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- Convenors:
-
Nataliya Tchermalykh
(University of Geneva)
Maya Avis (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Bodies, Affects, Senses, Emotions
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel analyses disruptive responses to injustice from a range of subjects: activists, artists and ordinary citizens. These public actions, staging self-inflicted harm or risky exposure demonstrate the metaphoric reach of the body which enacts and interrogates injustice, making it visible.
Long Abstract:
In recent years instances of dissent and resistance have been increasingly permeated by performative gestures which stage self-inflicted harm or risky exposure for political purposes. For instance in 2019, a Syrian Kurdish refugee set himself ablaze in front of the UNHCR in Geneva in protest against the Turkish invasion of northeast Syria. Several months later, a French student self-immolated in front of Lyon University in protest of the neoliberal policies, associated with Macron's presidency. There is an obvious continuum that connects these actions with carceral hunger strikes, collective self-mutilation, public suicides of unpaid employees or self-immolations by Tibetan monks. These actions of ordinary subjects demonstrate the extraordinary metaphoric and affective reach of the suffering or 'misbehaving' human body which simultaneously enacts and interrogates injustice, making it public.
This panel brings together reflections about performative responses to social suffering from a wide range of subjects: activists, artists and vulnerable populations. What do these seemingly irrational gestures of denunciation and despair mean in the contemporary culture? What are they symptoms or metaphors of, not only individually, but also socially? What are their direct and tangible legal and social consequences?
As legal anthropologists, we argue that these performances belong to the universal grammar of justice-making. We suggest that they should be seen as socially meaningful avenues of making injustice visible. These are actions that break the rules of political enunciation within the liberal public sphere which normally only attributes political voice to citizens acting as 'rational' subjects.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a case study from the urban margins of Istanbul, the paper examines the hypervisibility of police surveillance, necropolitical violence against racialized young men, and the various public performances that provide support for racialized working-class youths who refuse to be debilitated.
Paper long abstract:
The paper I would like to present draws on a case study from the urban margins of Istanbul and examines the hypervisibility of police surveillance and necropolitical violence against racialized young men and the various public performances that provide support for racialized subjects who refuse to be debilitated. More specifically, focusing on racialized working-class youths response to militarised spatial control and undercover police surveillance in their neighborhoods, I illustrate that the state violence and panoptic gaze of the undercover police can be experienced as an assault on subjects’ agency and free will, thereby triggering a desire to reject and defy the psychic power of the police over the self and hence reclaim the status of dignified subjects. The omnipresent gaze of the undercover police produces a desire among racialized young men to express their rage and be visible on the streets as a presence that threatens the police with potential violence and to become an embodiment of fearlessness.
While performances of fearlessness help young racialized men to affirm their sense of agency, they also put them in a more vulnerable position vis-a-vis the police. The presentation then concludes with a discussion on the affordability of resistance and asks who can afford acts of resistance in a context where necropolitical violence prevails.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on an art project related to the so-called European migration crisis that mixed public performance with a real political activism in order to let European citizens express their grief for refugee deaths, mourn them collectively and articulate the claim for migration policy change.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years one could observe a diversification of aesthetic strategies that socially engaged artists use in the struggle for human rights. In my paper I would like to focus on a very particular art project called "The Dead Are Coming" that was realized in Berlin in June 2015 by German art collective Center for Political Beauty. This multi-part action consisted of bringing to Germany the bodies of two dead migrants in order to bury them with dignity "at the heart of Europe" and organizing a protest march which ended by the transformation of the terrain in front of the chancellery into an improvised symbolic graveyard for victims of European migration policy. With such a controversial initiative operating at the intersection between art and a massive happening, the artists managed to engage and empower thousands of Berlin inhabitants ready to defend refugee rights. The aim of my analysis is to examine the mechanism of CPB's strategy of community creation and empowerment by art. This will be done by invoking the works on the power of collective mourning and considering the socio-political potential of Aktionskunst (a term used by CPB). I will also discuss the manner in which the artists activated and orchestrated affects and space (physical and metaphorical) in order to reach their goal. Finally, I will ask the question of the real capacity of art to not only temporarily empower the public or community but also to authentically accompany it on the way to the change of status quo.
Paper short abstract:
For her senior thesis project at Yale University 2008, performance artist Aliza Shvarts engaged in a repeated process which she described as "self-induced miscarriages". With her performance Shvarts radically subverts the patriarchal order by proposing “an imagination of total bodily autonomy”.
Paper long abstract:
When Aliza Shvarts (*1986) proposed a performance project for her senior thesis at Yale University 2008 including her own body in an artistic process which she herself described as "self-induced miscarriages", she was met not only with a national controversy and public backlash, but also with censorship on the part of the university.
Over the course of nine month the artist would artificially inseminate herself in the middle of her cycle and towards the end of her cycle, coinciding with the time of her menstruation, she would take herbal abortifacients to induce an alleged miscarriage. Picked up by right-wing blogs the project was widely dismissed as merely narcistic, morally disturbing, self-harming performance art. The following controversy reaching from the university newspaper to the New York Times exposed the inherent misogyny in the discourse around abortion in the US where women’s bodies are reduced to their reproductive functions.
With an conceptual ambiguity at the core of the performance – she herself as well as the audience could never know what bodily process actually took place – Shvarts questions the boundaries of language when it comes to the highly politicized discourse around women’s reproductive functions. Simultaneously, the performative act extends onto the audience as only the identification of the performance as miscarriage or abortion creates the political context in which it is perceived. Shvarts disrupts and transgresses patriarchal expectations regarding her body using it as an artistic medium of radical resistance and proposing an “imagination of total bodily autonomy”.