importance of physical presence, of bodily participation in social change. This is how Luz describes it, on the basis of her experience as an activist in an organization of mostly working-class and poor women (many of them piqueteras) and in a mixed-gender leftist political organization. Look, I think that the balance of the 19th and 20th of December [2001 popular uprisings] is this: that we went out to poner el cuerpo. When we say that in Argentina there was a jump in people's participation [. . .] it is because many more people started to poner el cuerpo. They started to poner el cuerpo, they started to participate. I believe that our politicians never pusieron el cuerpo, never. [. . .] I believe that the new political leadership should be like this: it should come up very much from the bottom, having broken their backs working, and should continue breaking their backs with the work. I think that's the turning point. And I very much value that. Here, poner el cuerpo has the double meaning of participation in mass mobilization and the more hidden daily work of activism. The vivid image of backbreaking work again highlights the intense embodied labor involved in collective efforts to change society. According to this view, social transformation is an embodied collective project.
6 Patriarchy K
1NC (4/5)
FrameworkThe role of the ballot should be to first view discursive and linguistic representations of the body, because embodiment is a fundamental part of both our discourse and political policies. Peterson 06 Christopher Peterson, Professor at UCLA, 2006, The Return of the Body: Judith Butlers Dialectical Corporealism, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/discourse/v028/28.2-3.peterson.html
In isolating Butler's work for critique, I do not mean to suggest that her corpus is uniquely "guilty" of resurrecting the metaphysics of presence under the guise of the body. As I noted above, the body has become something of an obsession (a hantise as one says in French) in American critical discourse over the past fifteen years. The impetus for this critical reading of Butler emerges from my own sustained engagement with and admiration for a body of work that has provided a wide-range of fieldsamong them, continental philosophy, feminism, queer studies, performance studies, and critical legal studieswith a series of rich and provocative theoretical engagements. My contention, however, is that her theorizations of corporeality also tend to eclipse the most radical insights of deconstructive thought by adhering to a series of dialectical oppositions (presence/absence, body/spirit, life/death) that fail to dislodge being from the present.15 Butler's reticence to interrogate the presumption of self-presence seems surprising given the radical character of her major theoretical claims. As is well known, her central argument about the body asserts that it is
unknowable outside of those linguistic tropes that occasion its survivability within language. Drawing from the Foucauldian paradigm of what American critics too loosely characterize as "discursive construction," she insists that any effort to posit a body prior to discourse is nothing more than a ruse, one that does not take into account how bodies congeal and materialize by virtue of their implication in language. By alerting us to the discourse of "constructivism" as a peculiarly American phenomenon, I mean to suggest that its invention is conditioned by the translation of Foucauldian thought into an American context. Although this problem of translation is both linguistic and culturalin that it is not merely a question of language difference but also of the uniquely American political investments that Foucault's thought has often [End Page 159] been enlisted to addressthe former might be said to enable, or at least reinforce, the latter. This possibility is suggested by Robert Hurley's translation of Histoire de la Sexualit. In an often-cited passage, Hurley's text reads: "Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct."16 The term that Hurley translates as "construct" is given in the original as "dispositif," although when it
appears in the chapter title, "Le Dispositif de Sexualit," he translates it as "deployment."17Dispositif (also "device," or "mechanism") has a much different connotation from the English "construct," which, as Butler notes, implies that there is some sort of agent doing the constructing.18 When coupled with the notion of "discourse," construction also suggests something much more idealist than dispositif. As Butler remarks in "How Can I Deny. . ." the discourse of constructivism risks a certain linguistification, a certain reduction of everything to language. This linguistification, however, ought to be read in the context of the American appropriation and assimilation of various French, "poststructuralist" theories (another American invention) rather than as a testament to an idealism inherent in contemporary French thought.
7 Patriarchy K
Link: Military
The military uses sexist discourse to promote patriarchal values such as violence and aggression, this leads to the disempowering both the body and work of women Martin 90, Brian Martin, 1990, Freedom Press: London, Uprooting War http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/90uw/uw10.html Modern military forces are overwhelmingly composed of men. Furthermore, sexism is a common part of military training and military life. Soldiers are trained to be violent, competitive, tough, and 'masculine.' They are trained to reject feminine characteristics of supportiveness, cooperativeness, tenderness and physical softness. Often military training is accompanied by explicit verbal abuse of women and the portrayal of women only as sex objects.The masculine ethos of military life has much in common with the oppressive treatment of women in both military and civilian life, including rape, batterings, prostitution and poor working conditions. In direct person-to-person violence, it is primarily men who are the perpetrators. Another connection between modern patriarchy and war is the service provided by women to men in both military and civilian life. Cynthia Enloe in her book Does Khaki Become You? has analysed a range of areas in which women serve the military: as prostitutes, as military wives, as nurses, as soldiers, and as workers in arms industries. In each of these cases women are placed in a subordinate position where they are easily exploited. The service of women to men is carried out in civilian life in a similar fashion, and in very similar categories: as prostitutes, as wives, as workers in the 'helping professions,' and as workers in occupations which are poorly paid, low-skilled and lacking security and career prospects.
8 Patriarchy K
Link: Military
The current model of policy making, especially with regards to the training and maintenance of the military, enforce gendered discourse which gives rise to wars and violence Workman 96 Thom Workman, professor of political science at university of New Brunswick, 1996, Pandoras Sons: The Nominal Paradox of Patriarchy and War, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:HVpenQLvgl0J:www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/OP31Workman.pdf+patriarchy+war&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us The training of the soldier is replete with a litany of disciplining epithets regarding the feminine. The transformation from boy-recruit into man-soldier requires the extirpation of any feminine traits and identities; it demands the vanquishing of any lurking womanliness. War is femicidal. This foreshadows, moreover, the vigilance with respect to the subversive feminine being looming within the warring fabric. Soldier and policymakers guard against the association of their actions or ideas with feminine traits. Regardless of its particular manifestation or definition of a practice, ritual, or goal linked to militaries and to battle, the ideology of war requires a strict, unrelenting overcoming of anything understood as womanly. Its discourse of identity and achievement, in other words, repudiates and disavows the feminine as much as it is embraces the masculine. This mysogynistic reflex undergirds the representation of opponents (on the war front and the "home" front) as women. Those opposing war routinely are dismissed in feminine terms, as being too emotional, too sentimental, as lacking in firmness and determination, as nave, unthoughtful, weak, confused, and, in the branding coup de grce, as unmanly (it is commonly suspected that peaceful people or doves, after all, don't "have balls"). There is a common and essential association between women and peace, an association that has permeated a share of social activism and Military enemies, moreover, typically are represented as woman. Military targets, especially the ground or earth itself, also are connotatively feminized in war-think. The practice of war surfaces within gendered understandings and identities. War embodies the rehearsal of patriarchal consciousness. Numerous leaders (mainly male but occasionally female) overtly draw upon gendered understandings for policy guidance. It is this sense of war being constituted and inflected through gender that informs the claim that patriarchy lies at the root of war. Without gender it is unlikely that war would arise as such a frequent alternative in human life, and that entire societies could be so extensively militarized regardless of the costs and trade-offs involved.
9 Patriarchy K
Link: Vulnerability
Female bodies are viewed as vulnerable, dependent and in need of rescue. This victimization allows for expendability within the current system of oppression Thomson 02 Rosemarie Garland- Thomson, Associate Professor in the Women's Studies Department
at Emory University, 2002, National Womens Studies Association Journal, Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v014/14.3garlandthomson.html Female, disabled, and dark bodies are supposed to be dependent, incomplete, vulnerable, and incompetent bodies. Femininity and race are performances of disability. Women and the disabled are portrayed as helpless, dependent, weak, vulnerable, and incapable bodies. Women, the disabled, and people of color are always ready occasions for the aggrandizement of benevolent rescuers, whether strong males, distinguished doctors, abolititionists, or Jerry Lewis hosting his telethons. For example, an 1885 medical illustration of a pathologically "love deficient" woman, who fits the cultural stereotype of the ugly woman or perhaps the lesbian, suggests how sexuality and appearance slide into the terms of disability. This illustration shows that the language of deficiency and abnormality simultaneously to devalue women who depart from the mandates of femininity by equating them with disabled bodies. Such an interpretive move economically invokes the subjugating effect of one oppressive system to deprecate people marked by another system of representation. Subjugated bodies are pictured as either deficient or as profligate. For instance, what Susan Bordo describes as the too-muchness of women also haunts disability and racial discourses, marking subjugated bodies as ungovernable, intemperate, or threatening (1993). The
historical figure of the monster, as well, invokes disability, often to serve racism and sexism. Although the term has expanded to encompass all forms of social and corporeal aberration, monster originally described people with congenital impairments. As departures from the normatively human, monsters were] seen as category violations or grotesque hybrids. The semantics of monstrosity are recruited to explain gender violations such as Julia Pastrana, for example, the Mexican Indian "bearded woman," whose body was displayed in nineteenth-century freak shows both during her lifetime and after her death. Pastrana's live and later her embalmed body spectacularly confused and transgressed established cultural categories. Race, gender, disability, and sexuality augmented one
another in Pastrana's display to produce a spectacle of embodied otherness that is simultaneously sensational, sentimental, and pathological (Thomson 1999). Furthermore, much current feminist work theorizes figures of hybridity and excess such as monsters, grotesques, and cyborgs to suggest their transgressive potential for a feminist politics (Haraway 1991; Braidotti 1994; Russo 1994).
However, this metaphorical invocation seldom acknowledges that these figures often refer to the actual bodies of people with disabilities. Erasing real disabled bodies from the history of these terms compromises the very critique they intend to launch and misses an opportunity to use disability as a feminist critical category. Such representations
ultimately portray subjugated bodies not only as inadequate or unrestrained but at the same time as redundant and expendable. Bodies marked and selected by such systems are targeted for elimination by varying historical and cross-cultural practices. Women, people with disabilities or appearance impairments, ethnic Others, gays and lesbians, and people of color are variously the objects of infanticide, selective abortion, eugenic programs, hate crimes, mercy killing, assisted suicide, lynching, bride burning, honor killings, forced conversion, coercive rehabilitation, domestic violence, genocide, normalizing surgical procedures, racial profiling, and neglect. All these discriminatory practices are legitimated by systems of representation, by collective cultural stories
that shape the material world, underwrite exclusionary attitudes, inform human relations, and mold our senses of who we are. Understanding how disability functions along with other systems of representation clarifies how all the systems intersect and mutually constitute one another.
