VIOLENT EXCEPTIONS NEW DIRECTIONS IN RHETORIC AND MATERIALITY Barbara A. Biesecker, Wendy S. Hesford, and Christa Teston, Series Editors VIOLENT EXCEPTIONS CHILDREN’S HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMANITARIAN RHETORICS Wendy S. Hesford THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2021 by The Ohio State University. This edition licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, which can be found at the following web address: https://openmonographs.org. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hesford, Wendy S., author. Title: Violent exceptions : children’s human rights and humanitarian rhetorics / Wendy S. Hesford. Other titles: New directions in rhetoric and materiality. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2021] | Series: New directions in rhetoric and materiality | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Examines the child-in-peril in twenty-first century political discourse to better understand the assemblages of power and exceptionality in contemporary discourse. Analyzes images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051800 | ISBN 9780814214688 (cloth) | ISBN 0814214681 (cloth) | ISBN 9780814281178 (ebook) | ISBN 0814281176 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Children’s rights. | Human rights. | Children—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HQ789 .H47 2021 | DDC 305.23—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051800 Cover design by Derek Thornton Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro This book is dedicated to my children, Mia and Lou Fei CONTENTS Preface Handprints and Humanitarian Violence at the Border ix Acknowledgments xvii INTRODUCTION Children’s Rights and Humanitarian Rationalities 1 CHAPTER 1 “No Tears Here”: Humanitarian Recognition, Liminality, and the Child Refugee 39 CHAPTER 2 Trafficking Global Girlhoods, Terrorism, and Humanitarian Celebrity 77 CHAPTER 3 Humanitarian Futures: Disability Exceptionalism and African Child Soldier Narratives 113 CHAPTER 4 Humanitarian Negations: Black Childhoods and US Carceral Systems 141 CHAPTER 5 Queer Optics: Humanitarian Thresholds and Transgender Children’s Rights 171 CODA “Walls as We See Them” 195 Notes 203 Bibliography 217 Index 249 PREFACE Handprints and Humanitarian Violence at the Border On July 10, 2019, the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcom- mittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing on the treatment of migrant children separated from parents at the US-Mexico border. The hear- ing was titled “Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border.” Yazmin Juárez, a Guatemalan citizen seeking asylum, was among the witnesses. Flee- ing domestic violence, Juárez and her daughter faced another form of vio- lence at the US-Mexico border—the violence of American exceptionalism. With tears in her eyes, Juárez recounted the death of her twenty-one-month- old daughter Mariee six weeks after she was released from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Texas. “We came to the United States, where I hoped to build a better and safer life for us,” Juárez told the subcommittee in Spanish. “Instead, I watched my baby girl die.” “When I walked out of the hospital that day, all I had with me was a piece of paper the doctors made with Mariee’s handprints.” Ms. Juárez described how “painful” it was to “relive this experience.” But, she said, “the world should know what is happening to . babies and children inside . ICE detention facilities. My bright beautiful girl is gone, but I hope her story will spur America’s govern- ment to act, so that more children do not die at the hands of this neglect and mistreatment.” Testimonies about the separation of children of color from their families haunt US history, from children bought and sold under slavery, to the Indian ix x • Preface Removal Act in the 1800s, when Native American children were taken out of their homes and put into boarding schools, to children separated from par- ents in World War II Japanese internment camps, to the racial disparities in the incarceration of youth of color and dispossession directed toward com- munities of color and gender-nonnormative families. The power of Juárez’s testimony and tears lies foremost in attesting to the life and loss of her daugh- ter, and in its capacious exposure of the consequential rhetoric of crisis and violence of American exceptionalism. Taking up the material rhetoric of her tears, and, more broadly, the humanitarian mediation of children’s human rights, Violent Exceptions examines how the figure of the child-in-peril is appropriated by opposing political constituencies for purposes rarely having to do with the needs of children at risk, and how childhood innocence accrues value in American political discourse as an antidote for political violence. The humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril, predicated on racial division, is central to conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis whereby politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Violent Exceptions illustrates how threshold politics, to which children’s human rights are also tethered, contour humanitarian representations and policies toward children traversing liminal identities and spaces, and extract value from this liminality. The stakes of these extractions are especially steep for children growing up and moving within and between liminal zones. Children’s rights and lives are at stake. In other words, the child-in-peril is not simply a trope but a constitutive material-rhetorical force through which the violence of the exception takes hold. In its focus on Yazmin Juárez’s tears and anguish, media coverage of the hearing summoned iconic repertories of motherhood, specifically the conceit of the grieving mother. The framed photograph of Juárez holding her daugh- ter, which stood beside her and was projected onto large screens as she testi- fied, reinforced the humanitarian framing of the border crisis, especially for US audiences. The emotional purchase of Juárez’s tears, however, resided in the testimonial transaction (Whitlock 162), namely in triggering the tears of US representatives, particularly several newly elected women of color. Dur- ing Yazmin’s testimony, the camera panned to and then fixated on US Rep- resentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was reportedly “moved to tears” (Sharman). At the hearing, US Representative Rashida Tlaib (Michigan), the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, thanked Juárez for telling her story and then turned her colleagues’ attention to the administration’s hardline immi- gration agenda: teary-eyed, she exclaimed, “We don’t need new laws. We need morality.” She continued, “We need an administration that understands there are human rights violations happening” (Montoya-Galvez). These women’s Handprints AND Humanitarian VIOLENCE at THE Border • xi tears, when taken in the broader context of their critique of the administra- tion’s policies, signify an investment in humanitarian sentiment and imply political solidarity in their shared recognition of maternal suffering and sacri- fice. In her speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in support of H.R. 3239, the Humanitarian Standards for Individuals in Customs and Border Protection Custody Act, Speaker Nancy Pelosi exclaimed, “The humanitar- ian situation at the border challenges the conscience of our [country]. Yet the Trump administration has chosen to approach the situation with cruelty instead of compassion” (Pelosi). In his televised “Address to the Nation on the Crisis at the Border” on January 8, 2019, the third week of a partial shutdown of the US federal govern- ment, President Trump likewise framed the situation at the US-Mexico border as “a humanitarian crisis—a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.” But for whom is this a crisis? Trump claimed, “Last month, 20,000 migrant chil- dren were illegally brought into the United States, a dramatic increase. These children are used as human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs.” Not only did Trump manipulate the 20,000 statistic, which does not refer to the number of children smuggled into the US but to the total number of children, parents, or legal guardians caught together at the border, his exclusive focus on coyotes and gangs shifted the humanitarian gaze from migrant children to US citizens as the true victims. The president’s nativist rhetoric reinforced the notion that all Americans are “hurt by uncontrolled, illegal migration.” “Among those hardest hit,” he argued, “are African Americans and Hispanic Americans.” He continued, “I’ve met with dozens of families, whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration. I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers.” “America’s heart broke,” he said, “when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien, who just came across the border.” The president then delivered a litany of gruesome murders: an “Air Force veteran was raped,