Violent Attachments

Abstract

Drawing on feminist and queer critiques that see violence as constitutive of identities, this essay points to subject-positions whose construction is necessarily conditioned by exercising violence. Focusing on settler colonialism, I reverse the optics of the first set of critiques: rather than seeing the self as taking form through the injuries she suffers, I try to understand selves that are structurally constituted by causing injury to others. This analysis refuses the assumption that violence is in conflict with (liberal) identity, and that, therefore, the endurance of violence of liberal states/societies is dependent upon mechanisms of active blindness (or denial, deferral, and other forms of dissociation). I argue that this assumption, which is shared by many critiques of violence, fails to perceive that people can desire the violent arrangements supporting their communities. They therefore fail to address political settings wherein violence is an affirmative element of political identities.

Violent Attachments

“…Specifically, these modes of organizing society place people in a different relation to the violence they inflict, allowing them to see it constantly, yet erasing the victims as suffering subjects. Here we find schemes of racism and dehumanization that render some lives less accounted for; 22 pseudoscientific assumptions about the lack of pain among some people that erase the possibility of victimhood; 23 or a framing of the other as a dangerous enemy whose killing is always justified.…”

“…The first model asks how people can live under atrocities-generating regimes: what enables people to accept, not object to, and even collaborate with state violence? The relevant literature is predominantly engaged with fascism and genocide (specifically, but not only, the holocaust) and has provided different answers to this question: the power of authority, 13 of ideology, 14 of order itself, 15 the bureaucratization of violence, 16 or lack of an ability to think independently, particularly to think from the point of view of the other. 17 What these explanations have in common, excluding the latter, is the idea that violence is located in some elsewhere.…”

“…In proposing that we think of this violence, this identity, via the feminist/queer model of desire, I do not claim, for example, that we should compare settlers to men in a heteronormative society, or settlement to rape. 53 I do not seek to propose here a complete analogy but rather a model, which, like any model, offers a schematic, initial guideline and is limited in its applicability to changing test cases. A brief review of some proposed paths for decolonization can begin to show what it would mean to think of critique from this perspective.…”

Feminist Semiotics of “Safe”: Intimate Violence in the Time of Pandemic

“…In this regard, leaving home and using the public space might be experienced as emancipatory and promoting safety (Fenster, 2005). Equating the home with intimacy, belonging, and protection, neutralizes social criticism, and encourages a distorted perception of intimate violence as a deviation or exception to the norm (Kotef, 2010). Hence, exposing this spatial ideological mechanism is critical, precisely because the ideal of the home functions not only as a representation of intimacy and security, but also as a prescription, one that contributes to the expunging of intimate violence from the public consciousness, and presenting it as implausible (Brickell, 2012;Price, 2002).…”

The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States

“…The rites of spectacle lynching enlisted white spectators as participants, facilitating them to see and feel themselves as agents of sovereign violence, and in turn drew a sharp boundary between the collective subject of national power and its racialized enemies. Popular agency and identity under Jim Crow were thereby mediated by racial violence (Kotef 2019).…”