10 Patriarchy K
Link: Representations
Representations of women in poverty follow reinforce sociopolitical representations of women as subjugated which prohibits empowering self representations Khader 08 Serene J. Khader, Professory of philosophy at Womens Studies at Wheaton College, 2008, When Equality Justifies Womens Subjection: Luce Irigarays Critique of Equality and the Fathers Rights Movement, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hypatia/v023/23.4.khader.html The appearance of universality does not attach equally readily to the aspirations of each sex. Rather, patriarchal power relations create a state of affairs where the possibilities of the male sex appear as universal. One reason the aspirations of the male sex are easier to represent as worthy universals is that, as Irigaray argues, our patriarchal history has given men a near monopoly on the means of symbolic self-representation.12 This effects a lack of affirmative representations of women in our symbolic repertoire.This insight about our available representational resources is key to Irigarays second criticism of the structure of political equality claims. In addition to manifesting the logic of the same, equality claims tend to draw on representational structures that tacitly privilege the masculine. Claims to gender equality ask us [End Page 54] to compare the moral lives of women and men. In order to do so, we will use particular symbols, metaphors, and concepts to represent these experiences. To the extent that equality claims typically appeal to existing legal structures or commonsense intuitions for their justifications, we can expect that they will deploy conventional representations of womens bodies and experiences. In a world where women are subjugated, the most readily available conceptualizations of womens experiences are those that justify this subjugation. Comparing mens and womens experiences is likely to make women come out seeming unworthy if we see these experiences through the lens of patriarchal representation. Central to Irigarays project is the idea that our symbolic context lacks non-degrading representations of women as women. This is not the place to fully describe her theory of language and the symbolic, which both draws
upon and differs from Jacques Lacans theory of the symbolic as the register of linguistic representation and exchange, but I sketch three of its central claims here.13 These are as follows: (1) that resources for representation reflect patriarchal sociopolitical conditions, (2) that thought draws on an imaginary structure that is always partly mythical, and (3) that the focus our culture places on the figure of the father in negotiating identity discourages the symbolization of womens experiences. Irigaray contends that
sociopolitical conditions affect our access to means of self-representation. Our linguistic and symbolic repertoires change in size and scope according to what we need to communicate in our lives. For Irigaray, this is the case for groups as well as individuals. She concludes from her empirical research in linguistics that centuries of consignment to the reproduction and care of the body has diminished the stock of symbols with which women can represent themselves. Their lives in patriarchy have generated needs mostly for means of symbolic exchange that allow them to talk about others or themselves insofar as they serve others. Men have not been in an analogous position; patriarchal culture has afforded them life opportunities that require means of self-representation. As a result, most of the representations of women in circulationparticularly in the public sphereare not representations generated by women. They are representations that reflect the needs and desires of men.
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11 Patriarchy K
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12 Patriarchy K
Link: Bureaucracy
The affirmatives engagement in the bureaucracy of the state establishes power systems which keep the female body subordinated Martin 90, Brian Martin, 1990, Freedom Press: London, Uprooting War http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/90uw/uw10.html The connection between patriarchy and bureaucracy can be seen as one of mutual mobilisation. In short, men use bureaucracy to sustain their power over women, while elite bureaucrats use patriarchy to sustain the bureaucratic hierarchy The first part of this dynamic is men using bureaucracy to sustain their power over women. In a typical bureaucracy, whether a state agency, a corporation, or a trade union, most of the top positions are occupied by men. Women are concentrated in lower positions such as typists, process workers or cleaners. In addition, top male bureaucrats usually have wives who do most of the work of child-rearing and housework and who provide emotional and career support. The power, prestige and privileges of the top bureaucrats thus depend on the subordinate position of women both on the job and at home. To maintain this power, the top bureaucrats can use their power in the bureaucracy to keep women in their subordinate place. This can take place in several ways:
formal exclusion of women from top positions; discrimination against women in hiring and promotion; promoting conformity to the bureaucratic values of emotional aloofness and technical rationality as a means of deterring or restraining women who operate best in an environment providing emotional support and opportunities for cooperative work; creation and maintenance of gender-linked job categories, which tie women into lower-level positions; maintenance of male career patterns which require mobility, full-time work and no interruptions (for child-bearing); maintenance of on-the-job work organisation which excludes integration of child-rearing and work, and opposition to alternatives such as independent work at home, or neighbourhood-based decentralised office arrangements; supporting other elite groups with similar practices, such as when trade union elites do not protest against corporate sexism; lobbying and applying political pressure to maintain policies that keep women in subordinate positions.
In these and other ways, the power that men have as top bureaucrats is used to keep men collectively in a dominant position over women. In this way, bureaucracy is mobilised by men to support patriarchy. The domination of men over women does not occur in the abstract. In this case it operates via the unequal power distribution within bureaucracies. Equally important is the way patriarchy is mobilised to serve bureaucracy. Top bureaucrats can maintain and strengthen their power by using, within the bureaucracy, the wider cultural dominance of men over women. The existence of a promotion path which favours men ensures the loyalty of many men in lower positions. The discrimination against women in lower levels (for example, the low salary, lack of autonomy and low prestige of typing positions) provides an opportunity for low-level men to feel superior to someone. In this way the psychology of masculine domination is mobilised to support bureaucratic hierarchy. A patriarchally organised bureaucracy is structured to maximise the linkages between male-female inequality and bureaucratic inequality. This ensures that any fundamental challenge to bureaucratic hierarchy would also require a fundamental challenge to prevailing male-female power relations.The mobilisation of patriarchy to serve bureaucracy takes place by many of the same methods as listed above
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13 Patriarchy K
by which bureaucracy is mobilised to serve patriarchy. Particularly important is the gender-typing of particular tasks, work styles and occupations, and the association of top positions with masculine values of competition, individualism, emotional aloofness and instrumental rationality.The same processes of mutual mobilisation apply between patriarchy and other structures, including the state, the military and capitalism. For example, the gender-based definition of 'combat' in the military is used to mobilise men and masculine behaviour for the military, and also to mobilise military hierarchy and command-obedience relations to maintain male dominance over women.The same processes of mutual mobilisation also provide a dynamic between dominant structures and the oppression of ethnic minorities and gays. For example, capitalists often have exploited and fostered ethnic divisions between workers to hinder and disrupt organisation of workers against employers.
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14 Patriarchy K
Link: Infrastructure
Current society requires the sacrifice of women in order to support its current infrastructure; we need a reinvention of politics of the body Keenan 06 Dennis King Keenan, Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University, 2004, Hypatia. Inc, Irigaray and the
Sacrifice of the Sacrifice of Woman, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hypatia/v019/19.4keenan.html
Another aspect of this hidden sacrifice of woman is the lack of recognition that the infrastructure of natural fertility functions for free. "No social body can be constituted, developed, or renewed without female labor [travail]" (FSA 100/WSM 86), that is, without the labor of work and the labor of giving birth. This failure to recognize (this hiding of) the sacrifice of woman establishes the sacrificial rite or rhythm, which "overlays the natural rhythms with a different and cumulative temporality that dispenses and prevents us from attending to the moment" (FSA 91/WSM 77). What is called for? To reveal the hidden sacrifice of woman. "To reveal that murder has been committed means not killing but rather putting an end to the hidden crime, aggression, and sacrifice" (FSA 101-102/WSM 87). This revelation would involve the acknowledgment of a crime. To acknowledge to someone that one is a criminal is a way to make one conscious of the self and to allow the other to be. This changes the economy of consciousness insofar as the master, or masters, are doubled into two sexes (at least). "What is sacrificed," Irigaray writes, "is henceforward the all-powerfulness of both one and the other" (FSA 102/WSM 87).
There is here (paradoxically) a doubling of the masters of the economy of consciousness. This revelation of the hidden sacrifice of woman (and, more specifically, the hidden sacrifice of natural fertility) may seem relatively straightforward, but Irigaray is, I would argue, inviting the reader to radically rethink his or her understanding of these all too easily understood words: revelation, sacrifice, and woman. I would argue that read alongside the logic of Lacanian psychoanalysis (and iek's reading of the work of Lacan), one can see that Irigaray returns these words to the reader in a way that opens up a different understanding of each of them. One could say that Irigaray disturbs the traditional discourses on revelation, sacrifice, and woman on one level while at the same time reinforcing their most extreme ramifications. The revelation of the hidden sacrifice of woman calls (paradoxically) for a sacrifice. "What is sacrificed," Irigaray writes, "is henceforward the all-powerfulness of both one and the other" (FSA 102/WSM 87). The revelation of the hidden sacrifice of woman would, therefore, ultimately involve a new sacrifice. This new sacrifice opens things up whereas the old immolation habitually led to the creation of a closed world through periodic exclusion [that is, through periodic hiding of the sacrifice of woman]. This new sacrifice, if sacrifice it be rather than a discipline, means that the individual or the social body gives up narcissistic self-sufficiency. (FSA 102/WSM 87)This new
sacrifice is a recognition that rather than being closed off, we are always already open to the other. This new sacrifice "means recognizing that we are still and have always been open to the world and to the other because we are living, sensible beings, subject to the rhythms of time and of a universe whose properties are in part our own, different according to whether we are men or women" (FSA 102/WSM 87, emphasis in original). Is this new sacrifice the sacrifice of the revealed sacrifice of man that hides the sacrifice of woman? That is, is this new sacrifice the sacrifice of sacrifice? This seems to be an acknowledgment of the impossibility of merely stepping beyond sacrifice. It seems to be an acknowledgment of the step/not beyond sacrifice. What would this sacrifice of sacrifice give one to think about revelation, sacrifice, and woman?
