<p>This paper is about what wounds reveal about the diversity among stigmatized groups. My argument is that the focus on mitigating social difference within the disability rights movement has inadvertently served to obscure key distinctions among disabled populations. As evidence for my thesis, I focus this paper on anti-gang forums hosted by disabled ex-gang members. Examining these forums ethnographically—and investigating the argument made by disabled, ex-gang members that their wounds<em> enable</em> them to save lives—allows me to describe some of the contexts in which it becomes politically strategic to inhabit the role of a "defective body" in order to make claims about a violent society.</p>
This article considers the relationship between the qualitative experience or the 'qualia of pain', enactments of violence, and the aggressive silences that obscure its recognition. I argue that by coming to terms with the qualia of pain, black urbanites transform experiences of injury into communal narratives. Nancy Munn's ethnography, The Fame of Gawa, helps frame my analysis. On the island of Gawa, the circulation of objects and names creates the possibility of engaging in a relationship that extends and develops communal ties that go beyond 'the self': this process of extension turns out to be the precondition for social recognition, or 'fame'. Like fame, a significant aspect of pain is its uncanny ability to travel through space and time, constituting a mode of historical consciousness -or a kind of politically-charged remembering. In Chicago, Jon Burge, a police commander infamous for his techniques of torture, allows us to understand how the qualia of pain are converted into narratives that shape community, and become the seedbed for historical consciousness. Not allowing your neighbor to forget what Burge has done -or how it is connected to the present forms of police abuse -is a way to remind the public of the government's complicity with abuse, a way to let them know that urban Chicagoans will not forget this longer picture.
Ethnography is a colonial enterprise. It sprouted its wings from nineteenth century travel diaries in which bold adventurers embarked on a perilous journey, straight into "the heart of darkness," and emerged to tell the tale. 1 Within these ethnographies, the idea of the "savage" helped constitute the notion of "civilization" that these adventurers took for granted (Trouillot 1991). Ultimately, in these fable-esque stories, the adventurer realizes that the exotic inhabitants are more similar to people in the West than different, and therefore argues that their culture should be seen as legitimate. This revelation, in turn, leads the adventurer to reflect upon his or her own society. Such is a prominent strand of ethnographic research in the traditional sense. But while notable nineteenth century ethnographers imagined themselves embarking on a journey to "discover" tribes and medicine men, some twentieth century ethnographers examined the "modern" world, focusing on latter-day "hobos" of the American city (Anderson 1923) instead of "primitive" tribes of the African hinterland. Today, twenty-first century scholars have tinkered further with these tropes in ways that redefine traditional approaches. In the wake of the critiques of ethnography delivered forcefully in the 1980s and 1990s by feminist and postcolonial scholars, urban ethnographers are frequently compelled to position their projects against antiquated tropes of the lone ethnographer, making his or her way amongst the "savages" (c.f.
The background context for this study is the relationship between the right to bear arms and the role of policing in the United States. The fact that the second amendment guarantees the right to bear arms and the correlative right to form "a well-regulated militia" have long been central to the scholarly understanding of the role of guns in American society. Yet few social scientific studies have taken the friction between militias and the burgeoning police departments of the 1800s as a point of departure for present-day debates about the police's use of force. For the early part of US history, many citizens feared that the police would attempt to supplant militias. In some southern cities, like New Orleans, residents argued that if the city government was going to let the police patrol the city, they should do so without guns. It was the threat of slave uprisings that ended the conflict between militias and the police. A major implication of this study is that rooting the contemporary understanding of police violence in early debates about the police's use of force can help social scientists better understand how policing is understood and experienced today. Indeed, the African Americans interviewed for this study view the gun in the hands of a police officer as a technology that is rooted in the slave patrol. This is because it is the descendants of enslaved people who are disproportionately subject to police shootings. The article demonstrates this point by exploring a 2014 police shooting. The shooting of Laquan McDonald garnered national attention when, on October 20, 2014, Chicago police Officer, Jason Van Dyke, shot the 17-year-old Black teenager 16 times. The methods employed in this study include: archival data on the early use of force debate, discourse analysis of court testimony from Van Dyke's 2018 first degree murder trial, and semi-structured interviews with Chicago residents who discuss this case. Ultimately, this study finds that in the McDonald shooting, the gun helps to reproduce the fantasy of Black predatory violence that is rooted in slavery.
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