US Torture Regimes and the Captive Body
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Technologies of Incapacitation: US Torture Regimes and the Captive Body By Michelle Potts A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Samera Esmeir, Chair Professor Michael Mascuch, Chair Professor Juana María Rodríguez Professor Charis Thompson Spring 2019 Abstract Technologies of Incapacitation: US Torture Regimes and the Captive Body by Michelle Potts Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Samera Esmeir, Chair Professor Michael Mascuch, Chair My dissertation project studies the practice of force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay detention camp and how incarcerated individuals mobilize their bodies against indefinite confinement. Using the critical-analytical methods of feminist science and visual cultures studies, I examine force- feeding within longer histories of racially gendered subjection such as vivisection and behavior modification in order to consider how the feeding tube came to be used as an instrument of punishment on the orientalized body of Muslim men perceived to be terrorists. Through empirical research, textual interpretation, and aesthetic analysis, my dissertation intervenes in the fields of critical prison studies, and science and technology studies by foregrounding genealogies of biomedicalization and how those incarcerated reclaim corporeal agency through practices such as hunger striking. Ultimately, I argue that force-feeding is commensurate with other interrogation techniques that have become more mainstream since the Cold War, emphasizing the medicalization of war tactics and punishment. Chapter one, “Vivisectional Mandate: Behavioral Science and Torture from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” follows the ways that the Cold War’s experimentation sets the stage for the war on terror. In particular, I situate the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques of the war on terror within Cold War behavioral science in order to track the role psychology has played in the progression of biopolitical torture techniques that aim to discipline racialized bodies. The second chapter, “From Cracking the Mind to Bodily Abjection: Situating Force-Feeding in the Torture Archive,” considers how force-feeding transforms the medical clinic into a site of punitive suffering. How is this transformation linked to the emergence of biotechnologies geared towards the optimization of life in the early part of the 20th century? These questions expand outward to 1 be considerations of patient and prisoner autonomy in the wake of right-to-die litigation and the use of the feeding tube in US domestic prisons. My third chapter, “Suspended Animation: Force- Feeding and the Visuality of Pain,” analyzes a policy manual on techniques for managing hunger striking at Guantánamo Bay detention camp alongside the visual testimonies of prisoner Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel and activist Yasiin Bey. This chapter investigates how the state frames medical ethics inside of the camps and how the emphasis placed on care obfuscates not only the demands of the prisoners but also the feeding tube as carceral technology. The fourth chapter, “Staging Incapacitation: Hunger Striking in the Wake of Force-Feeding,” considers the practice of hunger striking and self-harm at Guantánamo Bay. Here I examine prisoner’s testimonials of hunger striking and how such resistance to policies of corporeal wholeness functions as a viable form of political self-expression. By situating force-feeding practices at Guantánamo Bay into a history of medical experimentation, I reveal the inadequacies of prevailing theories of biopower, theories that are not capacious enough to account for how state sponsored torture is underwritten by the operation of Islamophobia and institutionalized racism. Tracing out an archaeology of state torture with the tools of critical prison studies and science and technology studies reveals Guantánamo Bay as neither a space of life nor death, but rather of what I refer to as suspended animation, a pointedly medicalized mode of living death. 2 Table of Contents Introduction: 1 Hunger Striking and the Suspended Animation of Force-Feeding Chapter One: 13 Vivisectional Mandate: Behavioral Science and Torture from the Cold War to the War on Terror Chapter Two: 33 From Cracking the Mind to Bodily Abjection: Situating Force-Feeding in the Torture Archive Chapter Three: 50 Suspended Animation: Force-Feeding and the Visuality of Pain Chapter Four: 66 Staging Incapacitation: Hunger Striking in the Wake of Force-Feeding Conclusion: 80 The World Yet Made Notes 84 Bibliography 106 i Acknowledgments Thank you to my family: Rosa, Michael, and Melissa. You tether me to the world and remind me of my meaning in it. Mami y Papi, thank you for your love and support. Thank you for your sacrifices, many of which I’ll never know. Melissa, thank you for being my person, and for your care and loyalty. Living with you has taught me so much about the