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Link: Philosophy
Modern philosophy focuses on cognitive functions and not their relation to physical embodiment DiPalma 02 Carolyn DiPalma, 2002, Body Politics: Webs of Embodiment, Medicine, Science, Technology,
Nature and Culture, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v006/6.2dipalma.html
"Embodied Reason" focuses on the relationship between embodiment and "'higher' cognitive operations" (81). Mark Johnson deploys a number of lists, groupings, charts, schemas and graphs to argue that human conceptualization and reasoning are embodied activities. He considers three levels of embodiment (neurophysiological, cognitive unconscious, and phenomenological), charges analytical philosophy with ignoring the body, and explores cognitive science's rediscovery of the body through evidence grounding conceptual systems (necessary for reasoning) in "patterns of bodily activity" (85). For example, "Color categories are computed by the eye and the brain" and thus are "grounded in our bodies" (86-7). Since the meanings of color terms in language are characterized by the body's neural circuitry, "if concepts are fundamentally embodied, then the language for expressing those concepts," argues Johnson, "reflects that embodiment" (88). He describes how, using "structures" emerging in "embodied experience," an infant reasons about the world and, he argues, it is, then, these embodied understandings that make linguistic effectiveness possible (93). Disturbingly, in his discussion of conceptual metaphor in relation to both embodiment and embodied reasoning, he manages to consider metaphor that aligns evil and immoral activity with darkness and moral activity with lightness unencumbered by the troublesome implications of associations with race and racist practices these metaphors harbor.
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Link: Disease
Construction of disease and illness places power over the body in biomedical domain and renders individuals incapable of breaking free of social norms DiPalma 02 Carolyn DiPalma, 2002, Body Politics: Webs of Embodiment, Medicine, Science, Technology, Nature and Culture, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v006/6.2dipalma.html Zillah Eisenstein and Susan Greenhalgh have each written poignant feminist accounts of personal encounters with illness. Both books stress an analysis of power at work in medical and cultural practices. A political commentary of her family's affliction with breast cancer, Eisenstein's reckoning connects environmental damage, women's health, and racial variations in both the occurrence and treatment of breast cancer. Greenhalgh's autoethnography accents power plays and creative interpretations that enable the biomedical domain to create and inflict suffering, to define disease, and to affect relationships and lives. She examines a misdiagnosis that labeled her with an essentially untreatable muscle condition, fibromyalgia, and the calamitous effects of this on her world, her health and her well-being. The splendid collections assembled by Weiss and Haber and by Reid and Traweek each contain a dozen selections divided into three parts: the former a result of an interdisciplinary National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on embodiment and the latter a consequence, in part, of several interdisciplinary events sponsored by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. While political concerns are mostly left for Weiss's and Haber's readers to discern, the various philosophical perspectives in this collection unite in their efforts to critique the legacy of Western metaphysics by interrupting the polarity between nature and culture that aligns body with nature and mind and/or consciousness with culture. These authors recognize a shift from the phrase "the body" as a "nongendered, prediscursive phenomenon that plays a central role in perception, cognition, action, and nature" to the label "embodiment" as "a way of living or inhabiting the world through one's acculturated body" (xiv). Reid and Traweek have assembled an impressive collection with an inspiring and disruptive interdisciplinary political agenda: the hope of provoking troublesome new and refreshing ways of thinking that allow "the pursuit of exciting ideas to take precedence over the defense of academic territory, the narrow building of careers, or the comforts of a glib avant-gardism" (15).
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Link: Disease
Identifying health concerns as national issues ignores personal concerns and questions about the politics of a biomedical perspective DiPalma 02 Carolyn DiPalma, 2002, Body Politics: Webs of Embodiment, Medicine, Science, Technology, Nature and Culture, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v006/6.2dipalma.html The ebb and flow of three groups of questions trouble these books. The first begins by identifying problems at the personal level of experience and appears when individual encounters with difficult issues and challenges of embodiment, such as disease, are interrogated to expose multiple effects of power. How does a diagnosis, its bodily manifestations, its accompanying medical practices, its emotional consequences, and its material effects get politicized and what enables recognition, encounter and transformation of various dominions at work? How does gender affect power dynamics within the biomedical encounter? What alternative discourses to the suffering body and its healing are available, to whom would they be helpful, how and why? The second arises at the level of interpretive understanding when philosophical and psychological approaches reconsider seemingly fundamental concepts by irregularly intersecting perceptions of intersubjectivity and disciplinarity, thereby reconceptualizing notions of self, other and the body in occasionally curious and temperamental ways. How does maintaining the body as a subject rather than an object of perception affect the possibility of political inquiry? What is the relationship between cognition, bodily activities, notions of self, and the environment; and how might interconnections affect development of human sciences, bioethical debates, and assumptions of self-preservation? How might sites of bodily resistance be read and recognized as a source for alternative discourses? This level of thinking enables inquiry into the corporeal effects of gender, race and class (or other markers of identity) in sanctioning exclusionary practices, bearing bodily distortion, or recognizing robust multiculturalism. The third group of questions is more overarching, framing practices of modernity and deconstructing shifts in the political economy surrounding allegedly legitimate and innocent approaches to intelligibility. At this level thinking pushes for new forms of inquiry, attends to unforeseen lines of research, and seeks refreshing engagements with the natural, social, and cultural milieu. These questions commence when disciplinary practitioners of science, technology, culture, and medicine consider the processes of their own production as educators and researchers and the coincident construction of topics, informants, and subjects studied. Institutional spatial constraints, for example, can be seen to inform differences in experimentation, pedagogical practices, opportunities for collaboration, and professional identities. How has routine knowledge production and understanding been successfully challenged and how do new sources of inquiry affect resource (re)distribution in the academy? How is it that nontraditional interdisciplinary scholars and teachers are often embraced more readily outside the academy than within it? How does recognizing mutuality between objects of study and researchers within interdisciplinary or cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine get politicized and what potentials are made available by the possible outcomes?
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Link: Disease
Status quo methods of addressing diseases reduce bodies to places of misery and suffering through eliminating their tie to personal politics DiPalma 02 Carolyn DiPalma, 2002, Body Politics: Webs of Embodiment, Medicine, Science, Technology, Nature and Culture, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v006/6.2dipalma.html Critiquing dominant breast cancer narratives and arguing for the body as a place from which to build a resistant consciousness, Eisenstein's engaging feminist political memoir, Manmade Breast Cancers, moves beyond a discourse of loss. She argues, ultimately, for healthy bodies as a human right. She also argues for the compelling despair of breast cancer to be used -- in a non-essentialist way that does not reduce women to either their bodies or their misery -- "toward developing an activism for a truly just democratic globe" (171). Hers is a knowledgeable political project that mobilizes theory, statistics, scientific studies and an abundance of current event examples to make connections among the following: breast, body, environment, history, cancer, global politics, medical and scientific practices as well as pharmaceutical and racist economies. "Bodies are always personal," Eisenstein notes, "in that each of us lives in one in a particularly individual way. They are also," she continues, "always political in that they have meanings that are more powerful than any one of us can determine" (1). Holding the personal and the political in slippery tension, she writes compellingly of her familial and bodily experience of cancer. When Eisenstein's mother was forty-five, when her two sisters were in their mid-twenties, and when she, herself, was forty each was diagnosed with breast cancer. Additionally, her mother's sister was fifty-seven when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer; and, while dealing with the various family cancer crises, Eisenstein's youngest sister has contended with physical disabilities resulting from a number of spinal fusion surgeries. Questioning master narratives of cancer that "do not quite fit my family's profile," Eisenstein probes for other links and possibilities (5). She has doubts about the success of struggling alone in life and of segregating individual difficulties from the labyrinth of profit-driven establishments. She also has a wariness of simple genetic explanations detaching the cause of cancer from the impact of environmental contaminants. She attributes these suspicions to having been raised with a healthy skepticism as the daughter of Communist parents. Readers dubious about the lack of political awareness in mainstream medical and scientific cancer discourses will find Eisenstein's meticulous chronicle dynamically instructive.
