disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 22: Security

Advisory Board Benjamin Agger, Sociology University of Texas at Arlington James Boon, Anthropology Princeton University Matthew Edney, Geography University of Southern Maine Nancy Fraser, Political Science The New School for Social Research Cynthia Freeland, Philosophy University of Houston Sander L. Gilman Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts Emory University Derek Gregory, Geography University of British Columbia Peter-Uwe Hohendahl, German Cornell University Anton Kaes, German University of California Berkeley Douglas Kellner, Philosophy of Education University of California Los Angeles Dominick LaCapra, History Cornell University Maggie McFadden, Interdisciplinary Studies Appalachian State University Marjorie Perloff, English Stanford University Barney Warf, Geography University of Kansas Samuel Weber, German Northwestern University James A. Winders, History Appalachian State University Irving Zeitlin, Sociology University of Toronto

disClosure 22 Editorial Collective Richard Parmer, Editor Lee Bullock Jason Grant Rachael Hoy Malene Jacobsen Vanessa Marquez Travis Martin Mary Beth Schmid Lacin Tutalar Christina Williams Marion Rust, Faculty Adviso r Art Editin g Richard Parmer Cover Art Peggy Coots Printing Copy Express

disClosure is a refereed journal produced in conjunction with the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentuc ky.

Funding for this issue was provided by the Office of the Vice President for Researc h , the College of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School, and the Studen t Government Associa tion .

Artists may retain copyright over contributions. No part of this work may be reproduced or reprinted without written consent of disClosure or where the artist retains copyright, the artist.

2013, ISSN disClosure, edito rs 213 Patterson Office Tower University of Kentu cky Lexington, KY 40506- 0027 disclosu r ejo ur n al@ g m a il.c o m http:/ /w w w .as.uky .ed u /so cia lthe o ry

disClosure: a journal of social theory No. 22

Security

Table of Contents: Editor’s Preface and Acknowledgments – Richard Parmer Reduced, Reused, Recycled Rethink, Remove, Refuse – Bryan Reinholdt Checked Bags: A Litany of Potentially Explosive Things – Sherrin Frances Some Breaks Remain While we’re on the subject of the quatrain – Andrew Calis The Abandonment of Modernity: Bare Life and the Camp in Homo Sacer and Hotel Rwanda – Carolyn Ownbey Actual as opposed to possible – Peggy Coots Security of the Nation: Why Do We Need ‘Mothers of Martyrs’ in Turkey?

– Esra Gedik for this earth too long hauled later valorization – Bob Mulligan The Embodiment of Collective Exclusion: Transcending the Borders of Social Segregation in Harry Potter – Alyssa Hunziker XX Chromosome (1) – Peggy Coots Exploring Security: Discussions with Jane Guyer, Stuart Elden, Russ Castronovo, and Michael Hardt

Contributors: Andrew Calis is currently teaching at West Virginia University (where he got his MA) as well as Alderson-Broaddus College. He is enrolled in the English PhD program at Catholic University of America and will begin in the fall semester.

Peggy Coots is currently a first year MFA candidate at the University of Kentucky and plans to graduate in the spring of 2015. Her work challenges views on the expectations and capabilities of the female body through abstract mark making. She is interested in views of (female) biology micro- and macroscopically.

Sherrin Frances worked as a TSA Security Officer while she completed her Ph.D. at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fe, Switzerland. She is now an Assistant Professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, where she teaches composition and writing courses. Her research revolves around an exploration of the various notions of security that are embedded within systems, structures, and taxonomies.

Esra Gedik received her M.A. at Middle East Technical University in Political Science and Public Administration with a thesis called “Ideological Ambivalence of Motherhood in case of ‘Mothers of Martyrs’ in Turkey.” She has started a Ph.D. at the same university in the department of Sociology. Esra studies militarism, nationalism, conscientious objections of women, women’s labor, and LGBTT and gender issues in Turkey.

Alyssa Hunziker is a graduate student at the University of Florida. Her interests include twentieth century literature, empire studies, and postcolonial literature.

Bob Mulligan is a career special educator currently lecturing part time in two NJ universities.

His professional interests in the areas of disability, labeling, and stigma are balanced by abiding love for family, friends, and all the birds of North America.

Carolyn Ownbey has a BA in English from UC Davis (2008), a MA in English from Boston College (2011), and will be attending McGill University in the fall to begin doctoral work. She focuses primarily on 20th century post-traumatic texts and poststructuralist theory, exploring theories of justice, ethics, and mourning in cinematic and literary narratives.

Bryan Reinholdt is an artist and teacher. Anti-war veteran. Citizen. Son. He is currently the executive director of the Center for Creative Art Teaching and finishing his Art Education Masters this summer. He will soon pursue a doctorate degree. His final project is a website on self-directed learning in art education at www.choicearted.com.

Editor’s Preface -Richard Parmer Security is a topic that can, at first, seem so every-day that it may appear too banal a theme for an entire team-taught course on social theory—or a full issue of a social theory journal. However, as the spring 2012 Social Theory 600 course here at the University of Kentucky and this journal reveal, the ubiquity of this concept is exactly why it is such a rich area of academic inquiry. Indeed, recent events make this idea quite timely, some of which include several recent government elections around the world, rebellions in Egypt and Syria, world-wide financial instability, and, most recently in the United States, the explosions of two bombs during the 2013 Boston Marathon. Security, and the lack there of, connects to such topics as nationalism, boundaries, empire, citizenship and migration, technology, violence and terror, networks, governance, subjectivity, economics, geopolitics, public(s), virtual life, and natural resources. These themes and many others were taken up by the Collective of this issue of disClosure, our contributors, and a wide range of visiting scholars, including Dr. Michael Hardt, Dr. Jane Guyer, Dr. Stuart Elden, and Dr. Russ Castronovo.

This issue of disClosure explores the concept of (in)security through a variety of disciplines, media, and theoretical perspectives.

I would also like to take this opportunity to announce that this will be the final printed issue of disClosure. Throughout this year, we have completed the groundwork for moving our journal online. Moving to a digital publication that is hosted through UKnowledge will provide new opportunities for our journal. It will expand the genres of work that we can publish and provide easy, free access to every issue, starting with our first in 1992. We look forward to these exciting new prospects for the journal. I hope that our readers will share our enthusiasm for the new digital home of disClosure.

Acknowledgments Compiling and completing this issue of disClosure would not have been possible without the assistance of Timothy Vatovec and Eir-Anne Edgar, the editors of last year’s issue. I would like to thank Dr. Marion Rust for her support as our faculty advisor, as well as for her guidance as the current head of the Committee on Social Theory at UK. As with each issue, this year’s edition is an extension of the team-taught, interdisciplinary course offered each spring by the Committee, which is centered on providing different perspectives on a common theme. Last year’s course, entitled “Security,” co-taught by Dr. Andy Doolen (English), Dr. Susan Roberts (Geography), Dr. Lisa Cliggett (Anthropology), and Dr. Masamichi Inoue (Modern & Classical Languages); was the guiding theme for this issue. I thank Kari Burchfield for all of her work on behalf of the Committee on Social Theory and disClosure. Finally, I would like to thank the members of this year’s Collective, all of whom had to make time during their own studies to collaborate on our CFP and review our submissions. I wish co-editors Rachael Hoy and Christina Williams luck in compiling our first digital issue, which will explore the theme of Mapping.

6

Collective Members Richard Parmer earned his BA in English and History at Presbyterian College and his MA at East Tennessee State University. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Kentucky. His work utilizes ecocriticism, gender, and sexuality as critical lenses for interpreting early American and Appalachian literatures.

Lee Bullock is a graduate student in the English Department at the University of Kentucky.

He currently works with actor network theory as a technique for reading literature. He is looking forward to upcoming research that examines mental health and incarceration.

Jason C Grant received his MA in French and Francophone Studies and his BAs in English and Linguistics from the University of Kentucky. His research focuses on the intersection of narratology and urban theory.

Rachael Hoy is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of Kentucky. Her research examines late 19th and early 20th century American literature spatially and materially, considering the forces shaping identity and the power mechanisms at work in the changing landscape. She will serve as c-editor of the forthcoming issue of disClosure on Mapping (with Christina Williams), expected spring 2014.

Malene H. Jacobsen is a second year M.A. student at the Department of Geography.

Malene's research is concerned with issues of space, migrant, refugee, border, security, and citizenship. The research is situated within feminist geopolitical literature and social theory.

Vanessa Marquez is an MA student in the Department of Geography. She studies Latino immigration in Lexington, Kentucky.

Travis Martin researches trauma and war in nineteenth and twentieth century war literature. He is also the managing editor of The Journal of Military Experience and founder of Military Experience and the Arts, a group that provides one-on-one writing mentorship to the military community.

Mary Elizabeth Schmid is currently a doctoral student in cultural anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Her dissertation research focuses on transnationalism, rurality, livelihoods and kinship in Mexico and Appalachia. She received her Bachelors of Science degree in Spanish and Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008 and worked as a bilingual migrant education outreach worker in western North Carolina before returning to graduate school in 2011.

Lacin Tutalar is a Phd Student in Geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on youth, urban art spaces (particularly music) and the politics of space. She has been involved with disClosure through her interest in political and emotional geographies and theories of space.

7 Christina Williams is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include 19th century American literature and the intersections of law and literature. She will serve as co-editor of the forthcoming issue of disClosure on Mapping.

8

Reduced, Reused, Recycled Brian Reinholdt

9

Rethink, Remove, Refuse Brian Reinholdt

10 Checked Bags: A Litany of Potentially Explosive Things -Sherrin Frances Invocation The small red duffel bag had been pulled from the X-ray machine and placed on a stainless steel table. Based on the X-Ray image, I was pretty sure the alarming item was a bag of sand about the size of a loaf of bread. This was not unusual, given that many people flew to Houston to visit the Gulf Coast or to go on weekend cruises to Cancun. They often brought back sand as a souvenir, as well as other stereotypical “Texas” gifts: bottles of tequila, cans of chili, cowboy boots, sombreros. But the sentimental value of the sand didn't interest me. My mission was to assure that it wasn't explosive sand.

I was working as a Security Officer for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The primary goal of the TSA is to search for possible explosive devices being smuggled onto a plane, and every suitcase that is checked in at the ticket counter is run through an X-Ray machine behind the scenes. We worked in teams of four. Three officers moved the bags on and off the conveyor belt and ran the X-Ray machine. The fourth person, however, traveled between the two-dimensional transparency of the X-Ray image and the real luggage, physically digging through the bags looking for anything the computer deemed suspicious. This was the most time-consuming, intimate job on the team and usually fell to the low man on the Security totem pole. This person was said to be “EDU:” Elbows Deep in Underwear. I screened checked bags for the TSA for just over a year, and my tenure at the TSA was primarily spent EDU. In that time, I saw a lot of things that blew my mind, but nothing that was actually meant to explode.

