Jews, Lice, and History

Raffles, Hugh

doi:10.1215/08992363-2007-008

Cited by 53 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…The language of invasion has a sordid history. In World War II, for example, new technologies of quarantine and delousing for the purposes of hygiene were eventually used to exterminate Jews, who were described as lice, and a threat to the hygiene of the nation (Raffles 2007(Raffles , 2017. In fact, it does not seem accidental that the chemical ultimately used in the gas chambers --Zkylon B --had previously been used for delousing Mexican immigrants in the US in the 1930s (Anderson 2017).…”

Section: How Might the Vocabulary Of Borders And Sexuality Help Us To...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexuality and borders in right wing times: a conversation

Tudor¹,

Ticktin²

2021

The Sexual Politics of Border Control

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In their prescient 2019 symposium on sexuality and borders, Billy Holzberg, Anouk Madörin and Michelle Pfeifer identified a deepening relationship between sexuality and mobility; they pointed to the increasingly important role of sexuality in the production and maintenance of border regimes, and how racialized border regimes in turn mediate expressions of sexuality. That is, they acknowledge sexuality as a dominant frame by which mobility is captured and regulated.The symposium made an important intervention, but then we were hit by the Covid19 pandemic and the effects of the many virulent, anti-immigrant, authoritarian and racialized regimes were made even more manifest. Instead of haunting us, right wing sentiment has materialized into a form of mass death of black and brown people and migrants -not just through the biopolitical logic of "letting die," but by actively exposing and cultivating infection in meat packing plants, prisons, detention centers as well as in front line workers. Holzberg, Madörin and Pfeifer anticipated that this would be furthered by its intersections with sexuality; and in our conversation, we explore how, specifically, with the idea that right-wing times have rendered these intersecting relationships both slightly different, but nevertheless all more urgent to understand.Those most vulnerable have borne the brunt of inadequate healthcare and housing, combined with newly invigorated forms of police and other forms of violence: perhaps top amongst these are trans people of color. The massive rally for Black Trans lives in Brooklyn, New York in June 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, acknowledged this vulnerability; with 15,000 people dressed in white, packed into the plaza in front of the Brooklyn Museum and spilling out into the transecting streets, people reacted to the many recent deaths of Black trans women, several of which came in the wake of rollbacks to transgender healthcare protections. Other murders occurred in prison or on the street. As Angela Davis (2020) stated in an interview, if we want to develop an intersectional perspective, the trans community is showing us the way; the trans community has taught us how to challenge our foundational sense of normalcy, and as Davis underscored, if we can challenge the gender binary, then we can resist prisons, and jails, and police. And, we would add, we can challenge the very idea of borders and nation-states.In what follows, we respond to prompts about the relationships between race, immigration, and sexuality, as these intersecting differences have been forced into the same frame by the violent practices of right-wing regimes, and brought into relief by Covid19. Even as we have long known that sexual politics are a way to govern bodies, and to distribute uneven states of vulnerability (Stoler 2010), we are seeing new incarnations of government. With the concepts of tolerance, multi-culturalism or integration, liberalism works to manage, govern and control difference. That is, it abandons and excludes those who exceed the bounds o...

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Section: How Might the Vocabulary Of Borders And Sexuality Help Us To...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexuality and borders in right wing times: a conversation

Tudor¹,

Ticktin²

2021

The Sexual Politics of Border Control

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“…5. Raffles (2007) and Mamdani (2001) have examined the ways in which comparisons to parasitic insects rhetorically construct exterminable others in the context of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, respectively. The rhetoric of the economic parasite also bears the imprint of a misogynistic bias contrasting "true" productive activity with "mere" reproductive or distributive activity (Ferguson 2015), while nonreproductive queer sexualities have also been violently pathologized as parasitic (Ahuja 2015).…”

Section: Para-sitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Filthy Flourishing

Doherty¹

2019

Current Anthropology

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Thousands of marabou storks occupy Kampala, nesting in the city's green spaces and eating up to 2 kilos of organic matter daily, mostly rotting garbage found in the city's open dumps. Weedy birds, they flourish amid Kampala's garbage crisis. Storks are both waste infrastructure and waste themselves, rendered disposable by the same state-centric views of infrastructure that make informal waste pickers precarious, and cast out from the imaginary of a clean, green, urban future. Theorizing animal and informal infrastructures together as "para-sites," this paper follows marabou storks through Kampala's ever-shifting waste frontier: the postconsumer equivalent to the extractive frontier that subtends the capitalist fantasy of endless growth. Kampala's topography, hydrology, and class structure ensure that trash flows downhill, accumulating in slums where it leads to flooding and outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other waterborne illnesses as well as to endemic malaria. Waste with wings, marabou storks remake the urban waste landscape, undermining efforts to stabilize the city's ultimate sinks in landfills, slums, and wetlands as they flourish in filth and defecate in the heart of greenness.

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“…Mahvunga clarifies that he is not simply concerned with the indifference toward the pain and killing of others, but also "with inhumanity as also making and being transformed into instruments for dehumanizing others and deriving ecstasy from producing corpses, stench, and pain" (ibid.). Hugh Raffles (2007) similarly explores the Nazi's zoometric process of making the Jewish people into lice, as he compares the Jewish Holocaust to the Rwandan genocide. I will quote him at length, as his insights are important to the points I make in this article:…”

Section: Civilizing Dogsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Captive: Zoometric Operations in Gaza

Braverman¹

2017

Public Culture

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Drawing on ethnographic encounters and investigative analysis, this article relays how Gaza’s spatial confinement generally, and the Israeli incursion of summer 2014 in particular, has lent itself to a radicalized discursive interplay between the animalization of humans and the humanization of animals who live in Gaza. I show how human animals—Israelis and Palestinians, children and terrorists—as well as nonhuman animals—snakes, zoo animals, dogs, mice, lions, insects, zebras, donkeys, chickens, and beasts—perform detailed daily rituals of humanization, dehumanization, and animalization. By defining the degrees of their relative humanity and animality, these rituals render life and death more or less worthy. I coin the term zoometrics to refer to the detailed calculations of biopolitical worthiness that occur within and along the animal-human divide. Such zoometric accounts highlight the slippages between bestialized and humanized bodies, exacerbated by these bodies’ shared conditions of extreme captivity in Gaza.

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Jews, Lice, and History

Cited by 53 publications

References 1 publication

Sexuality and borders in right wing times: a conversation

Sexuality and borders in right wing times: a conversation

Filthy Flourishing

Captive: Zoometric Operations in Gaza

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