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Link: Disability
The way which western society embraces the disability discourse results in devaluation of deviant bodies or characteristics, such as femininity Thomson 02 Rosemarie Garland- Thomson, Associate Professor in the Women's Studies Department at Emory University, 2002, National Womens Studies Association Journal, Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v014/14.3garlandthomson.html The first domain of feminist theory that can be deepened by a disability analysis is representation. Western thought has long conflated female-ness and disability, understanding both as defective departures from a valued standard. Aristotle, for example,
defined women as "mutilated males." Women, for Aristotle, have "improper form"; we are "monstrosit[ies]" (1944, 27-8, 8-9). As what Nancy Tuana calls "misbegotten men," women thus become the primal freaks in Western history, envisioned as what we might now call congenitally deformed as a result of what we might now term genetic disability (1993, 18). More recently, feminist theorists have
argued that female embodiment is a disabling condition in sexist culture. Iris Marion Young, for instance, examines how enforced feminine comportment delimits women's sense of embodied agency, restricting them to "throwing like a girl" (1990b, 141). Young concludes that, "Women in a sexist society are physically handicapped" (1990b, 153). Even the general American public associates femininity with disability. A recent study on stereotyping showed that housewives, disabled people, blind people, so-called retarded people, and the elderly [End Page 6] were all judged as being similarly incompetent. Such a study suggests that intensely normatively feminine positionssuch as a housewifeare aligned with negative attitudes about people with disabilities (Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick 2001). 1
Recognizing how the concept of disability has been used to cast the form and functioning of female bodies as non-normative can extend feminist critiques. Take, for example, the exploitation of Saartje Bartmann, the African woman exhibited as a freak in nineteenth-century Europe (Fausto-Sterling 1995; Gilman 1985). Known as the Hottentot Venus, Bartmann's treatment has come to represent the most egregious form of racial and gendered degradation. What goes unremarked in studies of Bartmann's display, however, are the ways that the language and assumptions of the ability/disability system were implemented to pathologize and exoticize Bartmann. Her display invoked disability by presenting as deformities or abnormalities the characteristics that marked her as raced and gendered. I am not suggesting that Bartmann was disabled, but rather that the concepts of disability discourse framed her presentation to the Western eye. Using disability as a category of analysis allows us to see that what was normative embodiment in her native context became abnormal to the Western mind. More important, rather than simply supposing that being labeled as a freak is a slander, a disability analysis presses our critique further by challenging the premise that unusual embodiment is inherently inferior. The
feminist interrogation of gender since Simone de Beauvoir (1974) has revealed how women are assigned a cluster of ascriptions, like Aristotle's, that mark us as Other. What is less widely recognized, however, is that this collection of interrelated characterizations is precisely the same set of supposed attributes affixed to people with disabilities
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Link: Disability
Current social service programs reinforce the idea of disabled bodies through attempting to cure bodily inconsistencies instead of accommodating to them Thomson 02 Rosemarie Garland- Thomson, Associate Professor in the Women's Studies Department at Emory University, 2002, National Womens Studies Association Journal, Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v014/14.3garland-thomson.html
I do not want to oversimplify here by suggesting that women and disabled people should not use modern medicine to improve their lives or help their bodies function more fully. But the critical issues are complex and provocative. A feminist disability theory should illuminate and explain, not become ideological policing or set orthodoxy. The kinds of critical analyses I am discussing offer a counterlogic to the overdetermined cultural mandates to comply with normal and beautiful at any cost. The medical commitment to healing, when coupled with modernity's faith in technology and interventions that control outcomes, has
increasingly shifted toward an aggressive intent to fix, regulate, or eradicate ostensibly deviant bodies. Such a program of elimination has often been at the expense of creating a more accessible environment or providing better support services for people with disabilities. The privileging of medical technology over less ambitious programs such as rehabilitation has encouraged the cultural conviction that disability can be extirpated; inviting the belief that life with a disability is intolerable. As charity campaigns and telethons repeatedly affirm, cure rather than adjustment or accommodation is the overdetermined cultural response to disability (Longmore 1997). For instance, a 1949 March of Dimes poster shows an appealing
little girl stepping out of her wheelchair into the supposed redemption of walking: "Look, I Can Walk Again!" the text proclaims, while at once charging the viewers with the responsibility of assuring her future ambulation. Nowhere do we find posters suggesting that life as a wheelchair user might be full and satisfying, as many people who actually use them find their lives to be. This ideology of cure is not isolated in medical texts or charity campaigns, but in fact permeates
the entire cultural conversation about disability and illness. Take, for example, the discourse of cure in get well cards. A 1950 card, for instance, urges its recipient to "snap out of it." Fusing racist, sexist, and ableist discourses, the card recruits the Mammy figure to insist on cure. The stereotypical racist figure asks, "Is you sick, Honey?" and then exhorts the recipient of her care to "jes hoodoo all dat illness out o you." The ideology of cure directed at disabled people focuses on changing bodies imagined as abnormal and dysfunctional rather than on changing exclusionary attitudinal, environmental, and economic barriers. The emphasis on cure reduces the cultural tolerance for human variation and vulnerability by locating disability in bodies imagined as flawed rather than social systems in need of fixing. A feminist disability studies would draw an important distinction between prevention and elimination. Preventing illness, suffering, and injury is a humane social objective. Eliminating the range of unacceptable and devalued bodily forms and functions the dominant order calls disability is, on the other hand, a eugenic undertaking. The ostensibly progressive socio-medical project of eradicating disability all too often is enacted as a program to eliminate people with disabilities through such practices as forced sterilization, socalled physician-assisted suicide and mercy killing, selective abortion, institutionization, and segregation policies.
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Link: Democracy
Womens erasure from the politics of economy and democracy results in policies such as the affirmative geared toward the neutered citizen Fermon 98 Nicole Fermon, 1998, John Hopkins University Press, Women on the Global Market: Irigaray and
the Democratic State, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v028/28.1fermon.html
Best known for her subtle interrogation of philosophy and psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray clearly also conducts a dialogue with the political, proposing that women's erasure from culture and society invalidates all economies, sexual or political. Because woman has disappeared both figuratively and literally from society [see Sen, "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing"], Irigaray conceives the contemporary ethical project as a recall to difference rather than equality, to difference between women and men--that is, sexual difference. She characterizes relations between men and women as market relations in which women are commodities, objects, but never subjects of exchange, objects to men but not to themselves: women do not belong to themselves but exist "to keep relationships among men running smoothly" [TS 192]. Women under these conditions require imaginative ways to reconfigure the self, to subvert the melancholy and regression of masculinist economies and envisage a future in which women would not be ashamed of the feminine, would experience it as a positivity worth emulating. Irigaray contends that after the gains of egalitarian politics are carefully examined, the inclusion of women in the political arena has failed to take into account women's distinct and different position from men, and from each other, as well as perpetuating the fiction of the "neutral" citizen, the ahistorical individual citizen of the nationstate. It is that fiction Irigaray dispels in her critique of liberal democratic politics and its creation, "citizens who are neuter in regard to familial singularity, its laws, and necessary sexual difference" [SG 112] in order to benefit the State and its laws. The subject is male; the citizen is neuter. Who is the female citizen in contemporary society? What is the ethical elaboration of the contractual relations between women and men, and between sexed individuals and the community? How do women imagine a distinct set of rights and responsibilities based on self-definition and autonomy, given the particular strictures of contemporary politics--that is, the market-driven, antidemocratic nature of the current economic national and global forces? Irigaray suggests that "the return of women to collective work, to public places, to social relations, demands linguistic mutations" and profound transformations, an embodied imagination with force and agency in civil life [TD 65].
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Irigaray warns that if civil and political participation is construed in overly narrow terms, if focus is on economic or judicial "circuits" alone, we overlook the symbolic organization of power--women risk losing "everything without even being acknowledged" [TD 56]. Instead an interval of recognition can expand the political to include the concerns and activities of real women, lest silence imply consent to sexual neutrality, or more likely, to women's obliteration under men's interests and concerns. Women's insistence on self-definition and wage labor, on love and justly remunerated work, testifies to the obduracy of women's difference, one that is not likely to disappear. The patriarchal family is still the legal norm, even when certain exceptions are made, while enduring questions regarding women's health and children's physical welfare as priorities beyond market considerations are consigned to legislative obfuscation, still a political afterthought. Instead, in the US the liberal state removes the slender welfare net specific to women and children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and fails to provide medical coverage to those who are among the most vulnerable of its citizens. Women without access to the legal protection of sex-neutral citizenship, poor working women without language (the money for an effective "mouthpiece" to represent their distress in a court of law), are further disempowered by liberal politics' insistence on sexual neutrality--that is, on repression or amnesia regarding the lived experiences of women.
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Impact: Scarcity
Restructuring the relationship between men and women is essential to reconnect with the fluid evolution and solve man made scarcity and poverty Fermon 98 Nicole Fermon, 1998, John Hopkins University Press, Women on the Global Market: Irigaray and
the Democratic State, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v028/28.1fermon.html
Sexual difference is key to any project of self-definition by women. Irigaray insists on the sexual nature of this self-definition, not solely for its obvious procreative necessity, but because the natural world is a source of renewal and fecundity which requires attentive interrogation and respect [SG 15]. This rebirth seems alien to the structure of male politics, which instead seem to provoke disasters (Bhopal, Chernobyl, or the current runaway jungle fires of Indonesia, courtesy of commercial logging, spreading thick pollution to neighboring countries) and untimely death. 1 We talk about social justice and forget its origins in nature and not merely as an engagement between men in abstraction. Irigaray believes that recognition and respect of difference between the sexes is prior to productive and generative relations between women, between men, and between men and women. Sexual difference is universal and allows us to participate in "an immediate natural given, and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal" [ILTY 47]. It is this prior recognition of two, rather than the One that has dominated world politics and thought, which must be acknowledged, along with the possibility of a political economy of abundance, not only that of man-made scarcity then attributed to nature. This melancholic (male) script pays romantic tribute to motherhood in the abstract without due recognition of the relations between real mothers and children, thus failing to properly acknowledge and protect mother or child. Our ability to address the specifics of race, ethnicity, and religious and other differences with respect hinges on our ability to acknowledge and respect the feminine, to see it as a source of invention and possibilities. To do so would of course affect relations between the sexes, "men and women perhaps . . . communicat[ing] for the first time if two different genders are affirmed," it would allow a new configuration rather than continuing the present regime: "the globalization and universalization of culture . . . ungovernable and beyond our control" [SG 120; ILTY 129].
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Impact: Scarcity
Protesting patriarchal domination provides a spiritual connection with the Earth that is crucial to overcoming environmental destruction Vaughan 04 Genevieve Vaughan, 2004, Gift Giving and the Goddess; A philosophy for social change, Avalon
Magazine, 12 December 2008, http://www.gift-economy.com/articlesAndEssays/giftAndGoddess.html
Those of us who honor the ancient ways and love Mother Earth, approaching her with wonder, can participate in the varieties of life beyond monotheism, loving the whole in her parts. When we create a society in which giftgiving has become the human norm, our spirituality will be liberated and we will recognize the goddess in each other and the earth. Though some of us may feel that we are already experiencing this phenomenon, we have to remember the dire situation society is in and try to turn our giftgiving towards the big picture. Protesting against patriarchy is a spiritual necessity. We must mother society, mother the future, mother our Mother the Earth and our human mothers as well as our children. As we call upon the ancient goddesses of our own and other cultures we empower ourselves with their gifts and we are also respecting the need of the people of the past not to have lived in vain, to have a progeny that survives on this magical planet, which must not be destroyed. When we look at our planet from space we see that here we are living in comparative Eden. The sun shines on other planets and on the moon yet they are desolate. The earth has created all this abundance of life, using the energy of the sun. She is the creative receiver-and-giver. We must honor her processes. When we have restored the giftgiving way we will all be able co muni cate with the spirits of nature who have no gender script. Presently our exchange system must be toxic to them so they keep away from us. Our psychic abilities cannot develop because the contents of our minds have been made manipulative by our economics. Perhaps if we create a gift based society we will be able to form a community with the spirits of the dead as well, a practical heaven on earth
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Impact: Scarcity
Exclusion of women from society results in an alienation from mother earth and exploitation of natural resources Vaughan 04 Genevieve Vaughan, 2004, Gift Giving and the Goddess; A philosophy for social change, Avalon
Magazine, 12 December 2008, http://www.gift-economy.com/articlesAndEssays/giftAndGoddess.html
By taking off the eyeglasses of exchange we can see Mother Earth not as the adversary or as raw material for our profit making activities but as the great gift giver. Each of the four elements has a different gift quality. Fire can be given to others without losing it, water nurtures life freely making up most of our body mass, earth gives us ground, space, and innumerable gifts of plant and animals, while air flows from a high pressure to a low pressure area, from where there is more to where there is less. (That's the answer that is blowin' in the wind). Our hearts pump blood out to satisfy the needs of our cells and then the blood returns to be re oxygenated. Every ecological niche meets the needs of the animals and plants that are adapted to it. Light from stars leaps over endless space to become a gift when our eyes are there to receive it. Mother Earth herself has taken the light of the sun and used it to create life in innumerable interactive (intergiving) patterns. In fact giftgiving is Her Way, not exchange. So how did exchange happen? How did we get so far from the Way of the Mother? I believe the answer goes something like this. By naming boys and girls with different gender terms we have alienated our boy children. We have taught them they have to be something different from their giftgiving mothers, even though it is difficult to construct an identity apart from the giftgiving by which our bodies and minds are formed. Cognitive psychologists have indicated that we construct our categories using prototypes (2). I believe that when a boy discovers he is not part of the category of his giftgiving mother he seizes upon the father as the prototype for the category 'human' and he uses that prototype for his own development of a non nurturing, non female, identity, which then appears to be the human identity. There is a one-tomany relation between a prototype and things related to it, so there is logically only one prototype per category. Boys are in the situation of having to compete with the father and with other males to be the one prototype for 'human', an almost impossible and contradictory task. The competition to get to the top and remain there becomes dominance and power-over. Hierarchies are constructed to provide many levels of categories so that at least some different people get to have the prototype position. In response to this misconceived, artificial agenda, females are seen to be those who cannot be prototypes for the human concept and who do not compete for dominance. In fact they continue to be socialized to be mothers and to follow a different, more human, giftgiving agenda. The fact that both men and women can participate in the work force and do child care shows that these are socially imposed roles and value systems. They are not biologically pre determined. In fact many people have both value systems operating internally, with all the conflict and confusion that 'engenders'.