Aberration Within the first hour of my first day, I had my first X-rated alarm. I got the giggles.

I had never had a job that required me to handle used sex toys. Pamela, the woman “shadowing” me until I was fully trained, said very matter-of-factly, “Oh yeah, we get a lot of dildos.” This one was the size of my arm. I followed the official testing procedure to determine if it was an explosive dildo. It was not.

Pamela was right. The non-explosive dildo was only one in a long series of unmentionables. Later that day, a bag came through with a suspicious object that was shaped like a slice of birthday cake. Toward the bottom of the suitcase, I felt a plastic baggie with something inside. I pulled it out. It was filmy. I couldn't see what was in there, but it seemed to be the right shape. I held it up and swung it around, looking for the right lighting.

“Is it food?” Pamela shouted from around the machine.

“I'm not sure,” I said. “It might be.” It was the right shape. And the color of chocolate frosting. I squeezed the thing. It was foamy.

“Well does it smell like food?”

“Yeah,” I began to say, “I think—” and then the bag twisted to just the right angle and I could see the front of this thing.

What I was holding up in full view of most passengers in the lobby was an anatomically correct hairless black vagina. I informed Pamela that it was not, in fact, food.

She wanted to know specifically what it was.

11 “It's a toy.”

“What kind?”

“A hairless black vagina.” She had never seen such a toy and came over to my table to check it out.

“Take it out of the bag,” she said. I looked at her.

“Really?”

“Yeah, go on. We've got to see what it really is.”

“I told you what it is.”

“I've never heard of that kind of thing before. How do you know that's what it is?”

I just looked at her.

“Well what do you do with it?”

“It's for men,” I said. She called Supervisor Bob over.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before,” she asked. He looked at us both. He nodded. He gave me permission to leave it in the bag while I checked it. Thankfully, the hairless black vagina was not explosive.

I came to learn that some people packed these treasures inside layer after layer of protective shirts and pantsuits. Some proudly left them as trophies on top of their vacation attire. Some tucked them inside of their shoes. One traveler included a note that read, “Attention TSA: These are my toys. Please treat them with respect.” Another person had placed each toy in its own plastic baggie with a label that said, “Clean.” Personally, I was glad to know that. But professionally, it didn’t matter what sort of notes were included or how the traveler tried to address me. The security relationship was between me and the potentially explosive object.

And so I quickly experienced a strange flattening out of meaning when it came to luggage, a pervasive equality based on indifference. By the end of my first day, I was professional enough to handle the sex toys just as I handled the chili and sombreros.

Temptation On my second day, a duffel bag fell off the conveyor belt. It made a popping noise, then it made a hissing noise, and then an unknown liquid began to puddle around the bag. I was frightened, and I immediately called Pamela. She ordered me to maintain control of the leaking bag until Supervisor Bob arrived and they had performed adequate tests on the liquid. About an hour later, once we were relatively sure that it wasn't some sort of biohazard, I put on my latex gloves and opened the bag to find the source. My latex gloves provided only the slimmest barrier between my own skin and the offending object. It was a can of beer. I was relieved. Pamela was disappointed. We put the dripping bag into a large plastic trash bag and taped it closed with official TSA security tape.

While the novelty of the sex toys had worn off fairly quickly, an even bigger surprise had been learning that so many people traveled with food and drink in their luggage.

Tamales wrapped in banana leaves were regular alarm items. They were surrounded by cat hair covered towels that smelled like tamales. Oil-stained workpants that smelled like tamales. Crusty lotion bottles, matted hairbrushes, sweaters, all infused with the odor of hand-made tamales It wasn’t only tamales and cans of beer, though. The bags often included jars of

12 gooey, creamy stuff which were sometimes cracked and leaking into socks and underwear.

Cooked corn. Slabs of beef. Big blocks of frozen fish. Punctured bags of wasabi-covered peas rolling all over the place. It took me longer to adjust to the food than the sex toys.

At one point, management sent a memo out that threatened screeners with their jobs if they did not stop eating food from passenger bags. I must say, I was never tempted to eat the food out of anyone's bag. It left me with an uncanny sense of homemade, nostalgic, memories that had gone rancid and cold.

Vegetation Toward the end of my first week, a tree came down the belt. It was a silk ficus planted in a ceramic pot and wrapped in a garbage bag. My team turned it on its side and shoved it into the X-ray machine. The tree set off an alarm, and the X-Ray showed some brick-like objects inside the pot. Luis removed the plastic bag and began poking around the fake moss at the base of the fake tree. Everything was glued together and sealed, so it was impossible to see what was inside the pot without breaking it open.

We had the airline begin paging the passenger, and Luis began testing for explosives.

The first test set off an alarm. The second test set off an alarm. Pamela called Supervis or Bob over. Bob stood next to me at the base of the X-Ray machine and we watched Luis conduct another test. The airline employees were peeking through the partition opening. The third test set off an alarm.

Supervisor Bob decided we should alert local law enforcement, who would then decide if we needed the bomb squad. Luis maintained control of the tree while we waited.

Other officers began to mill around, wanting to know what was going on. “The tree tested positive,” one of them whispered, “there's something fishy in the pot.” Finally, a police officer arrived with a dog, and as soon as the officer loosed the dog, it began barking and jumping around the tree. There was a bona-fide crowd gathered now. I was a little nervous, but Pamela and Luis were excited. She walked over to me and Bob and said, “Hmm. Might really be something, huh? We might really have something here. Might be something.” We all nodded and watched the barking dog.

Eventually, the officer pronounced the tree non-explosive. However, we still could not identify the brick-like things in the pot. Pamela was adamant that we pursue the matter.

Supervisor Bob agreed. Almost 45 minutes had passed at this point. Finally, the passenger returned and quickly gave us permission to search the tree. Luis enthusiastically took out all the moss and then cracked the ceramic. After making a big enough hole, he peered into the pot with a flashlight. The fake tree began to lean at an unnatural angle. Luis said that the brick-shaped things were just that: bricks. They were holding the fake trunk upright. Pamela was disappointed. Luis tried to replace the moss over the hole, but most of it fell into the pot. He taped the broken pieces of ceramic to the side of the pot with official TSA security tape. We replaced the trash bag over the branches, put the cockeyed tree on the conveyor belt and apologized to the passenger for the delay. This, I learned, was usually how it went with suspicious items.

Evacuation About a month after I began checking bags, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

13 Soon after, Hurricane Rita hit further down the Gulf Coast. We were the closest major airport to both disasters, so many people evacuated to us, and many connecting flights were diverted to us. Everyone in the airport was frustrated and tense. People were stranded.

Pets and babies were howling in every corner of the lobby. The news crews crawled around looking for pathetic faces to interview. For several weeks, when I arrived for my 4 am shift, I had to walk over dozens of people stretched out on the floor trying to sleep.

Behind our partition, however, the luggage kept coming regularly and we kept tossing bags at the usual half-hearted government pace. Most of the bags were overstuffed and chaotic, a simple and tangible reflection of the reality out in the lobby. These people hardly had time to pack at all, much less fold their underwear for the trip.

One morning, a church group arrived to check in for a flight to Louisiana with over thirty cardboard boxes of relief supplies. As usual, I was EDU and was assigned the biggest, most cumbersome box. It was too big to fit through the X-ray machine, so I was told to physically examine everything in it and test anything that looked like it needed to be tested.

The box was enormous.

I cut the tape and opened the box flaps. The carton was full of hundreds of tiny baby-food jars wrapped in hundreds of pastel washcloths. Jar after jar of peas and carrots, pureed pumpkin, and mashed bananas. They were delicate. Shiny. Simple. Generous.

Heartfelt. And each one was the right density to be considered potentially explosive.

It took hours to inspect, but after I reached the bottom of the carton, the TSA was satisfied that it was nothing but baby food all the way down. I wrapped each jar back into its washcloth and retaped the box. The jars were cleared to continue on their goodwill journey to New Orleans.

Cremation Soon enough, it was springtime. A very hectic Spring Break week was ending, and at one point I had to check a small duffel bag. It was an innocuous little bag, something that could easily have been carried onto the plane, especially compared to the mammoth bags that most of these vacationing students had with them. The student bags were filled with dirty laundry and liters of souvenir liquor. The computer told me that I was looking at yet another bag of beach sand. It was squeezed in between an old pair of muddy tennis shoes and several cartons of cigarettes. The whole duffel smelled like smoke. I pulled out the bag of sand out and reported to Pamela that I had found it. I noticed some pieces of shell inside the bag and a little card. The card said, “These are the cremated remains of Jose Melendez Rodriguez.” I realized those weren't shells, but bits of bone.

“Pamela,” I called around the machine, “It's not sand.”

“Didn't you just say it was? I've already written it down.”

“No, I was wrong. Can you come over here?”

“What is it, then?” she called.

“Can you just come over here?” I could hear her complaining to Luis. Making a change in the alarm log was a hassle. I maintained control over the ashes. As she walked up, I held the bag out for her to inspect. At first she didn't notice, so I pointed the card out to her. “Good lord,” she said.

14 What ensued was a very long discussion among Supervisor Bob, his boss, and the airline supervisor about whether or not Mr. Rodriguez could fly as-is. Eventually, they determined that he was a bio-hazard. If his bag were to be punctured, his ashes could possibly enter the filtration system and ultimately get into the cabin air.

The passenger was called back to the ticket counter and informed that Mr. Rodriguez's ashes would need to be contained in a box of some sort. The passenger found a box at the newsstand next door. Unfortunately, the duffel wouldn't zip with the box inside.

Reluctantly, the passenger took out some of the cigarettes. Then more cigarettes.

Eventually, Mr. Rodriguez’s ashes had displaced all of the cigarettes, but the bag finally zipped.

Pamela crossed out “Sand” in her log and wrote “Ashes.” Luis tossed the duffel onto the conveyor belt between a baby car seat and a blue suitcase with wheels. It landed upside down. The X-Ray machine was reset and the TSA was satisfied. I couldn’t linger on the moment for long. The next bag had already been tossed onto my stainless steel table.

According to the X-Ray, a small Statue of Liberty piggy bank in the outer pocket of the suitcase was potentially explosive.

Resignation After twelve months of checking bags, I had become exceedingly cynical about the “security” that I provided. I had come to dread the distance and simple-mindedness with which I was required to function. Every time I had to open a bag, there was a rush of adrenaline that THIS would be the bag with a real explosive. THIS would be the bag that put my training to the test. But I was not authorized to evaluate the bag’s contents with regard to the passenger’s name, the type of bag he owned, or where he was going. Nor was I supposed to evaluate the alarming item in relation to anything else in the bag. I relied solely on the logic of the computer to tell me what to look at. I considered the object merely in terms of its capacity to explode.

