the-rebellion-of-abject-pasts-macc3b3n

THE REBELLION OF ABJECT PASTS: MEMORY, (AGENCY) AND QUEER THEORY Abstract Gender Theory and Memory Studies share several common features: evoking what is allegedly unspeakable from the past implies setting into motion categories where anything outside the norm or conceptualization challenges the classical ways of understanding temporality and corporeality As certain elements of the memorialist tradition such as Trauma Studies may threaten the capacity of political intervention, there has been a search to stress the need to remember that we face a shared past based on norms, conventions and common practices aimed at some sort of stability guaranteeing agency The purpose of this paper is to describe the way in which queer theory may help solving some of the issues of memory studies, especially those associated to the theory of trauma, without reconstructing stabilities Later, the article takes the analysis of two series of photographs taken by the Argentine artist Sebastián Freire as its inspiration, given his capacity to challenge stereotypes displayed when representing certain disruptive events, especially those issues related to the role of agency Keywords memory, abjection, agency, queer, time, body San Sebastian's martyrdom occurred in the year 288: the wounds of the arrows on the body of the Christian soldier shed light on both the evidence of stigmatization and paradoxically, or consequently, the beauty of the male body One thousand and eighty one years later –on June 27 and 28, 1969-, coinciding with Judy Garland’s funerals, the Stonewall events that began the fight for the rights of sexual minorities in the United States took place Representations of these events are precisely the inspiration of the discussions of this article In each of these two cases, the events encouraged the spreading of images that helped to constitute, but also to question, queer identity –or the choice of questioning it as identitarian mechanism- It is these two events –or, actually, their representations- the thematic axis of the series of photographs by the Argentine artist Sebastián Freire that we take as a starting point of our analysis of what the theories of memory have to learn from queer theory: Sebastiano martir (2005) and Rainbow (2008) There, as we will see below, the interpretation of corporeality and temporality alternative to those generally normed place the theoretical weight of reflection upon the abject in a particularly revealing spot Though this article does not intend to be a case study of Freire’s pictures, I understand that these images may be helpful at illustrating my thesis The capability of this concept to present alternatives in connection to the reconstruction of the past, especially that defined by some as traumatic or disruptive of linear temporality, turns out to be particularly relevant The purpose of this article, first, is to describe a key debate inside the field of memory studies to later suggest an alternative, which is not precisely a third accommodating position Memory Studies express a tradition that tries to develop alternative strategies devoted to represent the past based on the experience of those affected and involved in this past This framework –deployed after quarrels around problems introduced by the apprehension of massive killings such as the Holocaust- rejects the efficacy of established explicative principles and claims a role for the immediacy and fragility of memory (Traverso, 2007: 67 ff) It implies a strong contrast to traditional academic History (Nora, 1978) that –allegedly- ignores the role played by subjective experience as part of what has to be taken into account in order to represent the past Memorialist strategies usually reject any attempt to establish comforting totalizing narratives, particularly those that might be related to a progressive conception of History As it has been stated by Ricouer: the autonomy of historical knowledge from memory is established thanks to the presupposition of a coherent scientific epistemology (2000: 168), “a singular collective that goes beyond the infinite multiplicity of memory” (Ricoeur, 2000: 393) The notion of ‘trauma’ –as we shall see- has played an important but also problematic role in the development of this paradigm Trauma studies –founded by Cathy Caruth (1996) and continued by Shoshana Felman (2002), Susan Brison (2002) and Roger Luckhurst (2008) – built up a field based on the assumption that “the genocide of European Jews can be seen as the paradigmatic historical trauma of modernity, a physical and moral cataclysm in both Jewish and Western histories that produced an enormous and enduring range of symptomatic cultural products” (Berger, 2004: 575) It is the dispute triggered by the deployment of this influential version of memory studies, what precipitated on us the need to review some of the terms involved As we shall see, Trauma Studies have been critized for its use of the notion of trauma alleging that the alternation of temporality involved has disastrous effects on the empowerment of agency We will argue that, in order to overcome this problem, a new conceptual framework based on recent developments of Gender Studies is potentially useful This strategy may avoid these paradoxes without erasing certain differential qualities of events considered unspeakable or traumatic Our proposal is focused on providing a role to concepts such as vulnerability and abjection, and to alternative ways of considering temporality and corporeality deployed under the umbrella of queer theory Actually, the closeness between memory studies and gender theory has been already established Both fields stress the appeal to a traumatic past that undermines the classic forms of representation This articles intends to go beyond the common axes