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Impact: War
Subordination of the female body perpetuates gendered culture which leads to inevitable war and violence Workman 96 Thom Workman, professor of political science at university of New Brunswick, 1996, Pandoras Sons: The Nominal Paradox of Patriarchy and War, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:HVpenQLvgl0J:www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/OP31Workman.pdf+patriarchy+war&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us The gender critique of war provides a generalized account of wars and the way they are fought. The gender critique tells us why we have wars at all. While it is suggestive with respect to the frequency, character, and scope of war, it does not try to account for the timing and location of specific wars. It tells us why war is viewed widely as an acceptable practice or way to resolve human differences (although this acceptance invariably is accompanied with obligatory protestations of reluctance). The gender critique of war, for example, cannot account for the timing and location of the 1991 Gulf War, although it can provide an explanation of the warring proclivities of modern Western states, especially the inconsistency between the peaceful rhetoric of the US and its incessant warring practices. It can account for the spectre of war in the aftermath of Vietnam, with the end of the Cold War, and with the election of George Bush. It is less able to account for the appearance of war in the Middle East in January of 1991. The opening intellectual orientation of the gender critique of war rests upon a constructivist view of human understanding and practice, that is, a view that anchors practices, including war, within humankind's self-made historico-cultural matrix. This view is contrasted starkly with those that ground human practices psychologically or biologically or genetically. War is not viewed as a natural practice as if delivered by the Gods; it arises out of human-created understandings and ways-of- living that have evolved over the millennia. More specifically, the assumption that men (the nearly exclusive makers and doers of war) are biologically hard-wired for aggression and violence is resisted, as is the related notion that women are naturally passive and nonviolent. The explanation for war will not be found in testosterone levels. It is not the essential or bio-social male that makes war. War is the product of the gendered understandings of lifeunderstandings of the celebrated masculine and the subordinated femininethat have been fashioned over vast tracts of cultural time. And since war arises from human-created understandings and practices it can be removed when these understandings change. War is not insuperable. Indeed, the rooting of war in human created phenomena is recognized as a response to the political incapacitation associated with biologically determinist arguments: "Attempts of genetic determinists to show a biological basis for individual aggression and to link this to social aggression, are not only unscientific, but they support the idea that wars of conquest between nations are inevitable."
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Impact: War
Patriarchal practices of devaluing femininity lead enforce a war ethic causing continuous violence, war and aggression Workman 96 Thom Workman, professor of political science at university of New Brunswick, 1996, Pandoras Sons: The Nominal Paradox of Patriarchy and War, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:HVpenQLvgl0J:www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/OP31Workman.pdf+patriarchy+war&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Cohn adds that the physicist was careful not to transgress the pale of the masculine in his subsequent work. This self-discipline on the part of the physicist is revealing in that is underscores the respect afforded gender boundaries. Appearing womanly invited an immediate loss of stature and a delegitimation of one's contribution to the discussion. Expressing concern about the pain and suffering associated with the death counts, or subordinating icy abstractions to particular, concrete considerations was recognized as an abandonment of the appropriate policy-making framework.
The practices of war emerge within gendered understandings that inflect all spheres of social life. As we created "man" and "woman" we simultaneously created war. Contemporary warfare, in complementary terms, emerges within the inner-mostsanctums of gendered life. Gender constructs are constitutive of war; they drive it and imbue it with meaning and sense. War should not be understood as simply derivative of the masculine ethos, although it numerous facets accord with narratives and lore of masculinity. The faculty of war is our understanding of man and women, of manliness and womanliness, and particularly of the subordination of the feminine to the masculine. It is the twinning of the masculine and the feminine that nourishes the war ethic. This can be illustrated by examining the infusion of the language of war with heterosexual imagery typically of patriarchy, that is, with ideas of the prowess-laden male sexual subject conquering the servile female sexual object. Both sex and war are constituted through understandings of male domination and female subordination. The language is bound to be mutually reinforcing and easily interchangeable. War is a metaphor for sex and sex is a metaphor for war. A recent study of nicknames for the
penis revealed that men were much more inclined to metaphorize the penis with reference to mythic or legendary characters (such as the Hulk, Cyclops, Genghis Khan, The Lone Ranger, and Mac the Knife), to authority figures and symbols (such as Carnal King, hammer of the gods, your Majesty, Rod of Lordship, and the persuader), to aggressive tools (such as screwdriver, drill, jackhammer, chisel, hedgetrimmer, and fuzzbuster), to ravening beasts (such as beast of burden, King Kong, The Dragon, python, cobra, and anaconda), and to weaponry (such as love pistol, passion rifle, pink torpedo, meat spear, stealth bomber, destroyer, and purple helmeted love warrior).The intuitive collocation of sexuality with domination, conquering, destruction, and especially instruments of war is confirmed by this study. Both sex and war, however, are manifestations of the gendered notions of power-
over, submission, inequality, injury, contamination, and destruction. Both practices are integral expressions of patriarchal culture and proximate to its reproduction. It is hardly surprising that the language of sexuality and
war is seamless.War is masculinist in the sense that it is bound up with the flight from woman to man; it is a repudiation of feminine characteristics and traits in favour of those understood as masculine. War is inscribed with
the celebration of manliness and the concomitant loathing of womanliness. We can speak of war in terms of its migration "to the masculine" and its flight "from the feminine". With respect to the former, war is associated explicitly with the achievement andrecoveryofmasculinity. Embedded within the fabric of masculinity are the rituals of violence and destruction. Violence and aggression are not incidental to masculinity; they are integral to its meaning. War arises as the quintessential practice of masculine confirmation; in and through war manliness is achieved. The tapestry of virility embodies the war ethic. The
masculinity of the war-maker is not doubted. War becomes the exclusivesanctuary of masculinized males (and occasionally of masculinized females). The extensive role of "women" in the functioning of the militaries is understood logistically but does not resonate within patriarchal consciousness
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Why weren't we prepared for this - the imminence of nuclear holocaust. The final silencing of life. The brutal extinction of the planet. Surely there have been substantial clues throughout history. Male supremacy. Wars. Witch-burning. Male religious myths. Institutionalized greed. The enslavement of half the human race. Centuries of violence. Why weren't we prepared for this? We have lived with violence for so long. We have lived under the rule of the fathers so long. Violence and patriarchy: mirror images. An ethic of destruction as normative. Diminished love for life, a numbing to real events as the final consequence. We are not even prepared. Mary Daly, in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, writes, "The rulers of the patriarchy males with power - wage an unceasing war against life itself. Since female energy is essentially biophilic, the female spirit/body is the primary target in the perpetual war of aggression against life. Women must understand that the female self is the enemy under fire from the patriarchy." She further writes that "clearly the primary and essential object of aggression is not the opposing military force. The members of the opposing team play the same war games and share the same values. The secret bond that binds the warriors together is the violation of women, acted out physically and constantly replayed on the level of language and shared fantasies." We needn't look far for evidence to support her theory. Recall the U.S. Army basic training jingle: "This is my rifle (slaps rifle). This is my gun (slaps crotch). One is for killing, the other for fun." The language of war is the language of genocide. Misogynist obscenities are used to train fighters and intensify feelings of violence. War provides men with a context to act their hatred of women without the veneer of chivalry or civilization. War is rape. In the male world of war, toughness is the most highly-prized virtue. Some even speak of the "hairy chest syndrome." The man who recommends violence does not endanger his reputation for wisdom, but a man who suggests negotiation becomes known as soft, as willing to settle for less. To be repelled by mass murder is to be irresponsible. It is to refuse the phallic celebration. It is to be feminine, to be a dove. It means walking out of the club of bureaucratic machismo. To be a specialist in the new violence is to be on the frontier. It is no accident that patriarchy related history as the history of war; that is precisely their history. In remembering their battles, the fathers recall the deep experience of their own violent proclivities and relive the ecstatic euphoria of those ultimate moments of male bonding. The history of war speaks volumes about national will in a patriarchal culture. Wars are nothing short of organized killing presided over by men deemed as the best. The fact is - they are. They have absorbed, in the most complete way, the violent character of their own ethos. These are the men who design missiles and technologies as extensions of themselves. These men are ready to annihilate whole societies. These are the men honored as heroes with steel minds, resolute wills, insatiable drives for excellence, capable of planning demonic acts in a detached non-emotional way. These are the dead men, the hollow men, capable of nothing but violence.