When I began my job at the TSA, I was highly suspicious of every unusual thing because it didn’t make any sense. A refrigerator box full of ramen noodles and oranges. A ceramic rooster infested with red ants. A TV set cushioned by dozens of mismatched baby shoes. Are they really any more strange and dangerous than vodka and toiletries? Jewelry, shoes and books? Most of the items that initially struck me as such strange things to travel with eventually became the most mundane: In a series of strange things, the strangest thing to see is the common. Targeting these items is all based on the complicated algorithms of modern safety and security and, as with any algorithm, patterns inevitably developed.

Everything demanded the same level of suspicion because the computer said so. And so, perversely, when it came to this litany of strange things, the more significant a thing was to the X-Ray machine, the less significant it was to me as a security officer.

Eventually, I resigned from the TSA. But the resignation I still feel, years later, lingers. Every time I travel now, I imagine who is behind the partition. I wonder if she is as resigned as I was to do the job without any context or connection. I want to say that finding human ashes in a passenger’s bag was profound on some level, but there weren’t any levels to work with. I was surprised to find cremated human remains in a piece of luggage, but quite relieved that they were “just” ashes. In the binary system of explosive/non-explosive,

15 the ashes passed the test. They were as inert as sand, and when it came to the long line of bags still waiting to be checked, that is all I needed to know. That is all I had time to know.

And even today, lingering in the back and the front of my mind, is the notion that the strangest things among us, the most potentially explosive things, are in fact the most banal.

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Some Breaks Remain -Andrew Calis The crack appeared on the plate like the first lick of lightning, crackling across the dark.

I saw the flash of glass before I heard it split.

It doesn’t matter she said seriously, even though it was a wedding present.

While we’re on the topic of the quatrain -Andrew Calis I’m afraid I’ve run out of steam, or been derailed, trailed off on my own, or shown up after everyone left.

17 The Abandonment of Modernity: Bare Life and the Camp in Homo Sacer and Hotel Rwanda -Carolyn Owenby In the introduction to his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben identifies as a starting point Foucault’s concept of the biopolitical, of “the process by which, at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power” (3), while at the same time he regrets the fact that Foucault “never dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century” (4). Picking up where he sees Foucault as leaving off, Agamben discusses not only sovereign power and the sovereign ban, the state of exception and the bare life that it necessarily produces, but also what he calls “the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181), the camp. Over the course of the book, a political imperative surfaces: an injunction for the modern world—its subjects, its states, even its humanitarian organizations—to acknowledge the structure of exception which forms the framework of modernity, and to question this structure and its founding principles. The book draws on events of modern history, particularly those associated with Nazi Germany, “interrogat[ing] the link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from one another,” in an attempt to “bring the political out of its concealment” (4-5) and ultimately to encourage the development of a “completely new politics” (11). In this project, I will focus both on Agamben’s text and on a text depicting another major biopolitical event in modern history— Hotel Rwanda, a film about the Rwandan genocide of 1994—to explore Agamben’s claim that the state of exception has become the rule in modern nation-states, and to determine what, precisely, is at stake here.

In the realm of modern biopolitics (and therefore, Agamben argues, in the state of exception generally), the concept of citizenship assumes a position of particular importance.

Agamben states that, “One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics… is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside and what is outside” (131). The distinction between who is a citizen and who is not becomes crucial, and all sorts of criteria for determining citizenship and, more importantly, non-citizenship arise. Using Nazi Germany as an example, Agamben explains that, “the answer to the question ‘Who and what is German?’ (and also, therefore, ‘Who and what is not German?’) coincides immediately with the highest political task” (130). Those who are deemed non-citizens, non-Germans here, are then excluded from the law, abandoned by it and rendered politically irrelevant. The same happens in Hotel Rwanda, where a group called the Interhamwe decides to distinguish citizenship on the basis of the categories of Hutu and Tutsi. The film reveals that these categories, established years prior by the Belgians, are essentially arbitrary: a foreign cameraman learns that the Belgians determined a person to be Hutu or Tutsi based on the length of their noses, but when he sees two women, one Hutu and one Tutsi, he says, “They could be twins” (14:19). In another instance in the film, Pat Archer, an aid worker for the Red Cross, tells protagonists Paul and Tatiana Rusesabagina that she was forced to watch as Tutsi orphans were killed. She recalls that, “There was one girl. She had her little sister wrapped on her back. As they’re about to chop her, she cried out to me, ‘please don’t let them kill me! I—I promise I won’t be Tutsi anymore!’” (47:28).

The factors that determine citizenship here are outside of the individual’s control. Agamben insists that in the state of exception there is, “a new decision concerning the threshold

18 beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant… and can as such be eliminated without punishment. Every society sets this limit; every society—even the most modern—decides who its ‘sacred men’ will be” (139).

In the film, the label “Tutsi” is enough to revoke a person’s citizenship, but at the same time, being a Hutu does not guarantee it, either. Agamben explains that, in the state of exception, “citizenship was something of which one had to prove oneself worthy and which could therefore always be called into question” (132). Throughout the film, Paul, himself a Hutu, must continually resist being reduced to his bare life and stripped of his citizenship, and the Hotel des Mille Collines here becomes a powerful symbol. Paul insists that, “This is not a refugee camp,” and he continues to call it a hotel and the people it shelters “guests,” even after 800 refugees have arrived (38:45, 60:22). Paul, who for the first half of the film is always dressed as a businessman, knows precisely what is at stake in maintaining himself as a citizen, a politically relevant person. Speaking to the hotel staff and to the refugees, he says, “Most importantly, this cannot be a refugee camp. The Interhamwe believe that the Mille Collines is a four-star Sabena hotel. That is the only thing keeping us alive” (65:43). Even for Paul, in the state of exception there is always a sense of danger: when one’s citizenship may be put up for debate and repealed at any moment, in some sense the law has already abandoned him. He has no appeal to the law if at once he is proclaimed not to belong.

Once a person is denied this belonging, Agamben insists, he fully represents the figure of the homo sacer. There are two attributes that together characterize the homo sacer: “the unpunishability of his killing and the ban on his sacrifice” (73, original emphasis). That is to say, any person who kills the homo sacer is not subject to punishment; this killing is not considered the crime of homicide. Simultaneously, the homo sacer is not sacrificed or killed through a legally prescribed procedure, such as the death penalty. The film’s Tutsi characters and those, like Paul, associated with them, are a clear example of homo sacer: none have been sentenced to death through legal means, but when the Interhamwe kill them, there is no recourse or punishment. In an early scene in the film, Paul, his wife Tatiana, and her brother Thomas look on as the army accuses their neighbor is of being a Tutsi spy, beats him, and takes him away. Tatiana, horrified, insists that, “We must do something… Call someone.” Paul responds simply: “There is nothing we can do” (10:55). During the genocide in Rwanda, as Paul recognizes here, the people were utterly abandoned by the law.

Paul and others taking refuge at the Hotel des Mille Collines do make calls of appeal later in the film—to foreigners and in Paul’s case also to General Bizimungu of the Rwandan army—and some help does come from these calls: select families are granted exit visas, the attacks on the Mille Collines are postponed. However, these events are always temporary, exclusionary; they come with a price and still are wrought with danger. There is no guarantee of safety for the homo sacer. When the exit visas are announced in the film by Colonel Oliver of the United Nations, the viewer feels a sense of relief, but there is simultaneously a sense of danger and hopelessness, for there are still more families left without aid. Even those families fortunate enough to be granted exit visas are not protected within the state of exception: the U.N. convoy bringing them to safety is driven into an ambush of Hutu militiamen.

The homo sacer stands outside the law, and is abandoned by it. Agamben calls the homo sacer “simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law” (82). The homo sacer, external to the law, still, however, remains intimately

19 bound to it. He does not simply have no relation to the law; he relates to the law precisely through his exclusion from it. Agamben explains this as the sovereign ban of the homo sacer from the sovereign sphere—in other words, as the state of exception. He says, “The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion)” (181). Being excluded from the law, the homo sacer cannot appeal to the law; it cannot protect him. His banishment from the sphere of law reduces him—from a politically relevant person, a citizen protected by the law and within the law—to his bare life alone. As such, as a creature possessing bare life only, the homo sacer may become subject to death or punishment at the hands of anyone. Agamben explains that in the state of exception, “human life is politicized only through an abandonment to an unconditional power of death” (90). Using the example of the Jew in Nazi Germany, Agamben identifies, “a flagrant case of homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing therefore constitutes… neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a mere ‘capacity to be killed’” (114). The Jew in Nazi Germany demonstrates exactly those two traits Agamben has told us are always present in the homo sacer: his ability to be killed without being the vict im of homicide, and his inability to be sacrificed. Agamben continues, saying, “The truth… is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice,’ which is to say, as bare life” (114). In the same way, the exterminating Hutus, particularly the group called the Interhamwe, call the Tutsis “cockroaches” (00:52).

The homo sacer no longer signifies anything beyond his bare life; he has no political relevance but for his mere existence outside the law, banished from the law, abandoned by it.

Agamben explains, “The life caught in the sovereign ban is the life that is originarily sacred… and, in this sense, the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty. The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely both life’s subjection to a power over death and life’s irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment” (83).

Being abandoned by the law, and as such being reduced to bare life, does not necessarily indicate that the abandoned sovereign subject, the homo sacer, will be tortured, murdered, or the like (although this is not out of the realm of possibility, and indeed there alwa ys seems to be a sense of danger haunting the homo sacer). It simply means the law no longer applies; the homo sacer cannot appeal to anyone for help, not to the law, the sovereign, or the police.

Hotel Rwanda demonstrates what is at stake for the individual when he is reduced to bare life and made into homo sacer. It depicts the danger and the horrors that can exist in a state of exception, when law withdraws and abandons the individual. What Agamben’s book further shows is how the structure of the state of exception is already at work in the dominant structure of modernity, and how the modern subject, despite whatever appearances may seem otherwise, is always already homo sacer. Agamben makes several assertions about declarations of rights, democracy, and humanitarian organizations that, at first, seem contradictory or paradoxical. However, it is through these assertions that the reader can decipher the political imperative of the book. To begin, Agamben discusses declarations of rights, declarations that the modern subject often takes for granted as liberating, empowering, and protecting the individual. Agamben makes it clear that this

20 understanding of these declarations entirely miss what is going on here. He asserts that, “it is time to stop regarding declarations of rights as proclamations of eternal, metajuridical values binding the legislator (in fact, without much success) to respect eternal ethical principles, and to begin to consider them according to their real historical function in the modern nation-state. Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state” (127).

Declarations of rights, Agamben contends, rather than freeing individuals from state power and control, more and more write them into the law. Perhaps the best example of this comes in Agamben’s discussion of the right of habeas corpus. Intended to “assure the presence of the accused at the trial and, therefore, to keep the accused from avoiding judgment” (125), habeas corpus also has another, more subversive effect. Because it writes the body into the law—despite its ostensible purpose of protecting that body—the institution of habeas corpus makes the body subject to the law more than it was before. Agamben says that habeas corpus “turns—in its new and definitive form—into grounds for the sheriff to detain and exhibit the body of the accused” (125).