already pointed in order to establish new theoretical axes that may help overcoming some of the problems of trauma studies Paths to a deviated memory Before introducing the way in which Freire modulates instability and artifice –through the role of kitsch in questioning traditional representational mechanisms- as forms to promote minorities’ agency, we will deploy our first point to explain the link traditionally established between gender theories and alternative forms of representing the past focused on genocides In fact, with regards to the first phase aforementioned, gender theory and memory studies share more than one feature: evoking what is disruptive from the past implies setting into motion categories where anything outside the norm or conceptualization challenges the classical ways of understanding temporality, corporeality and its own representation Feminist studies of sexual abuse, autobiographical literature, migration, and slavery have either assumed gender to be relevant to cultural memory or have engaged it explicitly (Hirsch and Smith, 2002: 3-12) The discussions within the scope of gender theory on modes of constitution and representation of identities have also been connected from the beginning with theories attempting to account for the statute of testimony in the reconstruction of the past Even the feminist definitions on “counterhistory” have helped to unfold issues related to “counter-memory” (Hirsch and Smith, 2002), both in the sense of counter-hegemonic experiences of the past and those that, from the present, refer to the past Gender Theory as well as Memory Studies presuppose that the present is defined by a past that is both constructed and challenged, assuming we not study the past for itself, but to address the needs of the present Both fields are always suspicious of universal categories, disregarding the possibility of considering identity as something already established The critical role of memory works in a conceptual arc close to that of gender theory and the latter forces us to address the role of the body –traditionally displayed by feminism- through the reconstruction of the so-called traumatic pasts Hence, what is allegedly unrepresentable from the past –genocides, collective massacres, etc.- has been addressed considering these points of contact supported by the theory of trauma (Hirsch and Smith, 2002), particularly influential within the framework of memory studies The key elements of Trauma Studies have been developed by Cathy Caruth –also highly criticized-, who defines trauma as “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares and other repetitive phenomena” (Caruth, 1996: 91) However, the effects of trauma extend far beyond with a late influence until they taint other areas of a feeling of incomprehension (Caruth, 1996: 92) It is therefore capable of determining the way in which the relationship with the future is established in undifferentiated terms toward the past and the present On the other hand trauma interrupts the experience understood as a coherent articulation and frequently involves a dissociation between cognition and affection that many times leads to an aporetic relation amidst the compulsion to repetition (LaCapra, 2004: 117) Considered as a typically disorienting experience, trauma as an experience where the past is uncontrollably relived, voids the difference between past and future This type of approach to explain the disruptive past has been subject to a critical turn objecting the use of the category of ‘trauma’ for threatening the capacity of political intervention and risking the relation between memory and identity It is therefore necessary to warn about certain hazards: It becomes necessary –as it is claimed, for example, by LaCapra- to highlight that we face a shared past based on norms, conventions and common practices aimed at some sort of stability There have been many arguments put forward following these line, aimed at pinpointing that reflection upon these issues in terms of trauma have only disempowered agency: A flattened temporality of constantly present events is argued to seal the forwarding toward the future as an otherness demanded by emancipating strategies Wulf Kansteiner (2006: 18 ff ) has stressed that certain uses of the concept of trauma question the role played by agency and intentionality to the point of endangering the term ‘collective memory’ itself In the same path Nancy Wood (1999: 66) has pointed out that, if not discussed publicly, trauma can turned into resentment neutralizing its own political effects Postcolonial theorists have even emphasized that traumatic events need to be thought as life-afirming: “there is a need of some kind of affirmative message that can be taken from the ‘unspeakable horror’” (Ward, 2007: 199) These objections have led to a displacement, as the one developed by Dominick LaCapra (2001, 2004) –in a path destined to critically rescue the framework given by the theory of trauma-, aimed at reestablishing stabilities This theoretical displacement fostered to save the memorialist paradigm from challenging immobilism implies disregarding some of the premises shared with gender theory: The identity of historical agency is now posed as incompatible with the flattened temporality of trauma The ghost figures that live in the present (Berger, 1999: 52) would threaten any future transformation power dissolving the agent Hence, following these lines, LaCapra states that it “tends to create what I term a sense of enlightened disempowerment –a kind of elaborated theorized fatalism ( ) which may itself not get beyond aimless agitation, blank utopianism, or blind hope” (LaCapra, 2004: 8) We could, first, endorse that as trauma implies the ghostly presence of the past in the present, it enables a sort of temporal flatness that would restrict