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Impact: Violence
Keeping the victims of patriarchy powerless causes in violence in every aspect of life, empowering the once socially dead body is the only way to escape nuclear proliferation Hope 91
Barbara Hope, 1991, Center for Peace Resources, Class of Nonviolence, Patriarchy: A State of War, http://salsa.net/peace/conv/8weekconv5-5.html
It is significant that, after the accident at Three Mile Island, women were more concerned about the danger than men; women felt they were being lied to about the real-life effects of nuclear technology. Women were resistant to the repeated declaration of the makle decision makers that everything was under control, that there was nothing to be alarmed about, that nuclear engineers could solve any difficulties. Women felt the lies. Women know and feel the lies that maintain nuclear technology because we have been lied to. We are the victims of patriarchal lies. We know the deceit that grounds patriarchal colonization of women. We know, feel and intuit the deep truth that falsehoods, deceptions and lies form the very character of male rule. Women are the first victims of the patriarchal state of war. Violence to our bodies: A women is raped every three minutes. A woman is battered every eighteen seconds. Women are physically threatened by a frightening social climate structured in male might. Women are depicted in pornography as objects to be beaten, whipped, chained and conquered. The myth prevails that women like it. Violence to our hearts: The positing of male comradeship as the model of human relationships. The systematic separation of women from one another. The degradation of women's culture. The erasure of women's history. The sanctifying of the heterosexual norm with its rigid understanding of the giving and receiving of affection. Violence to our spirit: The dismemberment of the goddess and the enthronement of the male god. The ripping of women away from a life in tune with natural patterns of rhythm and flow in the universe. The ongoing patriarchal work of rendering women unconscious to ourselves. Violence to our work: The exploitation and devaluation of women's labor. The regulation of women to supportive, maintenance roles. The deliberate structure of women's economic dependence. Violence to women. Under the patriarchy, women are the enemy. This is a war across time and space, the real history of the ages. In this extreme situation, confronted by the patriarchy in its multiple institutional forms, what can women do? We can name the enemy: patriarchy. We can break from deadly possession by the fathers. We can move from docility, passivity and silence to liberation, courage and speech. We can name ourselves, cherish ourselves, courageously take up our lives. We can refuse to sell our bodies and we can refuse to sell our minds. We can claim freedom from false loyalties. We can band with other women and ignite the roaring fire of female friendship.This much we have learned from our living: life begets life. Life for women, life for the earth, the very survival of the planet is found only outside the patriarchy. Beyond their sad and shallow definitions. Beyond their dead and static knowledge. Beyond their amnesia. Beyond their impotence. Beyond their wars. Wars which unmask the fear, insecurity and powerlessness that form the very base of patriarchal rule. To end the state of war, to halt the momentum toward death, passion for life must flourish. Women are the bearers of life-loving energy. Ours is the task of deepening that passion for life and separating from all that threatens life, all that diminishes life. Becoming who we are as women. Telling/living the truth of our lives. Shifting the weight of the world.
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This essay develops the hypothesis that social death is utterly central to the evil of genocide, not just when a genocide is primarily cultural but even when it is homicidal on a massive scale. It is social death that enables us to distinguish the peculiar evil of genocide from the evils of other mass murders. Even genocidal murders can be viewed as extreme means to the primary end of social death. Social vitality exists through relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that create an identity that gives meaning to a life. Major loss of social vitality is a loss of identity and consequently a serious loss of meaning for one's existence. Putting social death at the center takes the focus off individual choice, individual goals, individual careers, and body counts, and puts it on relationships that create community and set the context that gives meaning to choices and goals. If my hypothesis is correct, the term "cultural genocide" is probably both redundant and misleadingredundant, if the social death present in all genocide implies cultural death as well, and misleading, if "cultural genocide" suggests that some genocides do not include cultural death.
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Genocide is a paradigm of what Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit (1996) calls "indecent" in that it not only destroys victims but first humiliates them by deliberately inflicting an "utter loss of freedom and control over one's vital interests" (115). Vital interests can be transgenerational and thus survive one's death. Before death, genocide victims are ordinarily deprived of control over vital transgenerational interests and more immediate vital interests. They may be literally stripped naked, robbed of their last possessions, lied to about the most vital matters, witness to the murder of family, friends, and neighbors, made to participate in their own murder, and if female, they are likely to be also violated sexually. 7 Victims of genocide are commonly killed with no regard for lingering suffering or exposure. They, and their corpses, are routinely treated with utter disrespect. These
historical facts, not simply mass murder, account for much of the moral opprobrium attaching to the concept of genocide. Yet such atrocities, it may be argued, are already war crimes, if conducted during wartime, and they can otherwise or also be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. Why, then, add the specific crime of genocide? What, if anything, is not already captured by laws that prohibit such things as the rape, enslavement, torture, forced deportation, and the degradation of individuals? Is any ethically distinct harm done to members of the targeted group that would not have been done had they been targeted simply as individuals rather than because of their group membership? This is the question that I find central in arguing that genocide is not simply reducible to mass death, to any
of the other war crimes, or to the crimes against humanity just enumerated. I believe the answer is affirmative: the harm is ethically distinct, although on the question of whether it is worse, I wish only to question the assumption that it is not. Specific to genocide is the harm inflicted on its victims' social vitality. It is not just that one's group membership is the occasion for harms that are definable independently of one's identity as a member of the group. When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose their cultural heritage and may even lose their intergenerational connections. To use Orlando Patterson's terminology, in that event, they may become "socially dead" and their descendants "natally alienated," no longer able to pass along and build upon the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and projects of earlier generations (1982, 5-9). The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than that of physical death. Social death can even aggravate physical death by making it indecent, removing all respectful and caring ritual, social connections, and social contexts that are capable of making dying bearable and even of making one's death meaningful. In my view, the special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death (when it does that) but social death, producing a consequent meaninglessness of one's life and even of its termination. This view, however, is controversial.
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Although social vitality is essential to a decent life for both women and men, the sexes have often played different roles in its creation and maintenance. If men are often cast in the role of the creators of (high?) culture, women have played very central roles in preserving and passing on the traditions, language, and (daily) practices from one generation to the next and in maintaining family and community relationships. Where such generalizations hold, the blocking of opportunities for creativity (being excluded from the professions, for example) would fall very heavily on men. But disruptions of family and community, such as being alienated from one's family by rape or being suddenly deported without adequate provisions (or any means of obtaining them) into a strange environment where one does not even know the language, would also fall very heavily, perhaps especially so, on women. Most immediate victims of genocide are not born socially dead. But genocides that intentionally strip victims of the ability to participate in social activity, prior to their murders, do aim at their social death, not just their physical death. In some cases it may appear that social death is not an end in itself but simply a consequence of means taken to make mass murder easier (concentrating victims in ghettos and camps, for example). When assailants are moved by hatred, however, social death may become an end in itself. Humiliation before death appears often to have been an end in itself, not just a means. The very idea of selecting victims by social group identity suggests that it is not just the physical life of victims that is targeted but the social vitality behind that identity. If the aim, or intention, of social death is not accidental to genocide, the survival of Jewish culture does not show that social death was not central to the evil of the
holocaust, any more than the fact of survivors shows that a mass murder was not genocidal. A genocide as successful as the holocaust achieves the aim of social death both for victims who do not survive, and to a degree and for a time, for many survivors as well. Thomas's point may still hold that [End Page 76] descendants of survivors of the African diaspora produced by the slave trade are in general more alienated from their African cultures of origin than holocaust survivors are from Judaism today. Yet it is true in both cases that survivors make substantial connection with other cultures. If African Americans are totally alienated from their African cultures of origin, it is also true that many holocaust survivors and their descendants have found it impossible to embrace Judaism or even a Jewish culture after Auschwitz. The survival of a culture does not by itself tell us about the degree of alienation that is experienced by individual survivors. Knowledge of a heritage is not by itself sufficient to produce vital connections to it. The
harm of social death is not, so far as I can see, adequately captured by war crimes and other crimes against humanity. Many of those crimes are defined by what can be done to individuals considered independently of their social connections: rape (when defined simply as a form of physical assault), torture, starvation. Some crimes, such as deportation and enslavement, do begin to get at issues of disrupting social existence. But they lack the comprehensiveness of social death, at least when the enslavement in question is not hereditary and is not necessarily for the rest of a person's life.
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and therefore incapable of being killed, is conditioned by a peculiarly American disavowal of vulnerability and mortality, which means that the Levinasian insistence on the
anteriority of the other's precariousness reinscribes the very dialectic of being/non-being that the turn toward ethics is intended to correct.32 As Donald Pease has argued, 9/11 replaced "virgin land" with
"ground zero," effectively transforming a "secured innocent nation [into] a wounded, insecure emergency state."33 The killing of those deemed already dead thus works to cover over this wound, to reproduce the exceptionalist ideology of American innocence, security, and invulnerability.34 Referring to the events of 9/11, Butler asks if we might learn something "about the
geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and devastating exposure to this condition" (29, my italics). But if corporeal vulnerability is a general condition of being, how is it that she characterizes this precariousness as a "brief and devastating exposure"? Is not the perception of this vulnerability as aberrant, as enclosed within the space of a few hours on one September morning, symptomatic of the American interdiction of mortality? I want to suggest that this rhetorical slip betrays an adherence to a logic of presence that disavows finitude even as this argument places the vulnerability of the body at the center of its politics. This resurrection of ontology should perhaps come as no surprise, given Butler's [End Page 171] adherence to Levinas, who, as Derrida notes, is "very close to Hegel, much closer than he would want himself and here at the moment when he is opposed to him apparently in the most radical manner" (criture 147). Indeed, Levinas imagines a relation to alterity that escapes the Hegelian dialectic of "mutual recognition" by posing the other as absolutely exterior to the same. Yet, this apparent move beyond Hegel ends up reinscribing a binary between self and other that mimes the dialectic it claims to surmount. Just as Levinas reverses rather than displaces the philosophical tradition's privileging of being over alterity, Butler inadvertently reasserts the ontological security of American life by posing the other's corporeal vulnerability as anterior to one's own. Ethics cannot "begin" with the precariousness of the other, but must commence at the intersection of a self and other who are never fully outside the orbit of one another.
