Transcript Slide 1

Femina sacra from Waldenburg
- a testimony
Ewa Charkiewicz
presentation at 7th Feminist Research
Conference, June 6th, 2009
• On April 14th. 2008 without any prior notification,
municipal employees of Walburg City Hall entered flats
in a poor area of the city (White Stone), and proceeded
to pull electricity cables off, cut water pipes, and
demolished partitioning walls to make the flats
uninhabitable - in order to force inhabitants to leave.
• For young women who were at home at the time, with
their children, the experience was not unlike rape. The
perpetrator was the state. The eviction was extrajuridical.
• 24 women, all of them young mothers with children,
organize a hunger strike to protest evictions. The strike
lasts over a week, and is given publicity in the media.
Walburg is in an ecoomically depressed area of Poland, mines and
factories closed; population migrating abroad
To make a living, some people turned to open pit mining. The open pit miners
organized to make a deal with the state to allow them excavate coal; they were
not successfull. The president labelled them as criminals.
Evicted from municipal flats for non-payment of rent, some people
had nowhere to live but in the abandoned coal pits
White Stone – area of Walburg, where evictions and women’s
hunger strike took place
Demonstration in front of the City Hall: 'you get delicacies,we get rubbish bins'
Comments made in political chatrooms: - It’s a pathology, these are
parasites that live off our taxes (~jolka)
• This underclass breeds another underclass [margines] (~ alicja)
• Why do I have to pay for their housing. I’d rather pay for sterilizing
these females (o90).
• -they have had an accident? Did they get cancer? No!!!!! They grab
for the money of somebody else !!!!!!!!!!!
• Orphans of communism! Parasites! Fuck off from my money! Child
breeders, where are your husbands! Having a vodka? Go to work,
parasites! Why on earth somebody should pay their bills from my
money. Cut off their electricity and gas, kick them out into the street!
They should have studied or taken up an honest work ….! (Dolny
Slask menelski)
• Take their children! Sterilize them! The children would be better of in
an orphanage than with their hyperactive, unfit mothers. The only
solution is to use force to sterilize these women to stop them from
blackmailing society with their children. (~RhapsodyFan)
Policing solidarity and compassion
•
The truth is there are many flats abandoned years ago in Walbrzych,
nobody lived in these flats for years, the state could renovate them and give
to people who need them, and if they do not do it, people occupy the
apartments on their own, instead of waiting for years. This is the fault of the
president of Walbrzych (wałbrzyszanka)
•
Wałbrzyszanka, you can occupy your own property, otherwise this is a theft
and it should be severly punished. And if someone dreams of communism
let them go to Korea (~ adela)
•
Go and buy these parasites flats. The cows live in the flats illegally, kick
them out flat on their face !!! Since when thieves are allowed to take
somebody’s else property? (dragonis)”
•
We are in the hell of the extreme right. The herd of people who hate each
other, liberal fanatics, and fanatical egoists (this means the same) . Their
slogan is to stomp other people into the ground ….Zero imagination, not to
speak of empathy. (~Euron)
•
Bolshevic brothel! Pay for their flats with your own money.! That will be the
end of touching compassion? (gość)
What is happening here?
• Suicidal parody of neoliberal newspeak?
• Taxpayer is the only available form of political
subjecitivity.
• Unprocessed trauma of violence experienced
with transition (sudden experience of existential
insecurity, rapid, and compressed transformation
of state, political institutions, values, gender
roles (but not gender relations), violent
resubjectivisation. Abandonment.
• The norm: responsible, prudent, fit, flexible
neoliberal market citizen capable of living on
individual subscription
Lecture March, 2008, by prof. Balcerowicz, presumed architect
shock therapy, head central bank, minister finance
•
„The socialist economy is a very bad social system… it has to perform badly… it is
incompatible with democracy, as naive collectivists would hope for… The desired
norm is the system of freedom, decentralization, with people having freedom to start
their own business or ngos.
•
The strategic moment was a state of exception which has to be used well, it had to
be prepared intellectually and organized well (He refers to early months of transition
and to his role)
•
Those who criticize the market are etatists, collectivists, they have soviet mentality or
they are ideological aberrations if they support democracy and oppose capitalism
•
Work is a productive activity. Unproductive activity includes thieving, war, or simple
idlessness…
The biggest problem for Poland is a large number of people who do not work. If it is
possible to get money easily and for long period, and without work, then there will be
many people acting like this. Not working takes many forms, such as earlier
retirement, easily accessible disability payments, social allowances. When there are
people who do not work, do not pay taxes, and they live off allowances – those who
work have to pay high taxes…”
(neoliberal legend, poverty comes from lack of employment, and low wages; via the
VAT taxes the poor contribute a larger share of their income to state revenue than the
rich who pay low income tax)
•
Neoliberal governmentality
•
Political rationality: marketization ( ‘free market’ as regulatory ideal and
permanent economic tribunal (Foucault, 2004)
•
Political technologies and technologies of the self: fit, flexible (plastic),
entrepreneurial subjects
•
Neoliberal biopolitics: the state & market invests in resubjectivication to
produce wealth generating, cable of living on private subscription (Bianco)
human economic units; adjustment of human subjects to new forms of
accumulation of capital (Foucault, 1976)
•
Recategorisation: economicallly useful and human waste. New sharp
eugenic distinctions are drawn along the lines of economic utility
•
The other side of neoliberal biopolitics is thanatopolitics (for the sake of its
own survival the state protects the population and therefore is entitled to
slaughter, Foucault,1982; also Foucault on state racism, 2004)
Life that does not deserve to live collusion neoliberalism/conservatism in motherhood
economic fitness tests
•
In extreme poverty, and with children? (~Gocha)
•
Do they think they are sacred cows if they are pregnant? (m_sasin)
•
Instead of stupid health checks at 18, when they measure people’s weight
and height, they should conduct psychiatric tests to check if somebody
should not be prevented from breeding children, because it’s them that
suffer. (~Ina)
•
How come they breed children if they do not have a place and means to
live? What do these misfits think that they would live at the expense of
somebody else? This species will exist as long as there are social security
handouts! (~sta)
Where are their husbands? Why don’t they provide for their families? And if
they do not have husbands why did they make themselves kids? They
should start thinking, instead of crying, and asking everybody for help
(daren)
•
•
They broke the law and now they endanger they lives of their children. Sent
them to the joint (sawa)
Femina sacra
• Agamben: homo sacer (the originary structure of politicojuridical order, the one that can be killed with impunity, eg, only
after being stripped of nationality, political rights and property
Jews (bare life) were moved to the camps, and killed with
impunity); State of exception as political paradigm.
• Agamben’s work useful for feminists but ungendered and
disembodied
• Femina sacra – a body that can be killed or impregnated with
impunity (Lentin)
• My take on the argument: in western political order life the
originary inclusion of life in law gender differentiated: patria
potestas (father’s right to kill) and cura materna – women’s
duty to care
• Women included by triple exclusion: along the axis of
economic fitness, sex/gender, race.
• Are all of us feminae sacria?
Resistance
• Resistance – action on the limes, on
abandonment and disposession, where life
defends its capacity to live;
• Political challenge to the split
biopolitics/thanatopolitics
• Bring subjects back from bare life.
• Condition of indistinction between economic
and political require the revisioning of feminist
theorizing