Mutilation forces silence and strips the victim of identity

Evidence

Mutilation – the uncivil extreme of violating the body through physical acts – is a form of doing the unrepresentable, that which cannot in some sense be spoken adequately, the changing (mutating) of the body in some basic or radical way. But as also a muting, a silencing, it is, in the extreme, making the identified or identifiable anonymous, lacking identification. Mutilation or bodily violations accordingly are a form of forced silencing, a more or less direct cutting out of tongues. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 239

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s long-running thread on silencing and the soundscape literature’s treatment of muted voices. — connects to: Wounds and scars function as symbolic surfaces for exchanging bodily signs — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 372; Bodily mutilation operates as state-endorsed silencing that strips civic identity — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 239; Political civility depends on being named while mutilation reduces persons to unnamed numbers — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 240
• DEFINE: Defines mutilation as a form of forced silencing and identity-stripping.