Using this same logic, Agamben turns to a discussion of democratic and totalitarian states, revealing what to the modern subject seems to be an unsettling solidarity between the two. He speaks of the rapidity “with which this century’s totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies” (122). The most unsettling aspect of this scenario is the fact that the switch happens “almost without interruption,” and so the modern subject must question exactly how different democracy and totalitarianism are, really. The reason for this “otherwise incomprehensible rapidity” (122) is precisely what Agamben explained concerning declarations of rights: the institution of ‘rights’ in democratic states also inscribes the subject more and more within the law and the state’s power. Agamben explains that, “the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order” (121). Democratic states, then, while advertising themselves as different from their totalitarian counterparts, as granting freedom to their citizens, really operate precisely like the totalitarian states do— capturing, albeit covertly, the lives and bodies of the individuals within their power.

Revealing another perhaps shocking solidarity in the modern world, Agamben moves on to take issue with the structure of humanitarian organizations. Where the modern subject ordinarily conceives of humanitarian organizations as in opposition to oppressive state power, Agamben reveals a secret complicity. He says that these organizations, “can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight” (133). Because humanitarian organizations refuse to take political actions, because they simply cater to the bare life (and not the political existence) of the individual—clothing and feeding people— Agamben insists that they operate “in perfect symmetry with state power” (133), perpetuating the structure of the state of exception instead of questioning and fighting it. In Hotel Rwanda, the character of Colonel Oliver demonstrates this problem over and over again. When a U.N. convoy is attacked, an Interhamwe Hutu yells at Colonel Oliver, “Look, I told you, you’ve got cockroaches in your truck!” The colonel responds, saying, “No, no, no. They’re political refugees under U.N. sanction” (92:21). What the colonel does not

21 realize is that here, still within the confines of Rwanda and in the state of exception, they are nothing more than bare life, more cockroaches than they are political refugees, in that they can simply be exterminated. At another point in the film, Colonel Oliver tells a journalist, “We’re here as peace keepers, not peace makers. My orders are not to intervene” (37:53).

Even when the Interhamwe have killed several of the U.N.’s own soldiers, the men who guard the gate of the Mille Collines are not allowed to shoot. Agamben, in response to this sort of ineffectual aid given by humanitarian organizations (indeed, why bother to feed them if they will die by machete in a day or two?), makes a statement that indicates the political imperative here. He says, “A humanitarianism separated from politics cannot fail to reproduce the isolation of sacred life at the basis of sovereignty, and the camp—which is to say, the pure space of exception—is the biopolitical paradigm that it cannot master” (134).

Separating out bare life, no matter for what purpose, creates and perpetuates the state of exception, the camp; in order to affect change, modern subjects must question the fundamental structure of these humanitarian organizations, of democracies and totalitarianisms. In order to master this biopolitical paradigm of the camp, which is also the biopolitical paradigm of modernity, bare life can no longer be isolated.

Agamben ultimately argues, as the title of his book’s third and final section indicates, that “The Camp [is the] Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern.” Agamben explains—and texts like the film Hotel Rwanda demonstrate—precisely what is at stake in the state of exception, in the camp: the individual is reduced to his bare life, becoming homo sacer, and he is abandoned by the law; in this state, he is left vulnerable, without appeal, to the most horrifying violations and to the most gruesome death. The supposedly liberating and protecting institutions of democracy and humanitarian organizations are ineffectual (in the film: the U.N.’s inability to protect the refugees, the refusal of military aid by the world’s leading Western democracies—the U.S., Britain, France), and they operate in symmetry and ultimately in complicity with oppressive totalitarian state powers. The film highlights how horrifying it is that modern subjects, particularly in the West, witness such atrocities, and do not act, through the words of the American photographer: “I think, if people see this footage [of the Rwandan massacres], they’ll say, ‘oh my God, that’s horrible,’ and then go on eating their dinners” (44:05). At the same, however, time the film’s relatively happy ending allows the viewer to do precisely that. Agamben’s book, however, threatens its readers with the fate of the homo sacer, charges them to “learn to recognize” the “metamorphoses and disguises” (123) of the camp in the modern world, and also warns us that “There is no return from the camps to classical politics” (188). Homo Sacer, then, is a text which forces its readers to rethink what they understand as political, free, democratic, etc., and to try—and it is imperative that they do—to find a new political relation, one which does not operate as a state of exception, and which does not, most importantly, produce the figure of homo sacer. As he asserts in his book’s introduction, “until a completely new politics – that is, a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of bare life – is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the ‘beautiful day’ of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it” (11).

22 Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans: Daniel Heller-Roazen.

Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998.199 pp.

Hotel Rwanda. Dir. Terry George. Miracle Pictures/Seamus, 2005. Film.

23

Actual as opposed to possible Peggy Coots

24 Security of the Nation: Why Do We Need ‘Mothers of Martyrs1’ in Turkey?

-Esra Gedik Introduction: Discussing and defining major political issues in Turkey through the lens of national security has inevitably brought the Kurdish Question, which has always been perceived as a “security” issue created by an “internal enemy” and in the past 30 years has also been perceived as a “terrorism” problem. There has been an armed conflict between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Turkish armed forces (TAF) for over 30 years. The armed conflict has inflicted heavy material and moral damages on the region, on Kurds in particular, and on the entire society in Turkey in general. It is obvious that the conflict has caused human loses. Those who fulfilled their military service in the region and public officials who served in the security sector have died in the conflict. Therefore, the government, media, Kurdish and Turkish politicians, intellectuals, and non-governmental entities have started to focus more on mothers, both mothers of soldiers and mothers of PKK members, since the arrest of Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, in 1999. 2 In Turkey, women, especially mothers, became a “symbol of the struggle against the PKK.” Before, they were only “ordinary” housewives, but with martyrdom they have become “mothers of the nation,” known to everyone and respected by statesmen and commanders.

Motherhood has been used not only as a strategy for deepening nationalist discourse, but also as a strategy for countering the issue of Kurdish nationalism based on national security.

With the trial of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, the "relatives of martyrs" (şehit yakınları), as they came to be known, began to organize themselves and used anti-PKK sentiments at every opportunity, most notably in the courtroom where some of the families sat while Öcalan was being tried. They internalize the nationalist and militarist structure with conventional subjectification as mothers in Turkey. Mothers’ demonstrations become politically powerful because the women are performing their culturally appropriate role as “good” mothers and bearing witness to their own maternal suffering.

As Burcu Şentürk (2009: 93) says, “In the political context of conflict between the PKK and TAF in Turkey, the soldiers of the TAF are represented as the defenders of the honor of the Turkish nation against the ‘traitors.’” Besides, the mothers of these soldiers are portrayed as the mothers of the Turkish nation who raised loyal citizens for it. Through their motherhoods, these women are expected to support their sons’ mission as the protectors of the “motherland.” Thus, they become mothers as objects of wars who contribute to the continuity of warlike/militarist activities. These mothers are instrumentalized for dealing with the Kurdish problems through national security. The instrumental use of gendered stereotypes in the name of national security becomes most evident in the intimate interrelationship of nationalism and mothers of martyrs.

In this context, I want to evaluate how expressions of grief of mothers who lost their soldier sons in armed conflict in Turkey are used for discourse about the security of the 1

Mother of Martyr is a concept that is used to identify mothers of soldiers who died in the armed conflict in the East and Southeast of Turkey.

2 For the scope of this article, I will only discuss mothers of soldiers in Turkish army forces.

25 nation in Turkey since relations of mothers and sons in the shadow of war concerns the public domain and mothers’ role in the security of the nation. My main argument is that although these women lost their loved ones in an armed conflict because of their “new status” as “mothers of martyrs,” they do not question the conflict process but welcome the nationalist discourse of martyrdom based on national security in Turkey. I argue that one of the reasons why mothers of martyrs are needed is that these women I conducted interviews with were considered themselves, and their dead sons, as sanctified, and these women are placated by martyrdom discourse constructed by religion and nationalism in Turkey.

Secondly, many other actors having impact on making national security policies in Turk ey use mothers of martyrs’ grief and their willingness for revenge for the death of their loved ones. In other words, as their sons died for the nation, the big family, they are now accepted as the sons of the nation and these mothers are considered mothers of the nation. Thus, the things done in the armed conflict for the sake of national security and the peace negotiation process, in one way, are justified since it is said that we, as a nation, owe this to these mothers who lost their loved ones for our own security.

Although the subject of research is related “mothers of martyrs,” the subject, itself, is related with nationalism, and religion. Below, I will discuss relation between nationalism and religion in the context of martyrdom.

Methodological Approach: This study uses a feminist methodological approach, a feminist standpoint perspective. The primary methodological tool of the feminist standpoint is the feminist evaluation of women’s own experiences. In a society in which women are considered secondary and oppressed, experiences of women are affected by patriarchy. Hence, we cannot examine these experiences that are constructed and affected by patriarchy by using traditional methodological ways. Many feminists argue that the true voice of women, the women's experience, has been embedded in a traditionally "male" work. As the field of social research has, at least until recently, been dominated by males, the equation linking "male research" with objectivity and social distance is an obvious one. In fact, many feminist scholars argue that the very instruments designed as "objective" do nothing more than reinforce a male dominated worldview which fetishizes the rational, measurable, neutral and objective. Feminist scholars feel that the dominant paradigms contain a pervasive male bias characterized by objectivity, scientific "neutrality" and a hierarchical, distanced, essentially authoritative relationship between the "Researcher/Expert" and "His" subjects. Researchers who rely exclusively or even very strongly on objective measures are felt to be identified with this predominantly "male" mode of analysis. Such modes of analysis, it is felt, necessarily inhibit an understanding of women's experiences.

As a response, a feminist orientation to research grounds its focus on women's experiences, using these experiences as an indicator of the "reality" against which hypotheses are tested (Harding, 1986:6-7). With the feminist methodology, it is intended to reach the knowledge which is free from impact of patriarchy. According to Beverly Skeggs (1994: 77), feminist research is distinct from non-feminist research because it “begins from the premise that the nature of reality in western society is unequal and hierarchical.” In a similar way, Ramazanoğlu and Holland (2002: 2-3) note that “feminist research is imbued with particular theoretical, political and ethical concerns that make these varied approaches to social

26 research distinctive.”

Feminist perspectives suggest taking a broader view. This research aims “to correct both the invisibility and distortion of female experience in ways relevant to ending women’s unequal social position. This entails the substantive task of making gender a fundamental category for our understanding of the social order, ‘to see the world from women’s place in it’” (Lather 1988: 571). Hence, what distinguishes this study as a feminist study is t hat feminist methods do not lie in the choice of research questions alone, but are tied to questions about how data will be collected, presented and used. As a feminist study, there is “the acknowledgment of the reciprocal sharing of knowledge and experience between the researcher and the researched” (Shields and Dervin 1993: 67). With this way, this study plans to undo the conventional dichotomies and hierarchies in the research situation. The process entails not only speaking with and listening to women, but also demands that the researcher share the research project with participants, involving them at each phase of the research and including their input in the interpretation of results. As a result, the features of feminist research, including placing value on women’s experiences and subjectivities, the critical analysis of gender, reflexivity, and the emancipatory motivation, come together in interesting ways in the study of women’s experiences.

