Susan Hawthorne
Australian Women’s Studies Association Conference, Melbourne, 10 July 2006
Animal House
How long is
a day?
They
arrested us just before dawn.
Pulled from
our narrow bed.
There was
terror and a tearing
as if the
body were separating from itself.
Would there
be another day?
They took
us to the animal house.
The
stone-floored rooms
smelled of
urine mixed with fear.
Time is
filled with fear.
They put
electrodes against my face,
against my
neck,
against my
tongue,
against my
…
What will
they do next?
The tongue
swells in my mouth.
Will I ever
shape words again with my tongue?
I am
screaming from the inside,
I am
screaming out loud
and there’s
no one who wants to listen
to a
lesbian who’s been tortured
because
she’s a lesbian
What is torture?
Torture is the infliction of pain by the powerful on
the powerless. Pain here can be defined as physical pain or as mentally
disorienting and disintegrating techniques.
Some of the techniques of torture include:
• Infliction
of physical pain especially through pain on vulnerable areas of the body – e.g.
the soles of the feet.
• What
is misleadingly called “self-inflicted pain” through enforced body positions
e.g. standing against a wall hands high, legs apart so that a lot of weight is
placed on the fingers. Try standing like this and you will begin to feel the
body create it’s own pain – of course no one would “choose” to do this so it’s
not self-inflicted (but reversals are common in torture literature). The victim
is made to feel responsible for their own pain and suffering.
• Scrambling
the biorhythms of the body: sleep deprivation, manipulation of time by feeding
at irregular intervals, reversing day and night or making it impossible to tell
which is which through constant low light and or bright lights and or darkness
(hooding) as well as a constant low rumble that prevents audio cues.
• Use
of mind-altering and mood altering drugs to create a sense of unreality and
psychological disorientation.
• Use
of electroshock pain producing implements, particularly in vulnerable parts of
the body including the sexual organs.
• Humiliation:
personal or sexual e.g. running a tape loop that repeats “my mother hates me”
or humiliation through rape and infliction of pain mixed with sexual arousal.
This mix causes disorientation of the self and is like the “self-inflicted
pain” mentioned above. It becomes a twisted self-betrayal.
All of the above create a state of fear as well as of
existential chaos. The human mind collapses, sometimes falls into a kind of
psychic regression, or dependence on the torturer who might create structure in
the life of the victim.
What I have found interesting in reading up about
torture is just how much I am reminded of how women are oppressed.
• Think
of the threats of pain or actual instances of pain that men (the powerful)
inflict on women. Think of the state of fear most women inhabit when they hear
footsteps behind them in the street at night.
• Think
of the stress positions women are placed in, in the interests of fashion
whether it be high heels, bare midriffs, or skin tight clothing – all of which
create “self-inflicted pain” for which women themselves are responsible.
• Think
of the body manipulations – anorexia, electrolysis, piercing etc – also
“self-inflicted”.
• Think
of the ways in which a woman’s biorhythms are scrambled because she has to get
up to feed the baby, to have sex with the husband, to be there for the teenage
son or daughter, to be there for anyone and everyone. Sleep deprivation is a
major problem for women around the world.
• Humiliation
and shame: think of all the down-putting comments (it hasn’t stopped), the
advertisements, the fact that she let herself get drunk and so was raped; that
she got pregnant and is ashamed; that she had or didn’t have an abortion and is
ashamed no matter which decision she makes.
Physical pain does not simply resist language but
actively destroys it (Scarry 1985: 4)
Scarry also goes on to talk about how hard it is to
understand the experience of torture of people whom one doesn’t know and who
live in far away places – that is how is it to be “politically represented”
(Scarry 1985: 12)? And further, that invisibility of an event results in it
receiving little attention.
"Intense pain is world destroying" (Scarry
1985: 28) writes Elaine Scarry, and she goes on to say, "Intense pain is
also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so that
which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its
subject" (Scarry 1985: 35).
Now think about the word lesbian
Those of us who use the word lesbian do so in order to
wear away at the connotations of shame. The shame is there because it is
culturally inculcated. Just as it is in the word cunt. These are considered two
of the worst words in the English language – so let’s get them said.
Lesbians stand up to male power. And it is this threat
to male power that makes lesbians so
scaaary. Over thousands and hundreds or years lesbians have been killed for
standing up to male power – or male sex right.
Lesbians dare to use words like lesbian and cunt
positively – how scary is that? It’s like the tape loop – played over and over
throughout our lives – lesbians are unnatural, lesbians are evil, lesbians will
seduce you, and the sex you get will be all cunt! If you’ve never listed to an
Eminem song and you feel like a bit of humiliation – that’s the kind of thing
you can expect to hear. Of course, all jauntily set to a the rhythm of Rap.
