English 223 – Week 8
Important dates
George H. W. Bush Presidency 1989-1993
Gulf War 1990-1991
George W. Bush Presidency 2001-2009
Iraq War 2003-2011
Dick Cheney:
Secretary of Defense 1989-1993
CEO and Chairman of Halliburton 1995-2000
Vice President 2001-2009
Abu Ghraib Scandal 2003
“In April 2005, four months into Bush’s return to office, Michael Jackson stood trial in Santa
Barbara for child sex and Saw 2 had just hit the multiplexes. Film critics who once wrote for
reputable magazines blogged to a handful of readers about the ‘new sadism,’ Last year’s Abu
Ghraib scandal had already been recycled as porn; Abu Gag! (The Best Throat Fucking Ever
Lensed) was up for AdultCon’s Grand Jury Award. While Homeland Security made preemptive
arrests, any attempt at addressing the present, right down to this statement itself, now felt sadly
preemptive” (77)
“Catt steps into a cloud of compassion […] She cannot imagine spending one day in prison.
She’s never done anything she couldn’t talk her way out of. Paul spent sixteen months in state
prison for defrauding Halliburton Of less than one thousand dollars. Meanwhile she’s amassed
tens of thousands by working within the tax code’s gray zones. Unaware of his former
employer’s massive war crimes, Paul seems ashamed of stealing less than an art gallery spends on
an after-party” (133)
“In the summer of 2006 […] in the US, in Maricopa County, at the very jail to which Paul awaits
extradition, chain gangs of juvenile prisoners dig roadside graves for the indigent. Electorally
unbeatable, the affable fascist Sheriff Joe Arpaio was indicted again just this month, this time for
hawking DVDs of the women’s jail toilets on the county website, his 24/7 webcam feeding live
from the doorless stalls-an abject form of comic relief from the jail’s other tortures: the four
point restraint chairs, the hooded suspects detained for drug use and shoplifting, the ‘Tent city’
jail where thousands of petty-crime suspects who could not afford bail were detained while
awaiting their trial dates. And even these acts were merely a screen. Arpaio’s bumptious brutality
was a signature riff designed to render less spectacular forms of abuse, occurring throughout the
US every day, newly benign and normal” (195)
“It occurred to Catt that the epistemological groundwork for the war in Iraq had been laid by
Paris Hilton’s anal sex video. Like the great Easter egg hunt for WMD’s, the question of whether
the soft-porn not-quite-home video had been posted by a sleazy ex-boyfriend, as Hilton claimed,
or by one of her publicists, was irrelevant. The only point was, it was there. Once anything
entered the mediascape, it was unstoppable” (27-8)
“Posters that appeared in midtown Manhattan only days after the attacks show a turbaned
caricature of bin Laden being anally penetrated by the Empire State Building. The legend
beneath reads, "The Empire Strikes Back" or "So you like skyscrapers, huh, bitch?" Or think of
the Web site where, with a series of weapons at your disposal, you can torture Osama bin Laden
to death, the last torture being sodomy; or another Web site that shows two pictures, one of bin
Laden with a beard, and the other without—and the photo of him shaven turns out to be O. J.
Simpson. What these representations show, we believe, is that queerness as sexual deviancy is
tied to the monstrous figure of the terrorist as a way to otherize and quarantine subjects
classified as "terrorists," but also to normalize and discipline a population through these very
monstrous figures. Though much gender-dependent "black" humor describing the appropriate
punishment for bin Laden focuses on the liberation of Afghan women (liberate Afghan women
and send them to college or make bin Laden have a sex change operation and live in Afghanistan
as a woman—deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic suggestions), this portrayal suggests
something further still: American retaliation promises to emasculate bin Laden and turn him into
a fag. This promise not only suggests that if you're not for the war, you're a fag, it also incites
violence against queers and specifically queers of color. And indeed, there have been reports
from community-based organizations throughout New York City that violent incidents against
queers of color have increased.”
- Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag”
“On the one hand, S/M seems to parade a servile obedience to conventions of power. At first
glance, then, S/M seems a servant to orthodox power. Yet, on the contrary, with its exaggerated
emphasis on costume and scene, S/M performs social power as scripted, and hence as
permanently subject to change. As a theater of conversion, S/M reverses and transmutes the
social meanings it borrows, without finally stepping outside the enchantment of its magic circle.
In S/M, paradox is paraded, not resolved […] S/M refuses to read power as fate or destiny.
Since S/M is the theatrical exercise of social contradiction, it is self-consciously against nature,
not in the sense that it violates natural law, but in the sense that it denies the existence of natural
law in the first place. S/M performs social power as both contingent and constitutive, as
sanctioned neither by fate nor by God, but by social convention and invention, and thus as open
to historical change. Consensual S/M insists on exhibiting the "primitive" (slave, baby, woman)
as a character in the historical time of modernity. S/M stages the "primitive irrational" as a
dramatic script, a communal performance in the heart of Western reason. The paraphernalia of
S/M (boots, whips, chains, uniforms) are the paraphernalia of state power, public punishment
converted to private pleasure. S/M plays social power backward, visibly staging hierarchy,
difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy, and the alienation of the body as being at the center
of Western reason, thus revealing the imperial logic of individualism, but also irreverently
refusing it as fate. S/M manipulates the signs of power in order to refuse their legitimacy as
nature”
–Anne McClintock “Maid to Order: Commercial Fetishism and Gender Power”
“When Catt’s short book on the Bloomsbury social reformers, she goes out on tour. Instead of a
collar, she carries The History of Western Philosophy” (241)
“Catt drives Paul to the airport. At first she’s enraged, and then stunned. And then, finally,
empty. She knows she won’t trust anyone this way again. In the coming weeks, she will question
her judgment and motives. She’ll wear out her friends. She’ll force herself to sit through a halfdozen Al-Anon meetings. When she finally stops weeping, she’ll realize she no longer has to
search for a killer. She’s already been killed. But she isn’t dead” (251)