Aiming to find answers to suggested research questions, I plan to conduct in-depth interviews. I have decided to use in-depth interviewing as the main method to collect data for the study since a qualitative is adopted for the investigation. The central concern of the interpretative research understands women’s experiences. Shulamit Reinharz (1992: 19) explains how interviewing is a way feminist researchers have attempted to access women’s hidden knowledge: Interviewing offers researchers access to people’s ideas, thoughts, and memories in their own words rather than in the words of the researcher. This asset is particularly important for the study of women because in this way learning from women is an antidote to centuries of ignoring women’s ideas altogether or having men speaks for women. (cited in Hesse-Biber, 2006: 118) Hence, this study uses in-depth interview methods to learn women’s own experiences from the women’s side, and by this way I plan feminist research not on women, but for women.

At the beginning, I chose mothers from Şehit Aileleri Federasyonu (ŞAF)3 who may talk about their experiences and the experiences of others. For that reason, I went to the organization once or twice in three weeks. I tried to be a participant observer for a while.

Then, I went to cemetery of martyrs in Cebeci/Ankara in Turkey on Fridays to find mothers of martyrs since those mothers’ “new home in which they spend most of their time, has become cemetery.” In a final step, I relied on a snowball method to talk to mothers in Merzifon/Amasya, Havza/Samsun and Suluova/Amasya in Turkey. I interviewed nineteen people, fourteen mothers of martyrs, three fathers of martyrs and two wives of martyrs.

Because of the socio-demographic structure of the region, although I did not plan to compare Sunni mothers and Alevi mothers, the interpretations of the narratives are based on

3

Association of Families of Martyrs.

27 the differences of Sunni Islam4 and Alevi thought.5 The narratives of these people proved to be an interesting case to show how personal narratives interact, overlap or contest with the hegemonic nationalist discourses about them and war.

Mothers, Nations and Mothers of Nation: The literature review about mothers and motherhood reveals many different discussion topics, including working mothers, “bad” mothers, black mothers or lesbian mothers and so on. What is striking about the discussion to date is the absence of an explicit definition of motherhood in most, if not all, of the literature. Aspects of motherhood and qualities of mothers, actual and imagined, are described, but the concept itself is not subjected to a rigorous interrogation. Motherhood, enveloped with beliefs and values, is institutionalized not only in marriage and family arrangements and practices, but also in law and social policy and through representations in literature, film, and other cultural forms (Kaplan, 1992). For Walker (1995: 418), the international debate has exposed shortcomings in commonsense views of motherhood as “naturally” the role of women. More noteworthy, there is a degree of agreement on the content of motherhood: it is to nurture, to preserve, to protect.

All nationalist projects involve a remaking of femininities and masculinities, with an ambivalent set of opportunities and restrictions for both. Questions of woman are central to all debates in a nation-building process. In that context, nationalist movements across the world employ mothers as a symbol of the nation (Mayer, 2000). Hence, the building of a nation involves different interventions and inscription upon female identity, whether through the assignment of forged roles such as mother, all serving one way or another the There are four Sunni sects in Islam: Hanafi, Shafi´i, Maliki, and Hanbali. The Hanafi sect is the l argest of the four, and its followers comprise 45% of the enti re Islamic world. It takes its name from its founder, Ebu Hanife (Numan bin Sabit) (699-767), and is widespread in Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Indi a, and Pakistan. Sunni Islam itself takesits name from its identification with the importance of the Sunna (the examples from the hadiths). There are many small religious differences, and some large differences, Sunni Islam and the other orientations. For ins tance, Sunni Islam rev eres Ali, but does not hold him up as the only true continuation of the tradition from Muhammad, and has no emphasis on his bringing a divine light from the Prophet (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, 2006: 31).

4

Alevism can be primarily understood as a syncretistic heterodox identity, as along with Islam, Zoroas trianism (Iranian), Shamanism, Maniheism, Christiani ty, and so on. It has many more elements of pre-Islamic Turkish and Iranian religions than Sunni Islam does. For example, prayer (namaz), the fast in Ramadan, ti thing (zakat), and the hajj are alien practices in most Alevi communi ties. Instead, they have their own religious ceremonies (cem), officiated by holy men (dede) belonging to a heredi tary pries tly caste. As among other schismatic Shi'i groups, 'Ali and the Safavid Shah Isma'il are deified, or at leas t idolized. Instead of adherence to the Shari'a, Alevis profess obedience to a s et of simple moral norms; they claim to live according to the inner (batin) meaning of religion rather than its external (zahir) demands.

There is a noticeable conflict among Alevi groups in that it is “represented” differently based on the ideological dominations. The fi rst group focuses on the religious side of Alevism, defining it as an Islamic sect and a part of Islam. This group uses the term “Alevi Islam,” and mos t of them try to pres ent Alevism as true Islam, or Turkish Islam. The Second group di rects Alevis to abandon their religious identity. This group puts emphasize on sources other than Islam, Iranian of Turkish basis (Şahin, http://www.alevihaber.org/v2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=263&Itemid=39).

5

28 formation of a sense of nationhood.

There are several reasons why women become such a target toward the building of a new nation. The significance of mothers is "the main vehicle through which people first form their identities and learn their place in society" (Forcey, 1994: 357). Women are mothers, are life givers, and are mothers of next generations, mothers of the nation. Nira Yuval Davis and Flora Anthias (2003) have suggested that women’s relation to nation has taken at least five major forms. Women serve as biological reproducers of national groups (the biological mothers of the people); as symbols and signifiers of national difference in male discourse; as transmitters and producers of the cultural narratives themselves (mothers, teachers, writers…); as reproducers of the boundaries of the nation; as active participants in national movements: in armies, congress, community organizations. In that point, Joanne Nagel expresses, Nation is a kind of family where man, as a head of family, and woman, as a mother, play their natural roles. Women have a crucial place as mothers of nation while they are dominated by nationalist movements and politics.

(Cited in Şerifsoy, 2004: 171) According to Natarajan, women shape national imagination (Cited in Saigol, 2004: 232). For her, “woman, with her status of being mother, evoke unity and integrity of a nation.” She adds, How does figure of mother unify the nation? “Mother” reminds common cultural roots (provides a shelter and food). Like soil, mother is eternal, patient, and indispensable. National demands are supported with solid demands. (Cited in Saigol, 2004: 233) Since a role of mothers is to raise new generations and implant cultural values, motherhood has been mostly used in order to indicate internal and dominated cultural territory for new born nations. Gaitskell and Unterhal (Cited in Saigol, 2004:233) point out in their study about African nationalism that the idea of motherhood has changed during the 20th century and added that motherhood is not only a fixed biological concept but also a flexible expression. For Yuval-Davis and Anthias, “women do not only teach and transfer the national cultural and ideological traditions, but also mostly, they form them.” Mothers play an important role in re-creating the differences between ethnic-national groups. They convey culture and they are privileged signifiers showing national differences. Mothering as ultimately attributed to the whole nation’s sake stems from the duties of mothers to the family, society and nation. In that sense, mothers are envisaged as women who carry the genuineness of the nation in a private sphere. Badinter claims, 19 th century ideologues that are completely sure about their certainty have benefited from theory of mother’s being “naturally altruistic” in expanding mother’s responsibilities even more. (…) Women are told that they are the watchdog of ethnic and religion and that the destiny of family and society depend on their way of rearing children. (Cited in Uluğtekin, 2002: 58) Therefore, in or out of war, mothers play socially attributed roles such as being the mothers raising or giving birth to sons who will be soldiers (martyrs) for the sake of their country and provide health, sexual, nutrition and nursing services to the men in war (Enloe, 1990). Motherhood is attributed to the whole nation’s sake from the duties of mothers to the

29 society and nation. In that sense, the experiences and lives of mothers are shadowed with a manipulated sacrifice since what is important is to rear “good” children for the system.

While women are lauded as “mothers of nation,” they are pacified and limited within this role. These kinds of roles, on one hand, points out that mothers are burdened with the roles by patriarchal society. On the other hand, with motherhood, a woman is expected to support the man, who is “protector” for both them and the country where they live in; mothers as objects of wars contribute to continuity of warlike/militarist activities. This stresses that man is depicted as the warrior-hero or citizen-warrior, entrusted with the almost sacred duty to defend the homeland.

For example, Palestinians, like in Turkey, commonly refer to those who have died for national cause as martyrs and to mothers who have lost children as mothers of martyrs. The national movement endowed the “mothers of martyrs” with the status of national icons (Peteet, 1997: 105). As far as concerns Peteet (1997), in Palestine like in Turkey, it is assumed as a national duty to bear many children to replenish wartime losses. In doing so, they locate their reproductive abilities in a national political context. While nationalist discourse celebrates them as icons of the nation, they are celebrating their reproductive potential.

Although the mother of the martyr may not have been active politically in the sense of belonging to an organization, nationalist discourse transforms her maternal sacrifice into a supreme political act. Mothers of martyrs are invited to attend resistance celebrations with the leadership, a public, symbolic display of a newly acquired stature in the community (Peteet, 1997: 122).

On the other hand, Marco says that mothers of Plazo de Mayo are not only mothers of their own sons, but also they have become mothers of the whole society and it was indicated that they represent the idea of “social motherhood,” which rebelled against political parties and military government in Argentina. Marco quoted from Schmukler: “After this event in Argentina, we can not articulate motherhood with political passiveness and succumbing anymore” (Cited in Olgun and Yüksel, 1991: 57). In Argentina, mothers have constructed their own agency that is different from dominant structures and discourses in the country in that era. Like in Turkey, in Argentina, the natural role for woman is being wife and mother (Fisher, 1995:5). However, they resisted the dictatorship and transformed women’s view of Argentinian society and their agency in it. The structure in Argentina was military rule while mothers of disappeared occurred. However, it was the condition that constructed those mothers; those women were brought together by the disappearances. It was a force of opposition to the military rule. Women became more conscious of the dimensions of the repression and this made them more determined. Mothers forced to modify their traditional role as mothers and changed their perceptions of their roles within the society. They were challenging the traditional ideology of motherhood, an ideology most commonly found in the moral discourse of the military (Fisher, 1995; Marga ret, 2004; Femenia, 1987).

