Summary

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  • Caselist.RoundClass[9]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[10]

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Caselist.RoundClass[9]

EntryDate

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1		-2017-05-10 19:19:17.867
	1	+2017-05-10 19:19:17.0

Caselist.CitesClass[10]

Cites

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	1	+====Transformation of the wound into an identity of its own is the essence of commodifying suffering. Remembrance is the only mechanism to counter wound fetishization—we need specific and constant connections to these histories====
	2	+**Ahmed 04** (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, "The Contingency of Pain", 2004, Routledge, New York, pp 31-34 //Accessed 9/15/16 GK)
	3	+How does pain enter politics? Does pain become political only through speech, or through claims for compensation? Pain has been considered by some as a very problematic ‘foundation’ for politics. Working with Nietzsche’s model of resentiment, for example, Wendy Brown argues that there has been a fetishisation of the wound in subaltern politics (Brown 1995: 55, see Nietzsche 1969). Subaltern subjects become invested in the wound, such that the wound comes to stand for identity itself. The political claims become claims of injury against something or somebody (society, the state, the middle classes, men, white people and so on) as a reaction or negation (Brown 1995: 73). Following Nietzsche, Brown suggests that reactions to injury are inadequate as a basis of politics since such reactions make action impossible: ‘Revenge as a "reaction", a substitute for the capacity to act, produces identity as both bound to the history that produced it and as a reproach to the present which embodies that history’ (Brown 1995: 73).10 Brown’s reworking of Nietzsche shows how an over-investment in the wound, ‘come~~s~~ into conflict with the need to give up these investments’ (Brown 1995: 73). I agree that the transformation of the wound into an identity is problematic. One of the reasons that it is problematic is precisely because of its fetishism: the transformation of the wound into an identity cuts the wound off from a history of ‘getting hurt’ or injured. It turns the wound into something that simply ‘is’ rather than something that has happened in time and space. The fetishisation of the wound as a sign of identity is crucial to ‘testimonial culture’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001), in which narratives of pain and injury have proliferated. Sensational stories can turn pain into a form of media spectacle, in which the pain of others produces laughter and enjoyment, rather than sadness or anger. Furthermore, narratives of collective suffering increasingly have a global dimension. As Kleinman, Das and Lock argue, ‘Collective suffering is also a core component of the global political economy. There is a market for suffering: victimhood is commodified’ (Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997: xi). This commodification of suffering does not mean that all narratives have value or even equal value: as I show in Chapters 6 and 7, following Judith Butler (2002b), some forms of suffering more than others will be repeated, as they can more easily be appropriated as ‘our loss’. The differentiation between forms of pain and suffering in stories that are told, and between those that are told and those that are not, is a crucial mechanism for the distribution of power. We can reflect critically on the culture of compensation, where all forms of injury are assumed to involve relations of innocence and guilt, and where it is assumed that responsibility for all injuries can be attributed to an individual or collective. The legal domain transforms pain into a condition that can be quantified as the basis for compensation claims. The problem of wound fetishism is the equivalence it assumes between forms of injury. The production of equivalence allows injury to become an entitlement, which is then equally available to all others. It is no accident then that the normative subject is often secured through narratives of injury: the white male subject, for example, has become an injured party in national discourses (see Chapter 2), as the one who has been ‘hurt’ by the opening up of the nation to others. Given that subjects have an unequal relation to entitlement, then more privileged subjects will have a greater recourse to narratives of injury. That is, the more access subjects have to public resources, the more access they may have to the capacity to mobilise narratives of injury within the public domain. How should we respond to this transformation of injury into an entitlement that secures such forms of privilege? I would suggest that our response should not simply be to critique the rhetorical use of injury or ‘wounds’, but to attend to the different ways in which ‘wounds’ enter politics. Not all narratives of pain and injury work as forms of entitlement; so for example, to read the story of white male injury as the same as stories of subaltern injury would be an unjust reading. Whilst we cannot assume that such differences are essential, or determined ‘only’ by the subject’s relation to power, we also cannot treat differences as incidental, and as separated from relations of power. The critique of wound culture should not operate as generalised critique, which would mean ‘reading’ different testimonies as symptomatic. As Carl Gutiérrez-Jones argues, the critique of injury needs to recognise the different rhetorical forms of injury as signs of an uneven and antagonistic history (Gutiérrez-Jones 2001: 35). So a good response to Brown’s critique would not be ‘to forget’ the wound or indeed the past as the scene of wounding. Brown does ‘part company’ with Nietzsche by suggesting that ‘the counsel of forgetting... seems inappropriate if not cruel’ for subjugated peoples who have yet to have their pain recognised (Brown 1995: 74). I would put this more strongly: forgetting would be a repetition of the violence or injury. To forget would be to repeat the forgetting that is already implicated in the fetishisation of the wound. Our task might instead be to ‘remember’ how the surfaces of bodies (including the bodies of communities, as I will suggest later) came to be wounded in the first place. Reading testimonies of injury involves rethinking the relation between the present and the past: an emphasis on the past does not necessarily mean a conservation or entrenchment of the past (see Chapter 8).11 Following bell hooks, our task would be ‘not to forget the past but to break its hold’ (Hooks 1989: 155). In order to break the seal of the past, in order to move away from attachments that are hurtful, we must first bring them into the realm of political action. Bringing pain into politics requires we give up the fetish of the wound through different kinds of remembrance. The past is living rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present. In other words, harm has a history, even though that history is made up of a combination of often surprising elements that are unavailable in the form of a totality. Pain is not simply an effect of a history of harm; it is the bodily life of that history. To think through how pain may operate in this way we can consider the document, Bringing Them Home, which is a report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (1996). Bringing Them Home reports on the Stolen Generation in Australia, a generation of indigenous children who were taken away from their families as part of a brutal and shocking policy of assimilation. Generations of indigenous children grew up with little or no contact with their families, or with their community and culture. They were often taken from their homes in a violent manner.

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-05-10 19:19:19.757

Judge

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	1	+x

Opponent

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	1	+x

ParentRound

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	1	+9

Round

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	1	+4

Team

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	1	+Lake Travis Ehresman Neg

Title

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	1	+JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K - Wound Fetishism Link

Tournament

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	1	+Harvard