As Nicole Brossard claims, “A lesbian who does not
reinvent the world is a lesbian in the process of disappearing.” (Brossard
1988: 136)
It appears to me that these examples reflect very
precisely the ways in which patriarchal culture reflects the system of the
torturers. And when I overlay the experiences of lesbians there is a terrifying
kind of resonance among the different elements.
…victims are made to feel
responsible for their own suffering, thus inducing them to alleviate their agony
by capitulating to the power of their interrogators (McCoy 2006: 52).
The most recent “innovations” in torture show that
there is a conscious striving to replicate what happens to people who are
oppressed and abused. A number of methods are employed. Scrambling a person’s
biorhythms. Messing up eating times and deprivation of food and drink. Playing
loud noises. Sensory disorientation. On top of this is added humiliation and
denial of a person’s reality. Psychological torture has the “advantage” of “leaving
none of the usual signs” (McCoy 2006: 53).
The victims of this kind of
torture go through a number of stages including “agitation, … thinking
difficulties, and finally … panic” (McCoy 2006: 53).
Think about the portrayal of lesbians. What strikes me
as common is the denial of lesbian reality. Invisibility and disappearance of
lesbians is so common as to be almost not worth mentioning. Daily, I am
confronted with lies about lesbians, with distortions and misrepresentations,
with hatred of lesbians and with a complete dismissal that lesbians might just
have something very interesting to say about the state of the world. Try to
raise money for a lesbian film; try to raise money for lesbian health; try to
start a campaign that acknowledges that lesbians are victims of torture.
Listen to
FannyAnn Eddy, who attempted to do just that. She was a lesbian activist in
Sierra Leone, and less than a year before her murder, she said:
Silence creates vulnerability. You, members of the
Commission on Human Rights, can break the silence. You can acknowledge that we
exist, throughout Africa and on every continent, and that human rights
violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity are committed every
day. You can help us combat those violations and achieve our full rights and
freedoms, in every society, including my beloved Sierra Leone (Eddy 2004).
But who
listened?
Alongside the hatred of lesbians, my research has
taken me to read about the horrors of lesbians who are tortured. Like other
victims of torture, these lesbians have rarely committed crimes. Rather the
“crimes” for which they are punished are the result of expedient
criminalisation. That is crimes invented in order to create criminals of a
particular group.
Let me mention some of the violations without going
into too much detail[2]:
• In
Russia Alla Pitcherskaia was charged with hooliganism and incarcerated in a
mental asylum. Her punishment fits the psychological disorientation methods,
including drugs, electroshock “treatments” and incarceration.
• In
Zimbabwe, Tina Machida was raped daily on the order of her parents until she
bacame pregnant. Feminists have long argued for the centrality of rape as a
method of torture – Millett, Stiglmeyer, Kappeler, Caputi – just to name a few.
Rape is used to humiliate, to cause pain, to dehumanise and in the case of men,
to feminise (and therefore to humiliate, cause pain and dehumanise). In the
case of lesbians, rape is also used as punishment. In detention facilities,
lesbians are at risk of rape not only by the guards, but also by male
prisoners.
• In
Iran, lesbians have been reported to have been pushed off buildings.
• In
Sierra Leone on September 29, 2004, FannyAnn Eddy was found dead after being
repeatedly raped. She had been working in the offices of the Sierra Leone
Lesbian and Gay Association (Human Rights
Watch, 4 October 2004, Morgan and Wieringa 2005, 20). The media would have
us believe that lesbians no longer suffer the pain, humiliation, and shame of
systematic discrimination and torture, let alone murder.
Rape, beatings, humiliation, forced
pregnancy, infliction of physical and mental pain, false diagnoses of mental
illness, forcible confinement and detention, and death are clearly all events
that have immediate and long-term implications for the individual lesbians
affected. Further, the promotion of sado-masochism by Califia (1988), Weiss
(2005), and others contributes to the escalation of violence and social
acceptance of violence under the guise of “free choice.” Carole Moschetti
(2006) names this collusion “sexual relativism.” Sexual relativism excuses and
invisibilizes sexual violence against women on the grounds of “naturalness” and
the “male sex right.” In the context of the torture of lesbians, it can be seen
as the extreme violations of lesbians for their resistance to heterosexuality
and the model of the male sex right. Sado-masochism by lesbians complicates the
issue, but domination, an integral part of male sex right practices, is the
model for lesbian sado-masochism.
