Prisoner abuse functions as a publicly enacted sexualized ritual of racial violence

Evidence

The fact that the status of Iraqis is so evidently subhuman, so culturally different, and so in need of discipline, crowds our newsreels. Unless we too have become numb to it all, we will need to find an explanation for the sexualized terror and for the ways that ordinary people participate in it. Pyramids of naked men forced to simulate having sex should not baffle us, but neither should we believe that they are trivial or exceptional moments in a giant clash of civilizations. To grasp their import, we will have to attend to prisoner abuse as a publicly enacted, sexualized ritual of racial violence and track the trade in mythologies signalled by our persistent marking of ourselves as modern and the non-West as culturally different. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 191

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does the ‘ritual’ framing extend beyond Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo and other contemporary abuse sites?
• SEED: Article angle: reading Abu Ghraib’s pyramids-of-naked-men not as individual deviance but as a public ritual that constitutes modernity against the non-West.
• XREF: connects to: Surveillance footage revealed racial violence as performed private-fantasy theatre — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1235