In other words, what I try to show is that motherhood is an ideological status that is defined by different power struggles. Although mostly being a mother is accepted as a significant role of a woman and respected, as is seen in the example, not every mother is accepted in a respectful way—only as long as a woman’s motherhood stays within their (nationalism, religion, the state or the army) definitions of mother. An example from Turkey

30 for that discussion can be Saturday Mothers. Since May 1995 relatives of those who have "disappeared" in police custody hold a weekly vigil in Istanbul (Cited in http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/EUR44/017/1998). The Saturday mothers were asking about their beloveds, who went missing under detention, and calling on the government to take legal action against those responsible. However, although they are mothers, their motherhood did not prevent the police from harassing them.

Briefly, an interdisciplinary range of recent feminist studies has diluted and held up for questioning the conflation of motherhood with peace, sacrifice and nurturing (Di Leonardo, 1985; Ruddick, 1989). According to Ruddick (1989), motherhood has a soci alpolitical significance, since from its practice peace-aspiring patterns of thinking and awareness have to emerge. This notion has been severely criticized by other feminist scholars, who see womanhood and motherhood as socially constructed, having no predetermined values, attitudes, or habits. Therefore, patriarchal system’s positioning of women, especially mothers, within war is based in discourse on essential differences between woman and man due to their nature. Man is the creator of civilization and woman is the element of the continuity of generations. In this discourse, male identity is equal to “culture, political, wisdom, justice, public, power, universality and freedom”; female identity is equal to “nature, personal, emotional, private, morality, obedient” (Pateman, 2004: 124). There are various explanations about why theories of nationalism overlook the gender side. With reference to motherhood, women are described as the passive object of men’s sacrifice, thus depriving women of their agency as historical subjects in charge of their own destiny.

Mothers in Argentina have been able to challenge the historical narratives of the state and construct competing ones.

In that context, nationalist narratives of mothers of martyrs slide easily from the iconography of nation as woman to the construction of woman as nation, figuring women as motherland, the fecund body of the nation. This narrative is translated into moral imperative, requiring women both to represent the nation through moral virtue and social norms, and to reproduce the national group in biological as well as cultural terms. These images honor the women keeping Turkish national culture alive while their men were resisting foreign invasion during war. Not only have mothers of martyrs been used as a symbol of the nation’s security, but in their image, contemporary Turkish women are particularly targeted as strategic to the conservative battle to preserve the nation and its security. Women became a part of this discourse, not only as wives of military men, but also as mothers of the military nation, who themselves gave birth to warriors. As mothers and wives, they were responsible for “reproducing” and “supporting” the nation’s military force.

Situation in Turkey, Relation between Nationalism and Religion: In this study, I apply the territorial nationalism that can explain Turkish nationalism when it is considered in relation between national security and martyr and examine how mothers of soldiers are applied for the justification of the conflict process in East and South East of Turkey. It is worthwhile exploring a little further the linkages between Turkish nationalism and one of its characteristics: territory which can define relationship between martyrdom and nation in the case of Turkish nationalism. There is more to link nationalism to territory than just the changing configurations of the world political map: territory plays a central role both in nationalist identity and in nationalist strategy. The use of territoriality

31 gives a nation an absolutist and historically continuous presence. In general, a specific geographical area becomes associated with a particular collectivity, in the eyes of its members. This relationship between people and land is the product of continual mythmaking. In this way, a particular territory is historicized. They become essential elements of the community’s history, and the land becomes a historic homeland, “our land” (Smith, 1986: ch 8). Our land is where we can realize ourselves and our destiny/existence depends on it. That creates a special bond of holiness between the community and its homeland, as well as the piety and awe which surrounds the tombs of warriors, martyrs, laid to rest in the land of their people. Territorial heritages provide the patterns within which elites operate in order to mobilize large numbers. In other words, the ideal of self-renewal and the vision of collective destiny are built upon the territory and justify all the sacrifices that citizens may be asked to make. Nationalism had to inculcate a profound, keen identification with motherland as a sacred and inviolable ancestral homeland, the only guarantor of its history and destiny.

In all these cases, large numbers of people have been mobilized and martyred in the defense of lands. Where these lands are by tradition sanctified, the site of sacred acts and memories can be evoked, and even larger numbers of people can be mobilized for battle and death.

In Turkish nationalism, a crucial role is played by territoriality. In that sense, if we admit that the nation-state is an "invention" of the late 18th and the 19th centuries, we can trace how these new states no longer legitimized by divine right sought, and finally instituted, a new basis for their existence. One of the ways to acquire legitimation was to claim that the same people had inhabited the same territory for hundreds of years, being united by bonds of blood, culture, tradition, language, religion, and the like. In the heyday of nationalism historical and philological departments were often established or expanded so as to lend their services to the proving of such assertions. In that sense, the basis of the new republic was to be found in loyalty both to the homeland Anatolia and to the Turkish nation that inhabited it. All citizens of the Turkish state were deemed constitutionally Turks, and this was the broader, political meaning applied to the term “Turk.” Remaining legal barriers between the different communities were eliminated and great efforts were made to instill a sense of patriotism in all members of the population. Conceptualization of Turkish history as a history of high civilization among Turks also provides “an organic unity” (Berktay, 1990: 63). This fabricated glorious territory was a panacea for Turkish pride. Decades of indoctrination and a heavy dose of nationalist education created a deep sense of pride in being a Turk. This pride links the individual attachment to national identity. This political affirmation of the pride may stretch from the language of the group becoming an official language to make people believe the importance of sacrificing for the sake of the territory: nation.

Broadly speaking, this involved two processes; the national re-education of the young, and the inculcation of a spirit of self-sacrifice. The knowledge and the love of the homeland became therefore an integral part of a national programme of mass education, and it drew on the prior attachments of the people to their nation. As far as education was concerned, this meant a mass standardization of outlook, values, knowledge and skills in a national framework around the trinity of literature, history and geography. As Smith (1986: 243) points out, these were pre-eminent disciplines for imbuing the young with a national outlook and feeling, for they revealed the inner rhythms of the nation and its profound roots

32 in the past. As Altınay (2004: 126) examines in her work, the textbooks used throughout the 1970s and the early 1980s make similar claims: “Turks have formed states in all hi storical epochs. Turkey has won many legendary victories as the greatest military nation of the world.” For early 1990s, the textbooks include passages that define “love for homeland” as the greatest passion of Turks (Milli Güvenlik Bilgisi, 1990: 262) and “heroism” as a spirit that is a hereditary. In Turkey, education and educators have been giving a nationalizing and militarizing role from the early years of nation building. Students throughout Republican History have been told that they are members of a “heroic” race and they should prove this by being good soldiers. Such re-education was not an end in itself. It served to prepare the spirit of the young for a life of service to the nation, and if necessary, of heroic martyrdom.

Under this framework, we should deal with another unique character of Turkish nationalism: its relation with religion. As it is indicated at the beginning, nationalist movements use all or some of the proto-nationalist elements during the nation building process. Nationalism will be successful on the basis of how it actuates those elements such as religion, culture, and language on the way of nation-state building processes. One of these elements is religion. The role of religion in politics has received an enormous amount of scholarly attention, and it is not the purpose of this study to review that literature. However, it is seen that for the true nationalist hero is a martyr, sacrificing his life for his nation. Love of sacred homeland inspires the martyr’s death as it is seen above. For centuries to now, official representatives honor those who died for another sacred cause: the nation.

Consequently, the nation state is precious and holy, to worth dying for the sake of as much as God. The social psychology of martyrdom may be viewed as the replacement of a religious ideal by the secular nationalism. But the idea of martyr gives the ideal; the soldier kills or may be killed for the cause. Thus, to be willing to “die for the cause” or to serve for the higher ideal becomes the pledge statement of commitment. For that reason, it will be useful to examine the role and impacts of religion in Turkish nationalism and political culture since religion is an effective element to produce a meaningful world between mothers who have little or no common characteristic besides martyrdom of their sons.

For Schnapper, nation is a political project aiming to establish a new community (umma). This community is a community of citizens. In order to establish this kind of community, secularism is needed symbolizing that “especially social network should be national, I mean, political rather than religious.” However, neither nation was able to destroy traditions nor secularism could provide state’s impartiality about religion, such that “holiness delivers its meaning from religion to nation”, “nation and republic was transformed as a civil religion with its litany, temple and saints”. (Cited in Kalaycı, 1998: 161) Turkey emerged out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over three continents. In this content, the Turkish nation state was built upon a range of potentially opposing elements, tradition and modernization, secularism and religion, nationalism and ethnicity, strategic location and neighborhood disputes, democracy and military political action. Since 1923, during social-political and cultural transformation, religion was the most confused subject we faced. From empire to republic, during the building process of a Turk nation-state, the most comprehensive intervention was made to religion. As far as I

33 understood from Atay (1998: 100), by this way, ruling elites were not attempting to erase religion from the country. What they wanted to do was not to refuse the religion. On the contrary, for Tapper and Tapper, they wanted to examine (or try to examine) religion in a new way and they wanted to re-define it (Atay, ibid, 100). Among newly occurred (or established) nation state’s borders, it was aimed to develop a “religion” which was linked to those borders. In a more arrogant way, if we say, it was assumed to create a “Turkish Islam” rather than “Islam.” Mardin remarks that “the only way to free oneself from Islamic society is to establish an alternative Islamic society” (Mardin, 2000: 72). Claim of universality of that religion which had existed in that land with its historical, cultural and social dynamics did not fit into the newly established nation state’s borders. Consequently, it was forced to be suitable and dependent to this new establishment. The most basic goal of secularism was the separation of the state and religion. However, as Berkes argues, Kemalist secularism did not let religion have its own autonomous existence. Religion was placed under government authority as the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Berkes, 1964: 479).

First attempts to approach the religion in republican political practices with the aim of “ulusallık” can be counted as Turkification of Qur’an, Turkish call to God (ezan), Turkification of worship practices. For Zürcher, secularism was not only the separation of state and religion, but also was throwing religion out of the public sphere and establishing full control of the state over the rest of religious institutions. Ultra-nationalist thinking and creating historical myths (Turkish History Thesis or Sun Language Theory) were used to constitute a new national identity. In this way, nationalism replaced religion in most aspects of society (Zürcher, 2004: 264). As mostly common speech, “Türk’ün yeni amentüsü” (Turk's new credo) was nationalism (Yıldız, 2001: 213). In that point, nationalism has grown upon references of daily and social lives of people. Nationalism has been positioned as a kind of religion with its holiness, temples, idols, symbols, etc. Religion is seen as a system that should dissolve and a system that is supposed to dissolve. Nevertheless, there is an important paradox of modern national identity. On one hand, religion represents “old regime” that should be destroyed and, on the other hand, it represents a system that modern nation keeps limited in the private sphere in order to justify its power. By this way, although practices lived in the context of nationalism do not refer directly to religion, it provides continuity of infected religiousness. Generally these people are considered to be unable to explain rationally what was happening around them and tend to resort to identifying visible factors to which they attribute blame and support ideologies that can help explain their position. For example, martyrdom discourse based on religion is used to explain the death of soldiers in the armed conflict in Turkey between military in Turkey and PKK. Although versions of ‘thou shalt not kill’ reverberate through all religious codes, religious beliefs have shaped the way we justify and attribute meaning to killing.