beautiful struggle of interdependency. Thank you for taking care of me, it’s been an honor to take care of you. There are not enough words for my gratitude to each of you, but I will continue to try anyway. I am grateful to each of my amazing committee members. Thank you Samera Esmeir and Michael Mascuch for taking this project on and guiding me along the way. You pushed my thinking and writing, never letting me settle. Your support throughout the many stages of this research has meant so much to me, it’s been an honor to think alongside each of you. Michael, our many conversations about visuality helped me to see better, thank you. Samera, you sensed from the beginning what this project would come to mean to me. Thank you for encouraging me, and for emulating what it means to open a text and to ask new questions of it; my thinking is forever shaped by you. So much gratitude to Juana María Rodríguez, the Latina femme mentor of my dreams. The imagination, pleasure, and rigor you bring to your writing and thinking is something I aspire to. Thank you for your engagement over the years and the kitchen table conversations along the way. I’m immensely grateful to Charis Thompson for agreeing to think alongside me. Charis, thank you for the excitement you always brought to this project. I hope my work reflects back even a fraction of what you taught me. Thank you to the graduate students I’ve been lucky enough to make community with over the years. Darren Arquero, Adam Hutz, Paige Johnson, Tala Khanmalek, Suzanne LiPuma, Zachary Manfredi, Seán McKeithan, Andrea Miller, Kel Montalvo-Quiñones, Emily O’Rourke, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Giancarlo Cornejo Salinas, Kim Tran, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Janice Yu, Johnathan Vaknin, and Veronika Zablotsky. Thank you for your friendship, the hours gossiping, complaining, and trying to forge a life out of an impossible institution. Each of you has supported my writing and thinking in so many ways; you’re all my teachers and the world is better for the work you bring into it. Special thanks and gratitude to Kel, who is the best work husband I could have asked for and whose friendship and care has sustained me through it all. In many ways graduate school was only bearable because I had you beside me. Thank you to Shin Yi Tsai for giving me space to think through my own interiority, what a privilege it’s been. You make me feel less scared about my own groundlessness. It’s because of you that I remain optimistic about therapeutic practice. To my Riverside homegirls: Margaret Farr-Neiderer, Evelyn Mercado, Amanda Tune, Rachel Rodríguez, and Amanda Holguin. Thank you for being the best reminders of where I come from. Thank you for always seeing me, your friendship has meant everything to me. Thank you to the beautiful queer community that’s sustained me throughout my years living in the Bay Area. Sylvan Black, Mona Eshaiker, Jocelyn Freitas, Dara Garcia, Bridge Ho, Paige Johnson, Kayla Keener, Becca Rozo-Marsh, Leticia Miranda, Kel Montalvo-Quiñones, Serena Padilla, Dip Pakier, Ángel Ross, Neda Said, Wild Tigers, Kim Tran, Turner, Kate Vander Tuig, ii and Veronika Zablotsky. You’ve all brought so much pleasure and purpose to my life, and I’m continuously in awe of the work you do for our community. Thank you for showing me care, support, love, and other affects that make being with others interesting and hard, but always worthwhile. My sense of self and political commitments have been shaped by each of you. I’m forever grateful for the spaces we’ve carved out together and our commitment to finding new ways of existing. I’m honored to call each of you family. And finally, thank you to those who refuse. Throughout this project my own limitations have made it so that I don’t always have a name by which to call you. I nonetheless remain humbled, and because of you, committed to pushing my writing and thinking—my capacity to imagine beyond this world. In gratitude, thank you. iii For Rosa; my beginning, my first home iv Introduction: Hunger Striking and the Suspended Animation of Force-Feeding A new system of detention and interrogation was developed following the attacks of September 11, 2001.1 On September 18, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), giving him free reign to deploy the military on anyone he determined associated with 9/11.2 In the wake of the AUMF, the Bush administration authorized the CIA to build the Enhanced Interrogation Program (EIP), essentially legalizing the torture of US detained prisoners suspected of terrorism. This authorization was established to allow for the administration of harsher interrogation practices, including torture, or what Darius Rejali defines as “the systemic infliction of physical torment on detained individuals by state officials for police purposes, for confession, information, or intimidation.”3 The Bush administrations’ consensus was that “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT) would ensure that “high-value intelligence” was collected from prisoners.