the necessary sedimentation to frame action The agent, in fact, can only be constituted as such if certain autonomy of the present –actually, the core of the political- is guaranteed from where change can be introduced, from that moment and toward the future It also needs certain connection with the past, at least to deny it In other words, the radical temporal continuity established from the traumatic breaking point would enable the reification of the injury of the past in terms of an “injured identity” (Brown, 1995) plunged into victimization As stated by Wendy Brown, if we consider gender fully a production of power (Brown: 1995: 84), specificity and plasticity are not only dissolved, but a theory of subordination is also generated resulting in victimization capable of dissolving the power of its public interventions The insistence on finding the roots of an identity in a traumatic past forces the discursive and emotional reiteration of the injury in the present (Brown, 2001: 53 ff.) Even when this strategy may have had a constitutive function, its reiteration only disables agency We may, in fact, accept that if trauma results in a flattened temporality displayed after the shock of an event, the openness toward change would be clearly foreclosed: It is the suspension of temporality associated to the compulsion to repetition However –and this is the purpose of this article-, if we reconceptualize certain features of disruption addressing the productive and re-defining the capacity of precariousness, the strategies of change would be restored This is where memorialist theories should return to those of gender As a possible response to this trend, the use of gender theory with its specific strategies related to body and temporality to explain what is allegedly unspeakable or unrepresentable of the past has recently reshaped the discussion in a new sense: that one linked, for example, to the idea of the precariousness of life developed by Judith Butler (Sosa, 2009) There, the issues of vulnerability (Bell and DiPaolantonio, 2009) and mourning prompt the questioning of identity’s constitution as a horizon from where to sustain political agency and with it the emancipation under alternative premises Let us briefly reconstruct the concepts relative to this point Butler mainly highlights vulnerability as a basis for a community (Butler, 2004, a) In her own words, “Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure” (Butler, 2004, a: 20) This implies that “grief displays the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain” (Butler, 2004, a: 23) She argues that “the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and the instrument of all these as well ( ) the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own The body has its invariably public dimension” (Butler, 2004, a: 26) In other words, instabilities established by the imprints of disruptive events on the present, far from sealing empowerment, on the contrary, are opening it up to new meanings: opening it to the public implies the constitution of a space for agency It is the visibility of the suffered pain what exposes the agentic dimension of vulnerability It could even be said that addressing the transformations of agency, and thus face the possibility of a sound emancipation is only possible from this perspective Therefore, as we shall later see, while trauma implies a temporary flattening constantly turning the past into present, the concept of vulnerability –actually, inspired by the theory of trauma- is focused on the ways in which agency is altered –but no erased- from the impact of a specific fact There is no overlapping of temporalities, compulsion to repetition or dissociation here The notion of vulnerability can then be used to refer to disruptive moments of the past—such as September 11, 2001, used by Butler as an example- given a specific quality that does not necessarily refer to temporary setting on that particular event characteristic of the theory of trauma The experience of vulnerability, as mentioned by Butler, refers, however, to an effect on subjectivity of specific events that –even when deciding to maintain elements characteristic of the traumatic dimension such as temporary alteration- are focused on the transformation of agency out of mourning Within this Butlerian framework where “the “doer” is variably constructed in and through the deed” (Butler, 1999: 181), and “agency” is defined as “to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (Butler, 1999: 185), agency is not incompatible with the presence of vulnerability Therefore, the statement “construction is not opposed to agency” (Butler, 1999: 187) is asserting the possibility of identity subversion within the practice of repetitive signification And this is the core element for our purpose: the constructiveness of agency is not incompatible with its transforming power On the contrary, the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up, according to Butler, possibilities of “agency” that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed (Butler,1999: 187) In Undoing Gender Butler starts from the role of experience of recognition to show the way in which we are constituted as socially feasible beings (Butler, 2004, b: 2) These are socially articulated and variable terms in charge of both granting humanity to some and depriving others of the possibility of attaining said status by establishing the difference between human and less than human The critical relationship depends then on the invariable and unavoidably collective capacity of articulating an alternative 10 the modernizing narrative of bourgeois citizenship of the nation state and, especially, of the logic of capitalism perceived as inevitable (Freeman, 2010: xx), History – associated to queer temporality- emerges within the logic