In Turkey, religious reference cherishes national reference or national reference cherishes religious reference. Being a Muslim and being a Turk has been lived together.

Though many citizens continue to think of themselves as Muslims first, and Turks afterwards, for most people, Turk is equated with Muslim. Consequently, in that case, religion is linked with the extension of legitimacy to the polity in several ways. In that case, if I summarize, religion is linked with the extension of legitimacy to the polity in several ways.

As Ilter Turan (1991: 42-50) claims, first, religion provides a framework within which political power may be exercised. In other words, it is a constraint on what governments can

34 do and still maintain their legitimacy.

Second, religion is an element of social control that includes values such as being respectful to governmental authority and public servants, and compliance with government’ s command. In this way, religion is one of several ways through which obedience to political authority is secured. As Binnaz Toprak expresses, since religion has a control system over individuals, how is it possible not to take into consideration of religion while making politics? (Toprak, 1986: 359-367). In other words, if it is asked of people to make political choices, and those people’s world of consciousness and emotions can be determined by religion, how can applying religious references while making politics be avoided? The nation state, which did not want to share its power with anybody, could degrade religion, which again could keep its consistency with only the idea of not sharing power with anybody, as a functional element for the sake of its power. These, somehow, have given holiness to “national culture” and become functional to glue elements of “national identity” which were being re-created during the nation state building process.

Finally, religion is a source of symbols, ideas and meanings that are used to elicit positive political behaviors from society. A few examples may help to explain what is meant here. A person who dies in battle for the cause of religion is a şehit-martyr- and goes directly to heaven. Now this symbol has been borrowed from religious vocabulary, and is used to describe any public servant who dies in the course of public duty; in this way, government service is elevated to the level of God’s cause. Religion in symbols sometimes is nationalized with flags at mosques. In Greece and South Cyprus, a flag is used at church. In 1997, one of the slogans of Nationalist Movement Party was “Nation of Turk is Muslim. They will live Islam and live in Islam.” Turgut Özal said: “State is laic but I’m Muslim.” Friday sermons are used to invite citizens to engage in acts supportive of government. The Directorate of religious Affairs sends out model sermons to imams (preachers) that may encourage the citizens, for example, to pay their taxes, or to contribute to foundations established to assist armed forces; thus, secular acts are identified as being religiously desirable, and they gain an aura of religious legitimacy. To put it briefly, it seems that the Turkish state, while not viewing religion as giving direction to its policies and actions, continues to treat it as a resource which may be mobilized for “purpose of state” whenever it is found useful or necessary.

In conclusion, as Sakallıoğlu (1996: 250) points out, early republican strategy toward Islam showed two trends, one repressive, the other, a combination of the ideals of secular nationalism with Islamic symbols. In other words, what I tried to prove is that from the beginning of the Turkish nation-state, religion is constructed in the system to justify positive political behaviors. Although there is not an official religion of Turkey at the state level, this nation has a religion that people die for. For that reason, mothers of martyrs said that their sons are martyrized for this nation, territory (vatan için ölmek, şehit olmak). It can be easily understood then why the secular concept nationalism is linked with martyrdom and death is justified with a religious concept, martyr when the role of religion in Turkish nationalism is considered. After the relation between nationalism and religion, we should look at the issue of martyrdom in which this relation reaches its peek point.

35 Notion of Martyrdom: Individuals have died and been killed; in fact, millions of individuals during the 20th century died from war, torture, accidents or etc. Some deaths are memorialized and some are identified as martyrs. This is a function of attribution that distinguishes certain individuals and ways of dying from others, which have been no less significant, but probably less forged in memory. The human mind struggles to put meaning on six million individuals, but can form from a symbolic individual. To die for a cause in itself cannot be a measure of anything; rather it is an accident or incident en route to a goal.

While there are many martyrs to be found in history, few are chosen to be representative of a given movement, belief system or people. Of those few, even fewer speak across cultural boundaries and become national in their reach. It is more common for the bloody details to be spelt out in detail, and for the audience to be brought up to the moment of collective guilt and sorrow through the ritual of narration of the endless suffering of the martyr.

The term martyr is officially recognized by national representatives. As Fouché claimed, the status of martyr appeared as one of the means to get recognition (Cited in, Rosoux, 2004: 110). Indeed, this concept appears to be much more dramatic than the usual notion of “victim.” Here again it is noticeable that the quality of dead as “victim” or as “martyr” is not just a question of vocabulary. The conversion of a victim into a martyr is generally business of official representation. As Agamben said, the important thing is that “This holly life, from the beginning, has a political character and is related with the land where power in rule is established” (Agamben, 2001: 135).

History affords many examples of the use of martyrdom as propaganda and inspirational tool. Therefore, the martyr himself becomes a living definition of the intrinsic nature of the nation for which he was willing to die. Some or all of the following uses can be made of the martyr's death: the strength of his belief as attested to by his willingness to die for his cause can inspire and consolidate the commitment of his followers or young generation to their common cause; the strength of his belief as thereby attested can motivate to action those who sympathized with the cause but are not yet participants; relating and reciting the details of his sufferings can allow his coreligionists to experience his trauma vicariously and thereby evoke a level of sympathy which can further animate the young generation; the extent of the oppression of the system as evidenced by the system's willingness to kill the martyr can radicalize the polarity between the righteousness of the state's cause and the injustice of that against which they struggle; annual commemoration of the martyr's death can serve to keep his sacrifice alive and present in the collective memory and thus help to keep alive the aims and goals of the state; his death can be used as a newsworthy event which can be reported to the outside world in an attempt to elicit sympathy and external support.

36 The martyr’s defining role is most helpful when that particular belief system/nation is under attack within a given geographical location. He creates an example, a standard of conduct by which to judge other fellow believers. By demonstrating publicly that there is something in the subordinated or persecuted nation worth dying for, the value other believers place upon it is augmented, and that nation is highlighted.

Observing the links between martyrdom and politics brings us closer to some of the most teleological and ambivalent uses of death. As far as political approach is concerned, the focus is on the representation of those who commemorate martyrdom. As dead martyrs no longer speak, this representation reveals the process of the decision. Indeed “martyrs are made not simply by their beliefs and actions but by those who witnessed them, remembered them and told their story” (Kassimir, 1991: 62, cited in Rosoux, 2004: 83). So what are the purposes of political uses of martyrdom? In order to have a common will in t he present, common glories in the past are needed. This means that shared suffering is more important than shared joy. When national memories are concerned, grievances are of more value than triumphs, for which they impose duties, and require a common effort. In insisting on notions like “sacrifice”, “grief”, or “shared suffering”, it shows that they have special urgency in the framework of nation building. The devotion to their heroic memory is a significant means whereby communities, political or religious, maintain their internal cohesion and control their social formation (Wood, 1993: 91-92). In this framework, the figure of martyr is revealed as particularly useful to maintain national identity, especially in a crisis situation. In the context of war, the emphasis of martyrdom is a powerful weapon since it can lead to the identification of the persecutors with the devil. When tragic events are constantly recalled during an international or intercommunity conflict, they can be used as incentives in order to redress suffering. In that case, the purpose is not only to reinforce the national cohesion. It is above all to justify a feeling of hatred for the enemy. According to Rosoux, this emotional rhetoric of the martyr pursues three main aims (Rosoux, ibid, p.

100).

First of all, it is pedagogical. The supreme sacrifice of the martyr constitutes an example and a guide for the population. It remains one of the key founding references of national identity. Martyr is not only used to edify young generations. The second purpose of this commemoration is directly linked to political circumstances. Crisis moments traumatize or deeply divide society. In such a context, the primary object of the martyrdom is to restore a sense of self-esteem and a form of unity among the society; to gather all the segments of society around one central figure and to focus their attention on an unequivocally heroic fate; to unify society against the enemy, and his tragic martyrdom became the unifying narrative. Remembering martyrs is a shared icon of a common history.

Finally, a third is that the commemoration of the martyr is used to legitimate the politicians themselves. The term martyr is officially recognized by national representatives.

The status of martyr appeared as one of the means to get recognition (Fouché, 2002: 126, cited in Rosoux, ibid, p. 110). Indeed, this concept appears to be much more dramatic than the usual notion of “victim.” Here again it is noticeable that the quality of dead as “victim” or as “martyr” is not just a question of vocabulary. The conversion of a victim into a martyr is generally the business of official representation. As Agamben said, the important thing is here: This holly life, from the beginning, has a political character and is related with the land

37 where power in rule is established (Agamben, ibid, 135). The major function of it is to legitimate the state and state authority.

In that sense, one can argue that crisis moments traumatize society or deeply divide society. In such a context, the primary object of the martyrdom is to restore a sense of selfesteem and a form of unity among the society; to gather all the segments of society around one central figure and to focus their attention on an unequivocally heroic fate; to unify society against the enemy, and his tragic martyrdom became the unifying narrative.

Remembering martyrs is a shared icon of a common history. This stage of the martyrdom is of crucial importance, perhaps even more crucial than the actual suffering and martyrdom itself. Those stories that have become national are among the most moving and dramatic that humanity has produced and continue to inspire people, generation after generation.

Stories of glorification, as Smith (1986) underlines, are tools mostly applied in building of a nation and to build or fill the collective memory since these records of memory invite people to take lessons from the deaths for the sake of the nation’s future. In this way, the martyr is granted stature and nobility out of the mouths of his own persecutors and enemies. For example, it is mostly repeated at demonstrations against PKK and terrorism in Turkey: “Martyrs do not die and our nation cannot be divided into parts.”6 In that sense, I should look at different meanings of martyrdom in religion in order to evaluate how the concept, itself, obtained the highest prestige for individuals that people can be manipulated to die for.

Notion of Martyrdom in Religion: Martyrdom exists as an active and powerful force in the ideology of Islam and to understand why it has such powerful roots and such great symbolic weight, it is necessary to examine the different levels at which the concept manifests itself. In Islam, martyrs are called “witnesses” because their souls witness paradise, their deaths are witnessed by angels, or their wounds will testify to their dignified status in the afterlife. To fully understand the religious and socio-political contexts of both types of martyrdom in Islam, one needs to examine their religious and historical grounds in the Qur’an and hadith. 7 According to Saloul, in Islamic tradition, there are two main forms of martyrdom: martyrdom in war and spiritual martyrdom of asceticism. 8 The first, martyrdom in war, is the most obvious form: someone who dies in battle for his religious belief. In Islamic history, this form is the earliest form of martyrdom and it In Turkish, “Şehitler ölmez, vatan bölünmez.”

