Sexualized torture marks the Arab male as emasculated and outside humanity

Evidence

Can we consider the racial hierarchy in Iraq a sexually charged idea? What does the sex do? Certainly sexualized torture evicts Arabs from the community of men, and from a common humanity. As the Dreyfus case has shown, both the acts and the photos transform the body into text, confirming that the Arab is emasculated, body not mind, and that occupation is as necessary as it is dangerous. How else to mark the boundary between them and us, and how else to avoid drowning in blackness, but through violence? The excess (overworked prison guards nevertheless find the time to assemble human pyramids and to take pictures – many other soldiers laugh and join the exhibition) and the sex both tell us of what must be so forcefully and ritualistically disavowed – their humanity, their masculinity, and, above all, the desire for what must not be desired. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 177

Categorization

• XREF: The excess — guards finding time to photograph even when overworked — echoes the reader’s interest in how ritual violence demands audience and record, like the sacrificial chapters. — connects to: The Arab Mind’s homogenizing caricature was instrumentalized to design US torture. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 206