Gendering the state of exception : the politics of gender and the production of language in Latin American carceral narratives
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/22x8b647
It is critical to delineate the representations of gendered abjection within the camps as this is reflective of the military regime’s simultaneous sexualization and dehumanization of the prisoners. The military regime underscored the importance of gender roles, especially Argentinean women’s placement in the domestic sphere as nurturers and caretakers of their families (Jelin 82). Thus, any person transgressing the sociomasculine norms vis-à-vis their political affiliations or perspectives on gender notions were considered subversive threats to the military regime’s new social order.
If these strict gendered divisions were set forth by the military regime, then one must consider how these gender roles were manifested in camps in the relationship between the prisoners and the guards, who functioned as agents of the state. Thus, it is my intent to investigate the complex replication of gender roles within the Argentinean concentration camps vis-à-vis Strejilevich’s recapitulation of the sexualized and gendered process of desubjectification.
Numberless Death exposes the existent tension between the simultaneous sexualized abjection and abnegation of existence of the female prisoners, and this tension is discursively reflected in the experimental form of her text, specifically in the discursive gaps. Moreover, I argue that Numberless’ exposition of the hypermasculine modes of domination functions as a political, counterhegemonic text that critically subverts gendered expectations of the content of her testimony and as being privy to merely her experiences as a victim of sexual torture.
In Strejilevich’s discussion of gender, she clearly emphasizes the military regime’s masculinist ideology and critiques their use of sexual violence to torture the prisoners in the camps. By alluding to the personal and collectivized experiences of sexualized torture, her testimonio provides a critical exposition and deconstruction of these rigid, entrenched hypermasculinized forms of repression that were systematically enforced during the military dictatorship.
Although the concentration camp experience was predicated on the dehumanization of each prisoner in order to facilitate their extermination, a central method of torture in the camps was sexual abuse and rape. The military officials’ depiction of the female prisoners as debased, licentious women encouraged their degradation of the prisoners through sexual abuse. In the text’s section entitled “Men quick to unzip”, she presents the topic of rape as constitutive of the repressive state apparatus in the concentration camps:
How do you live…among men who, without a qualm, earn their daily bread by asking how you like it—from the front or from the rear? Men quick to unzip who open and close their flies with masterful swiftness, the result of extensive training. A very masculine way of subduing the enemy (14).
Here, rape is not an impulsive act of sexual domination, but rather, it is “the result of extensive training” by the military regime, a critical element utilized against these bare lives in the state of exception; rape is thus reflective of the systemic heteropatriarchal violence that underpinned the Argentine dictatorship, where gender roles were codified and violently maintained inside and outside of the camps.
What is important to note here is that although the prisoners are denied all of their human characteristics and both men and women are equally tortured, they are still portrayed as sexual beings, sexualized and dehumanized in the concentration camps and bodies that are in need of physical and psychological castigation. The women raped in this passage are demoralized when asked whether they “like it…from the front or from the rear.” In this instance, the officials are underscoring their power over the prisoners by morbidly offering a “choice” in their method of rape. This hypermasculinized method of torture indicates the military officials’ systemic use of rape as a primary method of torture.
We must thus consider the regime’s use of sexual torture as a simultaneous hypersexualization and revilement of the female prisoners, particularly in their sexual objectification of the female body but also in their expression of utter disgust and contempt for these women. In their concentration of distinct female body parts, here is an instance of corporeal fragmentation of the body through the experience of, in this case, sexualized torture. The female prisoner is being sexualized in an extreme sense and is reduced to her mere sexual organs. In addition to being objectified in the crudest sense, the prisoners are constantly reminded of their inferior status as bare lives and are faced with the ever-present threat of death in the camps.
In a critical passage, Strejilevich invokes the simultaneous fragmentation and sexualization of the women inmates when the guards taunt the women on the way to the shower: “The guards rate us as soon as we start to pull down our pants…The ass of the third one, the legs of this one, the tits of the first one in line – one hundred points. Any other bids? ... Better enjoy it [the shower], this might just be your last time under water” (69). The women are verbally degraded and sexually dehumanized as the guards objectify them, concentrating on their distinctive body parts, yet they also reinforce their absolute power as agents of the state.
This particular sexualized abjection is in dialogue with the hypermasculinized power structure of the military regime that systematically sexualizes, dehumanizes, and abnegates the existences of these women; while the guards degrade them sexually, they also remind the women of their ability to exterminate them at any moment; in these instances, sexual torture and death are intimately linked in a sinister form of repression and power. Strejilevich includes the following excerpt from Nunca Más which further illustrates this hypermasculinized, sexual domination over the prisoners:
“What did they do to you last night?” “They raped me, sir.” “Bitch, (slaps) no one did anything to you here, understand?” “Yes, sir.” “What happened to you last night?” “Nothing, sir.” (15).
The dialogue included in this archival source is critical in demonstrating not merely the binary between oppressor and victim, but also the absolute power of the state vis-à-vis the negation of this victimization. Here we are presented with what Agamben terms as life that “ceases to be politically relevant”, but within a gender and sexualized context; the military officers in this scenario are not merely emphasizing their power over the tortured woman, but they denote here the prisoners’ lack of political and legal rights while simultaneously sexually torturing this dehumanized prisoner (Homo 139). The prisoners’ absence of human characteristics therefore demonstrates that they are now politically and socially irrelevant to Argentina during the dictatorship. However, this process does not merely reflect the dehumanization of the women, it alludes to the critical role sexual abjection plays in this process of degradation. In essence, the prisoners in the concentration camps are incarcerated and abused for their political affiliations and for being suspected subversive threats to the “Process’” social order; this particular passage therefore iterates the process of sexualization via the woman’s rape and also underscores the dehumanization vis-à-vis the officials’ denial of her sexual abuse.