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Iraq serve as devastating reminders of the body's mortality. But corporeal vulnerability does not have its origin in external violence. Corporeal vulnerability does not commence with our exposure to others. The body's finitude, its spectrality, is inherent. As Freud puts it, however, "at bottom no one believes in his own death. . . . Every one of us is convinced of his own immortality."35 The political stratification that positions the socially alive against the socially dead thus also describes the unequal distribution of mortality/immortality more generally.36 If no one believes in his or her own death, then death
always "happens" to others. As Heidegger observes, the recognition that "'one dies' spreads the opinion that death, so to speak, strikes the they" (234). For Heidegger, however, the futural "not yet" that attends
the "certain" but "indeterminate" possibility of death denies how being is always "ahead of itself" in its anticipation of death. Hence, while the move from the living body to the precarious body
begins to address the problem of finitude so largely absent from Butler's earlier work, her tendency to reduce finitude to the problem of external threat and violence does not awaken to the originary mourning that haunts all bodies.
Avowing mortality and mourning might not only forestall the violent response to 9/11, but could also challenge the reduction of America's "internal" racial and sexual others to the liminal status of social death. The construction of the Muslim other as always already dead describes but the most recent version of a long American tradition that secures the "immortality" of the "majority" at the expense of the mortalization of the nation's racial and sexual others. 37 Indeed, the belief that "death strikes others" is most violently felt in the domain of racial and sexual politics. What I have been calling the "redoubled ghostliness" of racial
and sexual minorities describes an intimate contact with both social and material death. As Karla Holloway observes in Passed on: African-American Mourning Stories, black Americans are unusually at risk for an
"untimely death," from specific forms of racial violence, such as lynching and capital punishment, to all varieties of disease.38 Given the homophobic equation of homosexuality and death that has characterized the response to the AIDS crisis, sexual minorities also bear the burden of the death that heterosexist culture denies. Without
diminishing the reality of this heightened proximity to death, however, we must also recognize that finitudeas a generalizable condition of existencealways comes "before its time." While some of us are socially dead,
we are all specters. If self-presence is always tied to the belief in one's immortality, then only a theory that dislodges corporeality from the present can challenge the unacknowledged belief that death is what happens to others. "The ultimate queer act"to modify Holland's assertion with which we beganwould be finally to displace the dialectic of being/non-being, to resist the racist and heterosexist disavowal of spectrality through which the abjection of queers both emerges and is sustained.
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applications, is Gail Weiss's "The Abject Borders of the Body Image" in which she investigates processes of body image formation and calls for an analysis of standards differentiating "normal" from "abnormal" bodies. She employs Julia Kristeva's account of abjection: the process of active body image formation through the power of that which is excluded (although what is excluded continues to erupt). Weiss examines the relationship between abjection and body image distortion by pursuing "the rather tricky issue of what the distortion deviates from since the very notion of distortion" suggestions a norm (43). Concentrating on the raced and gendered example of anorexia, she argues that a nondistorted body image depends upon techniques of bodily distortion. Arriving at an "embodied understanding" requires the creation of multiple body images in tension with one another -- images that go beyond hegemonic regulation of "the abject borders of our body images" (56). Encouraging communication between multiple images, she claims, would "allow us to productively negotiate the turbulence of our corporeal existence" (56). Accessibly discussing the complex notion of abjection and its psychoanalytic heritage, Weiss, more importantly, demonstrates the usefulness of deploying it politically in a feminist destablization of ideal body images.
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While Derrida's point is that the iterability of a speech act requires the possibility of one's absence from future scenes of utterance (and thus already implies one's absence in the present), this living death also names the experience of "being" more generally. As Heidegger puts it, being "is always already dying" in its "being toward its-end."5 For Heidegger, death is not a punctual event that one might mark on a calendar;
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rather, death always already belongs to our being. The conventional reduction of death to a calculable moment is precisely what Poe's story parodies. While his doctors assert that his "disease [is] of that character which would admit of exact calculation in respect to the epoch of its termination [End Page 154] in death," Valdemar (aided by the magic of mesmerism) continues to live beyond the estimated moment of decease, a prolongation of dying that allegorizes how life stretches along a path marked at every step by death (51). Valdemar's protracted dying also echoes Emily Dickinson's poem "Because I could not stop for death," in which death "kindly" stops for the speaker and bears her forward through each stage of life. If, as in Dickinson's poem, death haunts our "being" from the very beginning, then the spectral condition of sexual minorities is not reducible to a problem of representation, or rather, misrepresentation, as queer scholarship tends to suppose. When Holland caricatures "postmodernism" as "the attractive zombie theory of the academy, a place where the living travel through death and are reborn to utter the truths of such a journey," she suggests that postmodernism articulates a dialectical relation between life and death, a sublation of being and non-being that ultimately triumphs over finitude (166). Such a dialectical view of the relation between life and death, however, opposes itself to the spectral, which is neither present nor absent. But perhaps Holland's caricature is to be expected, for as Derrida notes in Specters of Marx, "the traditional scholar does not believe in ghostsnor in all that one would call the virtual space of spectrality." 6 If the traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts, that is because "there has never been a scholar who, as such, did not believe in the clear-cut distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being" (34). For Derrida, a capacity to speak to "ghosts" would be the mark of a scholar.7 Although it might seem odd to yoke queer critics to the figure of the traditional scholar, so ingrained is the anti-spectral character of queer scholarship that Holland can declare the ultimate queerness of raising the dead as a "fact," and support this claim only by referring us to ACT UP's famous political slogan: "silence = death." To insist on this "fact," however, is to sidestep the problem of finitude altogether.
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A2: Perm
Because the social service system uses cognition and linguistics as methods of manipulation we need to interrogate discourse not only reform the system in order to solve DiPalma 02 Carolyn DiPalma, 2002, Body Politics: Webs of Embodiment, Medicine, Science, Technology, Nature and Culture, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v006/6.2dipalma.html The early chapter titled "Problematique" is undoubtedly the richest for readers interested in the theoretical aspects informing Greenhalgh's argument. Here she clarifies the themes of her argument, indicates her scholarly debt to feminist theory, convincingly points to an admiration for recognizing conflicting complexities, and reveals a nuanced understanding of discourse analysis and the politics of storytelling within science. Greenhalgh notes the critical tools of the physician are "no longer the physical implements of the mechanic" and that "it is not the stethoscope or scalpel that does the fundamental work of medicine"; instead, medical tools are cognitive and linguistic, enabling persuasion and emotional intervention (18). Greenhalgh lists the four phases of this process as patient construction, storytelling, persuasion, and treatment (27). She argues knowledgeably that, influenced by gender dynamics, it is the discursive power of scientific medicine and its understandings of the afflicted body and its cure that becomes a cognitive, linguistic and material apparatus for social control.
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Framework (1NC)
We must first look to the discursive and linguistic construction of the body in American culture, yet this discourse is distinct from the ontology of the body Peterson 06 Christopher Peterson, Professor at UCLA, 2006, The Return of the Body: Judith Butlers Dialectical Corporealism, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/discourse/v028/28.2-3.peterson.html
In isolating Butler's work for critique, I do not mean to suggest that her corpus is uniquely "guilty" of resurrecting the metaphysics of presence under the guise of the body. As I noted above, the body has become something of an obsession (a hantise as one says in French) in American critical discourse over the past fifteen years. The impetus for this critical reading of Butler emerges from my own sustained engagement with and admiration for a body of work that has provided a wide-range of fieldsamong them, continental philosophy, feminism, queer studies, performance studies, and critical legal studieswith a series of rich and provocative theoretical engagements. My contention, however, is that her theorizations of corporeality also tend to eclipse the most radical insights of deconstructive thought by adhering to a series of dialectical oppositions (presence/absence, body/spirit, life/death) that fail to dislodge being from the present.15 Butler's reticence to interrogate the presumption of self-presence seems surprising given the radical character of her major theoretical claims. As is well known, her central argument about the body asserts that it is
unknowable outside of those linguistic tropes that occasion its survivability within language. Drawing from the Foucauldian paradigm of what American critics too loosely characterize as "discursive construction," she insists that any effort to posit a body prior to discourse is nothing more than a ruse, one that does not take into account how bodies congeal and materialize by virtue of their implication in language. By alerting us to the discourse of "constructivism" as a peculiarly American phenomenon, I mean to suggest that its invention is conditioned by the translation of Foucauldian thought into an American context. Although this problem of translation is both linguistic and culturalin that it is not merely a question of language difference but also of the uniquely American political investments that Foucault's thought has often [End Page 159] been enlisted to addressthe former might be said to enable, or at least reinforce, the latter. This possibility is suggested by Robert Hurley's translation of Histoire de la Sexualit. In an often-cited passage, Hurley's text reads: "Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct."16 The term that Hurley translates as "construct" is given in the original as "dispositif," although when it
appears in the chapter title, "Le Dispositif de Sexualit," he translates it as "deployment."17Dispositif (also "device," or "mechanism") has a much different connotation from the English "construct," which, as Butler notes, implies that there is some sort of agent doing the constructing.18 When coupled with the notion of "discourse," construction also suggests something much more idealist than dispositif. As Butler remarks in "How Can I Deny. . ." the discourse of constructivism risks a certain linguistification, a certain reduction of everything to language. This linguistification, however, ought to be read in the context of the American appropriation and assimilation of various French, "poststructuralist" theories (another American invention) rather than as a testament to an idealism inherent in contemporary French thought. The argument that bodies become legible only within discourse
has often been interpreted as negating materiality altogether. And yet, Bodies That Matter explicitly distances itself from the constructivist paradigm by advocating a "return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization."19 Despite diagnosing the constructivism debate as moribund, however, this text incessantly conjures up its ghost. If the monistic threat whereby the body becomes nothing but language is simply a red herring, then whysome sixty pages into this textdoes one need to return to the question: "Are bodies purely discursive?" The polemic over the question of whether Bodies That Matter does or does not negate corporeality thus
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distracts us from how this text performs the possibility of the body's death if only to bring us as readers to the brink of an ostensible, poststructuralist nihilism, one in which the body always survives its "dangerous" encounters with the dematerializing effects of discourse and language. The claim that would understand this theory as doing away with the body thus misses the dialectical logic by which the body always survives its death. The body is always present in Butler's workand that is precisely the problem. For it is the very figuration of the body as presence that marks this theory as idealist. Ironically, the false perception of her theorizations of corporeality as a nihilistic threat to [End Page 160] identity politics diverts our attention away from the manner in which the metaphysics of presence haunt her work. In short, while Butler offers a radical antiepistemological account of corporeality through which the body is rendered unknowable prior to discourse and culture, her theory is far more conventional with respect to the body's ontology.20
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Framework
The body is the first thing that must be changed into a political resistance only when the body becomes a site of political resistance will we have the strength to reconceptualize the body of a victim Sutton 2007 Barbra Sutton, assistant professor of women's studies at the State University of New York at Albany and she holds the Ph.D. in sociology, 2007, University of Miami, Latin American Politics and Society, Poner el Cuerpo: Womens Embodiment and Political Resistance in Argentina, 1 July 2009, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/latin_american_politics_and_society/v049/49.3sutton.html This article explores the relationship between women's embodiment and political resistance in Argentina during 20022003. This was a time of socioeconomic crisis, influenced by neoliberal globalization. In this tumultuous context, women's bodies became embattled sites, shaken by the crisis but also actively engaged in constructing a new society and new forms of womanhood. Bodies are important to understanding political resistance, as reflected by the meanings attached to poner el cuerpo, a common expression in contemporary Argentine social movements. This article analyzes how women
construct embodied subjectivities through their activist practices and how they define poner el cuerpo in terms of collective protest and daily activist work, coherence between words and actions, embodied sacrifice, and risk taking and struggle. As life in Argentina deteriorated because of the crisis, women's bodies represented not only suffering but also resistance and renewal. In December 2001, the world's attention turned to Argentina. The Argentine economy collapsed, protesters populated the streets, and their cry Que se vayan todos! (They must all go!) pressured the nation's president to resign and leave the presidential palace by helicopter. I watched these images of my home country from the United States, and a few months later, I returned to Argentina to conduct sociological research. This was a time of despair and hope after a decade of rapid economic changes in line with the neoliberal prescriptions of international lending institutions. Argentina's economic crisis and political protest captured media interest around the world, pointing to both the violence of globalized capitalism and the solidarity and innovative responses that the crisis inspired. In these tumultuous conditions, women's bodies became embattled sites, shaken by the crisis but also actively engaged in the construction of a new society and new forms of embodied womanhood.