The long-term implications of acts of
violence for the health of the social matrix is also significant. When a
society allows or enables violence against a group of its members, there is an
impact on social health. Such violence generates fear and distrust. It fosters social
disconnection. It condones violence. It calls for scapegoats and creates what
we are now seeing in the Western world: a new kind of Fascism. Postmodern
Fascism, slippery as an eel, multifaceted, dispersed, and often difficult to
pinpoint. In a social sense, it is like the experience of pain in the body. It
is hard to talk about, although many of us feel the distress and discomfort.[3]
Let me explain for a minute a recent conference
presentation by Margot Weiss (2005).[4] In her paper
Weiss discusses attending a BDSM[5] class in
California at which two people – a woman and a man – present BDSM “scenes”
around the use of a “spy.” The “spy” – a woman – is penetrated with a hammer
handle. The use of a condom seemed to legitimize this action in the presenter’s
eyes. Electroprods are used on her – and at this point I could not take in the
third element of the “play torture.” She specifically stated that BDSM is not
torture; indeed, she described it as consensual. Weiss went on to say that BDSM
classes are “consensual non-consent play” and that Amnesty International
documents are a useful source of ideas to create interrogation scenes. Later in
the “play torture” one of the players holds a knife to the throat of the “spy,”
and an unloaded gun is pointed at her. The clothes are cut from the body of the
“spy,” who is lying prone and spreadeagled on the floor. The “spy” then tries
to kick at the “torture players.” The “spy” can stop the “consensual
non-consent” by using the word “Rumsfeld.” Weiss’s question at the end of her
description of “play torture” is, “What does this performance tell us about the
Abu Ghraib photographs?” Abu Ghraib, she argues, is merely a scene, a
spectacle. And SM serves as a critique, as it disrupts how people understand
the world. And further, that because “scenes” are parodic, they become a
creative re-enactment about powerlessness over the war. The thing about torture
is that you do not know whether you will be alive at the end of the day. You do
not know when it will end. It is more than just “powerlessness”; it is
subjugation, degradation, abandonment, and dehumanization. To defend such acts
as “performative” is an instance of moral neglect.
Among the difficulties experienced by
anyone subjected to torture is how to convey the experience of pain inside the
body. As mentioned above, Elaine Scarry, in The
Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985), argues that pain
in itself “is language destroying” (1985, 19). For a lesbian this is doubly
difficult because the heteronormative discourse of society is not open to
understanding the utterances of lesbians. It is hard enough to get people to
empathize with and understand a person from another culture, another political
regime, an unknown country. Add to that the prospect of lesbian existence and
lesbian culture, and the difficulty of the task is amplified still more. Here I
am intentionally speaking as if the reader is a heterosexual. For the lesbian
reader, the experience is likely to be very different.
Within heterosexual discourse the lesbian epitomizes
the body untrammelled. The lesbian body is a body out of control in a
heteropatriarchal sense; that is, it is ungoverned by heteropatriarchal rules.
For the torturer, the prisoner’s body has also become a body out of control,
and this lack of control is shown each time pain is inflicted.
Elaine Scarry writes of the
prisoner’s lack of control, and the way in which responsibility for it is
deflected back to the prisoner so that the confession “will be understood by
others, is an act of self-betrayal” (1985, 47).
Graham, Rawlings and Rigsby (1994) argue
that women’s social relationship with men suggests a form of societal Stockholm
Syndrome, that is that the institution of heterosexuality and the individuals
who patrol it – men and apologists of men’s power – act as through women are
hostages to men. The captive perceives the behaviour of the captors as ranging
from extreme violence to kindness. The kindness creates a belief in safety in
the midst of violence and abuse.
These “acts of self-betrayal” are promulgated through
the latest techniques of torture, namely through was is misleadingly called
self-inflicted pain. I described this earlier. They are those positions which
held long enough create stress on the body. This is a quintessential
patriarchal technique used against women as a method of control. Interestingly,
such stress positions are frequently resisted by lesbians. Perhaps this is why
lesbians are so severely punished under extreme patriarchal regimes.
We can see the ramping up of hatred of lesbians in
statements by George W Bush. On 5 June 2006 he said: “Marriage is one of the
most fundamental institutions of civilization” (ABC Radio National News
Report).
“Only on the question of
women and sexuality do the fundamentalists of either side begin to converge.
Homosexuals and loose women are held responsible for God’s turning away from
the US, just as they are sometimes blamed for the woes of Islam” (Brennan 2003,
xvi).
There is an element here of wondering just
why it is that sexual orientation has been considered outside the ambit of UN
Human Rights rules and why lesbian refugees struggle so hard to be recognized,
heard, and acknowledged as “genuine” refugees. It is about the self-betrayal of
the body. If lesbian existence is a choice, so the argument goes, then the
lesbian can just as easily choose not to be a lesbian. The problem is that her
body betrays her. Her speech as a lesbian is taken to be a self-betrayal. The
situation is read this way, rather than as a problem of patriarchy and
oppression. It is an instance of what Mary Daly names “reversal” (1978) in which the victim is perceived to be the one
at fault, rather than the perpetrator.
