Sexualized torture functions as racial terror that constitutes imperial identity.

Evidence

I argue that sexualized torture, or what has euphemistically come to be called ‘prisoner abuse,’ is more appropriately named racial terror. Terror is how colonizers come to know their own power as well as how they come to make it known. In showing that what went on at Abu Ghraib convinced the American men and women who engaged in torture that they were themselves members of a racially superior race and nation, I emphasize, drawing on Michael Taussig, that terror is a mythology, a narrative meant to teach us who must be kept in line through force and who are the enforcers. Acts of terror make the nation and the empire, and as such they will continue to happen. The practices of torture at Abu Ghraib were sexualized and recorded in photos and videotapes. These two aspects suggest the psychic underpinnings of empire, whereby the boundary between self and Other must be policed through violence, lest it collapse. At Abu Ghraib, the acts of violence afforded American soldiers an intimacy that would otherwise be forbidden as well as a chance to establish forever who is in control. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 61

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that terror is a mythology that makes the nation and empire, recurs and must be continually performed, is dense and paradigm-shifting — torture as identity-construction rather than information-gathering.
• BMF: The violence as forbidden intimacy while policing the boundary between self and Other resonates with Home Boy’s exploration of Muslim immigrant identity policing in post-9/11 New York.