This article examines the significance of women's bodies in social activism and the role of political resistance in the constitution of women's embodied subjectivity at a time (20022003) and place (Argentina) in which women's political protest became particularly salient. It considers the following questions: How does the body, and particularly the female body, become a vehicle and agent of resistance? [End Page 129] How does women's political resistance engage and contest hegemonic modes of feminine embodiment?1 In her article "Protesting like a Girl" (2000), Wendy Parkins suggests that feminist theorizing should pay attention not only to the social control of women but also to their political agency.2 She argues, "we cannot think of political agency in abstraction from embodiment" (2000, 60). Indeed, political resistance involves, first and foremost, putting the material body in action to affect the course of society. Activists' bodily performances, capabilities, and vulnerabilities during political protest produce social, cultural, and political effects (De Lucca 1999; Peterson 2001). Wounded bodies, tortured bodies, defiant bodies, bodies that confront repression, bodies that protest in surprising ways, and out-of-place bodies shape both the political landscape and the embodied consciousness of participants.
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and capitalism, which in their pure form are supposed to operate on the basis of prescribed rules and performance
abilities rather than characteristics such as gender and ethnic origin. This problem has been realised by many feminists. One common idea is that there are two stages to a feminist programme: first, getting women
into positions of power, and second, implementing changes in organisations to undercut hierarchy and inequality. The problem with this is that postponing structural change to a later time is likely to mean indefinite postponement. The most serious threat from feminists arises from the potential for mobilising women to act against their oppression and, as part of this, against their exclusion from and exploitation by dominant structures. If women are successful in gaining some representation in these structures, this will partly remove the rationale for challenge, namely exclusion and discrimination. In addition, many women who do rise to positions of power thereby gain a vested interest in the hierarchy. The programme of promoting women into elite positions is sometimes held to be a fruitful
avenue for transforming society because women, through their biology or very early and deep socialisation, will be less aggressive, competitive or dominating than men. But even if the deep-seated psychological
characteristics of women are different from those of men, this by itself does not necessarily pose a severe threat to dominant structures. Women vary in their characteristics. Furthermore, they do have a potential for violence, for domination and for ruthlessness. Corporations and military forces will select those women, and indeed women will select themselves, who are most suited to operate in them, and the women will be further socialised once they join. Furthermore, even if some
caring and cooperative women obtain high positions in corporations and armies and proceed to act according to these values, this might only lead to the failure of some businesses and the defeat of some military forces rather than a collapse of the wider capitalist and military systems. Another problem with the promotion of equality within present structures is that some structures may be undesirable even if they were balanced by gender or entirely female. The military is a case in point. The experiences of earlier social movements should not be forgotten. The early feminist movement was often closely connected with socialist ideals. But the socialist goals were set aside to concentrate on obtaining the vote for women. After enormous efforts this was achieved, but with surprisingly little effect on the electoral system. This success was followed by the virtual collapse of the feminist movement and hence also the almost complete loss of a feminist push for socialism. Similarly, the organisation of workers for better working conditions was achieved after enormous effort, but at the expense of jettisoning most of the radical efforts for workers' control.
Struggles for equality within present structures cannot be a substitute for structural change, but they can be an important part of struggles for such change, as I will describe later.
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affirmation as presence, to the re-presentation of the body as hermetically sealed, safe from contamination and death. While we will return to this question of containment a bit later, what I seek to underscore here is how this argument both refuses and falls prey to the seduction of dialectical thinking. Against the reading that would understand the theory of discursive construction as reducing body/matter to language, the text asserts quite clearly that materiality cannot be "collapsed into an identity with language" (68). The passage continues:
Language and materiality are fully embedded in one another, chiasmic in their interdependency, but never fully collapsed into one another, i.e., reduced to one another, and yet neither fully ever exceeds the other. Always already implicated in each other, always already exceeding one another, language and materiality are never fully identical nor fully different.
Resisting the dialectical logic that would want to sublate the difference between language and materiality in the name of some greater synthesis, this argument would appear to write a certain diffrance into the relation between language and materiality. Any possibility
of identity is inevitably deferred by virtue of their "chiasmic" interdependency. But what is lost, if you will, in this recognizably deconstructive strategy is recovered when we move from the question of the relationship between language and materiality to that of the ontology of the body. Although this passage seems designed to allay ours
fears that the body might dissolve into language, what would happen, we might ask, if the reverse were to happen? That is, what if language was absorbed into materiality such that bodies became nothing but material stuff without ideality, indeed, without any discursive life? That such a question is not even on the horizon confirms that this argument concerning discursive construction means to perform a certain risk to bodily life. According to the tacit logic of this polemic, the possibility of everything becoming nothing but material is so in line with conventional thinking that it cannot even be considered a risk, despite the possibility that a material world without ideality would be, as Warren Montag reminds us, a "material world without anything . . . a body that has given up the ghost."23 But if the possibility of a materiality emptied of all idealizations is so remote that we need not even entertain it as a possibility, the same might be said of its corollary. Who actually thinks that the body is or might become nothing but language? According to the preface of Bodies That Matter, there would appear to be many people who fear this nihilistic conclusion. And it is precisely the hysteria spawned by this terrifying prospect that this argument seems compelled to assuage. The subtext of this argument appears to be the following: "Do not be afraid (of poststructuralism)the body still lives."
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Although Butler goes to great lengths to show how the body always "escape[s]" and "eludes its capture" by language, is not this threat of the body's dissolution, its full and final subsumption into language, precisely the nihilistic possibility that this and other texts rehearse over and over again, if only to win for the body a sense of triumph over death? (HCD 4, 18). Responding in another context to the paranoid conditionality of sentences that begin "'If real bodies do not exist . . .'" Butler writes: "The sentence begins as a warning against an impending nihilism, for if the conjured content of these series of conditional clauses proves to be true, then, and there is always a then, some set of dangerous consequences will surely follow" (Benhabib 35). Writing in the wake of the de Man scandal, the effort to counter this familiar caricature is understandable. But when does the effort to refute the caricaturepost-structuralism = nihilismend up disavowing death, indeed, putting in place the very metaphysics of presence that deconstruction, in particular, has sought to displace? Does the charge of nihilism always have to be answered by insisting on poststructuralism as "life affirming"? According to the charge of nihilism, negativity leads to consequences so dangerous that we cannot possibly look it in the face. Or as the refrain often goes in contemporary identity politics: the socially dead cannot afford, at this historical moment, when they are just now
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emerging from the shadows of abjection, to dwell with the negative, when as figures of death, that has been the only space that they have been allowed to inhabit. Given the polemic surrounding the question of nihilism, then, how are we to understand the preoccupation with "discursive construction" that haunts Butler's work? Following from Foucault, her use of the term "discourse" would appear to bear a set of meanings that line up quite neatly with those of the French philosopher. "Discourse" in Foucault is not only language, but carries the multiple valences of power, disciplinarity, institutionality, regulation, and idealization. Although her texts clearly exploit these multiple meanings, above all discourse comes to name something of a threat to the body. Understanding discourse as anterior to the body, she announces something like the death of the body as a thing-in-itself. This is made abundantly clear in the section from Bodies That Matter that I noted above, which bears the interrogative title: "'Are Bodies Purely Discursive?'" Recognizing the too-easy assimilation of death to that which cancels yet neither preserves (dialectics) nor produces any remainder (deconstruction), Butler proceeds to elaborate a meticulous answer to this question that shows how "the body" emerges only on the condition of its "negation" by discourse. Her answer begins with the following assertion: "To posit a materiality outside of language is still to posit that materiality, and the materiality so posited will retain that positing as its constitutive condition" (67).
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