The torturer, through this process,
dispenses all culpability, all responsibility for the pain inflicted on the
tortured person. His conscience is clear. It is all her fault. If only she
would do what is best for her, she would not have to suffer. In fact, he will
help her by raping her, by showing her what a real man can do for her, how what
she needs is “a good fuck, from real men” (Rivera-Fuentes and Birke 2001, 656).
This psychological stance, I suggest, is the source of the proliferation of
male sexual fantasy about the torture of lesbians.
To summarize my argument: The prisoner of torture is
considered out of control; the lesbian is considered out of control. The
tortured lesbian is therefore doubly out of control (and in a society where
lesbians are defined as mentally ill, triply out of control). Since she is so
clearly out of control, anything that happens to her is her fault because if
she chose to behave differently, she would not be tortured. The torturer/male
sexual fantasist/pornographer is therefore able to abandon all sense of
responsibility for his actions and for his beliefs about lesbians. It is in her
interest that he torture her, rape her, show her just how good he is.
Lesbian is the only concept
I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the
designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or
politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social
relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a relation
which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation
(“forced residence,” domestic corvée, conjugal duties, unlimited production of
children, etc.), a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to
stay heterosexual (Wittig 1992, 20).
Lesbians who step outside the patriarchally and
heterosexually normative modes of behaviour will be punished. Lesbians
epitomize the “other” in the western philosophical tradition, and the lesbian
body is very clearly a world of “otherness.” As I have argued elsewhere
(Hawthorne 2003), the non-existence and erasure of lesbians in heterosexual
discourse is central to the normative structure of our society. Lesbians
share with torture the denial of existence.
Conclusion
We are living in dangerous times. I believe a new
fascism, postmodern fascism, is on the rise. It takes the form of defending the
freedom of the powerful whose hate speech is protected: corporations, armies,
men, the wealthy, and the elite. It defends pornographers and pimps,
pharmaceutical companies and reconstruction teams, soldiers and torturers. We
know now how these political policies are run. It is through false kindness
(Graham et al. 1994); it comes
wrapped in choice; it comes with the word freedom
emblazoned across it. We need to invent strategies for exposing these systems
of injustice for what they are. We also need to invent ways of fighting social
demoralization and of increasing the social glue. Indigenous communities in
Australia (dé Ishtar 2005) have found that increasing the social power of women
strengthens the social fabric and reduces violence. In the last thirty years,
as a radical lesbian feminist, I have been active in women’s communities that
are creating vibrant feminist and lesbian cultures and in groups that are
working to reduce social injustice. However, at a conference in the USA in 2005
I saw feminists and lesbians support the practice of torture because it was
called BDSM, because it was categorized as “play” and as “consensual non-consent.”
This in a country engaged in widespread abuses of power, including torture
against its own and other people. If feminists and lesbians pivot toward
“consensual violence,” we can expect to see increased violence against women
and indifference toward the torture of lesbians.
If violence against lesbians is a matter of
indifference, and lesbians remain outside the scope of social justice reform,
then everyone’s civil and political rights remain in jeopardy. The most
difficult political reforms to make are, in the long run, the most important,
because they give us a clue as to the limits of our preparedness to live an
ethical existence. If we are unable to be concerned for the lives and well
being of those who are most different, then we are incapable of defending
justice for all – even at the most basic level, that involving freedom of
association, freedom to love.
References
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London and New York.
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Nicole. (1988). The Aerial Letter.
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George W. (2006). Interview. ABC Radio
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Pat. (Ed.) (1988). The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. Boston: Alyson Publications.
Caputi, Jane. 2004. The Age of Sex
Crime. London: The Women's Press.
Daly, Mary. (1978). Gyn/Ecology:
The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Spinifex Press.
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FannyAnn. (2004). “Testimony by FannyAnn Eddy at the U.N. Commission on Human
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[1] This
poem was performed at the annual New Zealand Women's Studies Conference at the Massey University Events Centre, Palmerston North, New
Zealand, 22 November, 2003.
[3] In the
US and Australia, legal theorists are arguing for the legalization of torture.
See for example, Bagaric and Clarke (2005). The push to legalize torture is not
substantially different from the push to legalize prostitution. It serves the
interests of similarly powerful parties.
[4] I have
requested a copy of the paper by Weiss from the author, but have not received
it. The quotations here are based on notes taken during her presentation in
2005. As an aside in 2017, Weiss has since published this paper. See Weiss 2009.
[5] In
this paper I use the abbreviation S/M when speaking generally about
sad-masochism, and I use BDSM when discussing the paper by Weiss (2005).