of capital as a manifestation of its contradictions, frequently as seemingly archaic material not yet fully vanquished It consists especially of dispositions that enable other subject-positions than that of a worker Embodied in the person’s bodily habits they express, but also define, the way in which relations with the environment are established The body becomes here an effect of time, not its metaphor According to Freeman, “queer temporalities, visible in the forms of interruption are points of resistance to this temporal order that, in turn, propose other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present and future others Hence the emergence of asynchrony, anachronism, anastrophe, belatedness, compression, delay, ellipsis, flashback, hysteron-proteron, pause, prolepsis, repetition, reversal, surprise and other ways of breaking apart the homogeneous empty time” (Freeman, 2010: xxii) Freeman develops a specific concept to describe the moment in which body and time liaise within the framework of History I: chrononormativity According to her characterization, it is the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity This is how people feel coherently collective Chrononormativity is a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts constituting the gender binary that organizes the meaning (Freeman, 2010: 5) Fissures that can open up to suggest other historical moments or ways of living (Freeman, 2010: 6), make a dent here in both linear and cyclical structures imposing alternatives inure in a reconceptualization of the possibilities of political intervention and the relationship established between past and present Contingent forms of being and belonging (Freeman, 2010: 71) that inevitably 25 refer to what is allegedly excluded by abjection and which is addressed by interpretations of agency in terms that, as those related to vulnerability, are herein presented Freeman's defined erotohistoriography (Freeman, 2010: 95) implies that the contact with historical materials can be precipitated by particular body dispositions, and that these connections may elicit bodily responses The feeling of having been surprised by an overflow of libido triggering a loss of control (Freeman, 2010: 119) making these dispositions capable of challenging the norm Hence, temporality and corporeality are joined to characterize alternative approaches to the past consistent with alternative agencies as well The detotalization of time addressed by queer theory has been particularly useful to explain desire and fantasy, two key attributes to unfold alternative ways to rethink historical imagination The way in which erotic relations and bodily acts supporting them link the work of the normative structures we call family and nation, gender, race, class and sexual identity should be acknowledged here, always according to Freeman, changing tempos, remixing memory and desire through the recovery of excess, as that expressed by the abject Queer temporality attacks, therefore, the concept of the inevitable (Freeman, 2010: 173) rendering an agency that needs indetermination possible (Freeman, 2010: 171) Regarding this issue, and before continuing analyzing the consequences of our central opposition, it is important to notice that there is a remarkable difference between queer temporalities and the temporality of trauma On one hand, trauma refers to the mere implosion of an established pattern: indeed, we face the impossibility of survival of regular temporality (Caruth, 1996: 91) On the other, queer temporalities imply the establishment of diverse and contingent patterns capable of opening up new possibilities 26 to the rules any agency needs in order to be empowered While the logics of trauma – based in a flattened temporality- may disempower agency due to the need of some temporal sequence –even a contingent one-, a queer perspective deploys the possibility of multiple temporalities The agentic capacities (Coole, 2005: 125) attend here to the establishment of diverse identities and different temporal patterns in charge of framing action Hence, based on the arguments deployed in this section, we could state that queer time and space have attributes compatible with the openness of vulnerability, showing as well the material dimension of agency as defined by this perspective In turn, it helps to visualize abjection as that exercised by the theory of trauma when attaching a possible meaning to the past reifying thus the injury of the agents involved Sebastiano, Dorothy and beyond Let us focus again on Freire’s images and dig for the manner in which these forms of understanding body and time above and beyond any normalization reconfigure the memorialist paradigm The Rainbow series –pictures 1, and 3- correspond to a construction –where the statute of the visibility of the constructed is part of what is represented- based on the screening of The Wizard of Oz on naked bodies As mentioned above, the work evokes the events of Stonewall when a particularly violent police raid in the New York Village’s Stonewall Inn, which hosted the most excluded members of the queer community –transsexuals, drag queens, homeless, drag kings-, was strongly resisted in 1969 It was an underpinning moment for the LGBT militancy In fact, it was after the following year when the gay pride parade was organized every June 28, first in New York and Los Angeles, and later in other cities around the world In his 27 photographs dedicated to this rebellion, which coincided with Judy Garland’s funeral -already a gay icon and whose death was lamented inside the bar- Freire plays with the representation of an overlapping of temporalities: the screened film –which includes, like filmed image as such, a reflection upon time- and an unregulated, entangled demonstration where immediate goals are overlapped with other long-term ones expressed through the bodies marked by the screening of Dorothy, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow There is a filmed past that, as trauma, flows constantly, anarchically insisting on the present, and a present that, sustained by an alternative sequence where agents never manage to present themselves in a stable unity, is defined upon a movement that attempts to constitute and in turn reject the unity of agents It is thus about images that, even when evoking certain characteristics of trauma, advocate the role of the agents involved in the upheaval and its impact on the empowerment of agency in the present It is abjection what shows the expectation of excluding that past that insists, however, on the present It is also the acknowledgment of vulnerability what forces to reveal that it is not something that happens merely as a result of maintaining the injury, but it is sustained on a strategy that aims to exclude that past, given its capacity to challenge the way in which agency is understood in the present The abject past –as aforementioned- is the past we exclude for being unbearable, but the theory of trauma itself implements the same strategy of abjection by reifying it and rejecting to question its limits, as Freire does through his images sustained on the premise of vulnerability There is, therefore, an overlapping of temporalities here that, imposed on altered bodies, promotes its capacities multiplying the logics on which it is installed As Halberstam would put it, it is about temporalities that fall beyond the norm that recognizes a unified conception of time Thus, establishing overlapped temporalities, as in Freire's photographs and Halberstam's description, opens up the possibilities of action 28 to horizons far more unpredictable than the unified logic of linear temporality while challenging trauma’s immobilism It is precisely then the evidence of temporality’s contingency demonstrated by the overlapped experience of time in the photographs what promotes emancipatory capacities and the efficacy itself of the 1969 demonstration and the subsequent parades organized to evoke the Stonewall riots In the second series addressed -pictures 4, and 6- dedicated to the martyrdom of San Sebastian -where the classical understanding of space and time are challenged by portraying a specific conception of the grotesque-, an alternative mode of the corporeal is revealed The possibility to conceptualize what is called the unspeakable as “abject” and incorporating thus not only a valuable category of analysis of the past, but also the possibility to reformulate the idea of agency of the protagonists of the past in such terms that would challenge immobilism and recover the instabilities characteristic of the gender theory clearly emerge here Freire’s photographs are a mockery of the stable through the evidence of artifice sustained in the use of shiny and particularly stereotyped dolls to represent San Sebastian Barbie, the Joker, Woody or even Ken are the plastic faces emerging among colored necklaces and bright candles It is precisely this stage in terms of the body as predetermined, stable and freezed under the norms of a kitsch stereotype what becomes central in Freire’s representation The body of San Sebastian –in other words, the abject- has been represented through the stereotype that tends to anchor the victim’s subjectivity to one single ground, distant and alien The camp strategy sustained on irony, reveals the absurd of this type of representation crossed by motionless The excessive contrivance that employs the artifice of mocking it can warn about the anchoring modality managing to incorporate the wasted, the abject to re-define it It is about acknowledging the artifice of reconstruction and eliminating the veneration of the past –nothing is mythical any 29 longer- to describe the line between the excluded and the included If the purpose is to express martyrdom marked by violence using normed images, very little may be recovered from the event’s significance It is the stereotyped body, frozen in some sort of naturalization following the style reported by Grosz, what is under consideration We have thus seen how the two series of photographs present queer conceptions both of temporality and corporeality up to the point of showing the sealing of agency when stabilities are chosen, whether that of the mask’s stereotype or those contained in the pre-established linear sequences These morals are precisely what can be incorporated into the discussions about the reconstruction of pasts other than what is assumed by the norm of established expectations Queer theory and Freire’s photographs show that evoking the past in unstable terms, far from presenting identities as anchored, increases the possibility of making that past significant for the present If these events are read as included in alternative temporalities and their players as framed within fluid bodies, the mark of the past in the present results in a higher rather than a reduced transformative potential It is, ultimately, the acknowledgement of vulnerability what more fairly responds to the impact of the past on the present, and also, potentially the present on the future If, by presenting the injury, the theory of trauma exerted abjection on the past that it did not address, the acknowledgement of this gesture, of this contingent limit between the accepted and the abject of the past, opens up the memorialist tradition of the historical theory to the possibility of overcoming some of these dilemmas 30 Picture Sebastián Freire, Rainbow (2008) Picture Sebastián Freire, Rainbow (2008) 31 Picture Sebastián Freire, Rainbow (2008) 32 Picture Sebastián Freire, Sebastiao Mártir (2005) 33 Picture Sebastián Freire, 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