Hadith is the documentation of Prophet Mohammed’s statements and actions which were pres erved from original oral transmissions. Hadith exists in a variety of degrees of reliability. While most of Hadi th are accurate, some may have been fabricated, whether due to sincere misunderstandi ngs or by devious i ntent. Since this project examines the religious thought of believers and not historical events, the veracity of hadith will not be an issue: a hadith reflects belief whether transmitted by a careful historian or consciously manufactured to promote an agenda. In this paper I will support my argument by using Hadith from Sahih Al -Bukhari, which is considered by the majori ty of Muslims as an accurate and valid collection of Hadi th. Quotations from Sahih Al Bukhari taken from the internet: Link name "Hadith Bukhari (English Translation)"; URL http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/bukhari/index.htm.

8 Available at http://home.medewerker.uva. nl/i.a.m.saloul/bestanden/Martyrdom,%20gender%20and%20cultur al%20identity.pdf 6 7

38 is primarily related to the concept of Jihad, often translated as “holy war”. 9 The Qur’an refers to martyrdom in war and the rewards of martyrs in many places.

And say not of those who are slain in the Way of God: 'They are dead.'

Nay, they are living, though you perceive it not. Think not of those who are slain in God's way as dead. Nay they live, finding their sustenance in the Presence of their Lord....the (Martyrs) glory in the fact that on them is no fear, nor have they (cause to) grieve. They rejoice in the Grace and the Bounty from Allah. (Qur’an, 3:169-71) The martyr is highly positioned in Islamic tradition. Thus battlefield martyrs are put in a special category as “martyrs in this world and the next” and are honored with special burial rites. The martyr’s body, in most circumstances, is not washed; he is to be buried in the clothes in which he was killed. Some hold that no prayers over the martyr are necessary since he is automatically purified from sin. The lesser categories of martyrs are “martyrs of the next world” meaning, chiefly, that they are not eligible for special burial rites but must be satisfied with divine approbation and the rewards of paradise (Berenbaum and Firesone, 2004: 140).

The second form of martyrdom is the spiritual martyrdom of asceticism. Spiritual martyrdom refers to a martyr who is killed for his/her faith or murdered while in the service of God, but who does not necessarily die in battle.10 According to Kohlberg, the category of martyrs was extended greatly after the decrease in the number of battlefield martyrs following early conquests (Cited in Berenbaum and Firesone, 2004: 141). The category of martyr was enlarged to include many kinds of death, including drowning, pleurisy, plague, or diarrhea. According to other traditions martyrs also include those who die in childbirth, those who die defending their property, those who are eaten by lions, and those who die of seasickness. The trend culminated in the transference of the value of martyrdom to other religious acts, so that death was no longer the most important prerequisite. Within this theological basis, martyrdom is portrayed as the highest privilege of Islam that contains two main sources of belief. While the first emphasizes the importance of Jihad and its different forms and meanings, the second describes the glory of the martyrdom act.

“A MOTHER OF A MARTYR” AS A RECONSTRUCTED IDENTITY As Zisook remarks, “Mourning experience, the loss of the loved one because of death, is a universal phenomenon that most people deal with for once or more in their life time” (Cited in Olgun and Yüksel, 2001). This painful loss affects both the individual’s emotional world and social functions. In that sense, mothers, especially mothers of martyrs, are the most popular icons of nationalist discourse. However, their voices have not been heard. That is why it is important to focus on the mothers’ narratives to show how Some writers claims that while the Qur’an frequently refers to war, the words used for war are “harb” and “”qital”. Translating Jihad as “holy war” would be incorrect in this context, for the literal translation of holy war “harb muqaddasa”, is not to be found in either the Qur’an or hadith (Montgomery, 1976: 155).

10 A fuller presentation of these themes can be found in Jonah Winters, "Martyrdom in Jihad" (unpublished paper; University of Toronto, 1997). Accessed from the internet: Li nk name "Martyrdom in Jihad"; URL http://bahai -library.com/personal/jw/my.papers /jihad.html.

9

39 nationalist discourse builds “mother of martyr” as a social category, not as a social actor.

In this context, as Hall underlines, identities are constructed by different discourses, practices, and positions that intersect with each other and are antagonistic (Hall, 1996: 4).

Such theories of subjectivity reject the humanist notion of a unified, fixed self that has a stable, essential core, and instead proposes the self as a site of disunity and conflict that is always in process and constructed within power relations (Weedon, 1997). The social structures and processes that shape our subjectivities are situated within discursive fields where language, social institutions, subjectivity, and power exist, intersect, and produce competing ways of giving meaning to and constructing subjectivity (De Lauretis, 1986; Weedon, 1997). Identities emerge in the midst of social relations, as constructivists argue (Cornell and Hartman, 1997: 81).

In this vein, answers for the questions of “Who are you?” or “Would you introduce yourself?” are about one’s perception of identity. It is about how you introduce yourself to someone and how you feel about yourself. In other words, perception of identity includes both “given” characteristics and an “essence,” and it also has socially constructed characteristics. As Harold R. Isaacs mentions in his book, Idols of Tribe, identity includes several features: common descent, shared history, and religion (Isaacs, 1989: 38). Ident ity may originate from either assignment by others or assertion by self. Whatever criteria are used to distinguish one’s identity from other identities, in this chapter I will focus on mothers’ narratives in order to understand how the trauma of the loss of a loved one shapes these mothers’ self-identity and their perception of motherhood.

How the Loss of A Son Shapes the Perceptions of Self-Identity of Mothers and Fathers: There is no doubt that bereaved mothers (and other family members) are, like their sons, victims of a trauma. Is their loss any different because their sons were killed in a war rather than by disease or a car accident? In what way is this trauma a social phenomenon as well as a personal experience? After establishing the field of meanings constituted by the multiple discourses of death, I turned to a second question: What are the social effects of their sons’ martyrdom on the women as mothers? Any study of how people respond to death must also be a study of how they create their lives. Thus, a study of laments must include an inquiry into how the social practices of bereavement may contribute to maintaining a particular form of social life.

Geertz (Cited in Bora, 1998: 83) defines culture as “meaning patterns which are told from generation to generation and symbolic structures that explain attitudes and information of individuals about life.” As Bora (1998:84) points out, the “culture of motherhood” can be considered as an ideological interpretation. In this context, nationalist discourses interact with political institutions and manipulate social and cultural practices to imprint gendered identities on embodied subjects, attempting to make them malleable within the power struggles of the nation-building or nation-defending process. I aim to demonstrate the interaction of gendered discourses with normative notions of nationalism and religion in the service and reproduction of the national idea. For that reason, I attempt to learn about these mothers’ understanding of being “a mother of martyr” while beginning to ask them about “who they are.”

40

At first, mothers of martyrs perceived the question of “who they are” as strange and unfamiliar. After I changed the structure of the question and asked them for information about themselves, they talked about their sons and their families. For example, Ayşe (57, housewife, lost her son 13 years ago) says: Well, I am a mother of a martyr, and a housewife. Well, how do I introduce myself? I am a mother who raises her children and sends them to school for years.

Another mother, Meryem (45, housewife, lost her son 14 years ago) says: I am a mother of a martyr. (…) Well, I got married when I was young. I became a mother at the age of sixteen. Then, I had problems with my husband. I had problems with the father of my children. (…) As of now, I am a mother of four children.

Moreover, Ayşe Naciye (63, member of the Association of Families of Martyrs, lost her son 15 years ago) says: I am a mother of a martyr.

As can be seen in the above quotations, each woman, first of all, defined herself within familial networks. These narratives show that those mothers perceive themselves not as independent individuals, but rather as a part of a family. Those mothers represent the conventional roles of woman. They remain loyal to conventional family bonds as altruistic mothers who care for their sons and families before themselves, before their own needs and interests. They do not consider themselves as individuals. They are, first of all, someone’s mothers. It is true that they have experienced trauma, important changes in their lives and lifestyles after their sons’ martyrdoms. However, they maintain the patriarchal bonds within conventional family structure.

On the other hand, for fathers of martyrs, the question of “who they are” is not an unexpected question. Furthermore, their answers include more personal information, in contrast to mothers’ answers. Although they also define themselves in familial bonds, they give more priority to personal information. For example, Hamit (57, Second Chairman of the Association of Families of Martyrs, lost his son 10 years ago) defines himself: My name is Hamit, a father of a martyr. I was born in 1950. I am from Sivas/Zara. I am retired. I have a son and a daughter.

Another father, Şükrü (65, Chairman of the Association of Families of Martyrs, lost his son 13 years ago) says: My name is Şükrü. I am Chairman of the Association of Families of Martyrs Moreover, Kemal (55, General Secretary of Association of Families of Martyrs, lost his son 15 years ago) says: My name is Kemal. I was born in Artvin/Arhavi. I was born on 24 December 1953. I had three sons. My first son was also an associate officer in the same place, in the same city. Both of them went to the army voluntarily. First one was discharged and came back. Mehmet had almost

41 40 days to be discharged. Then, he could not come. He was martyred.

The quoted fathers are all members of the Association of Families of Martyrs. All of them are retired civil servants. However, when asked who they are, they tend to speak about themselves. It is perceived that fathers consider their self-identity to extend beyond their familial bonds. Moreover, they are aware that the answer to a question about their identity depends on their personal characteristics.

Another difference between the fathers and the mothers is that many mothers failed to give their names in their introductions. On the other hand, almost all fathers provided their names first. They knew that I knew their names; however, they still included their names first in their introductions. Mothers called themselves “mothers of martyrs” before offering their names, although they knew I had come to ask them about themselves. So then what does it mean to be the “mother of a martyr”?

What Does It Mean To Be “A Mother of a Martyr”?

In this section, my aim is not to give a clear definition of what a “mother of a martyr” is or is not; rather I want to provide a picture of what it means to be such a mother, by the actions and practices of the mothers themselves. I argue that those mothers’ identities are constructed through nationalist discourse and religion, as Hall claims that each subject position is a reflection of a discursive practice. Mothers of martyrs are constructed in accordance with conventional gender roles, and the structure demands that they apply those roles in being a mother of a martyr. Giving meanings, by nationalist and religious discourse, to death by martyrdom transforms those mothers as “mothers of martyrs” and endows them with a special status both in society and in religion.

First, in the discourse of nationalism or the recreation of an “imagined community,” it is crucial to build national consciousness. The transference of personal motives and meanings to public and political symbols contributes to an understanding and explanation of a martyr’s death. Before, they were only “ordinary” housewives, but with their sons’ martyrdom, they have become “mothers of the nation,” known by all and respected by statesmen and commanders. They have found themselves in new roles and new subject positions. As a result of this, these mothers answer the question above by stating, “I’m a mother of a martyr.” First and foremost, the factor defining their identities is that they are mothers of martyrs.

As indicated above, while martyrdom sanctifies and glorifies the martyr in social and religious realms, it also provides prestige for the relatives of martyrs, especially for their mothers. When I began to look carefully at the ways people talked about death, the crucial role of one element—religious faith—became apparent. Like the discourse of honor, religious discourse builds itself on lamentation. Faith in God has to be seen, for men and women, as another moral register in which to read people's practices. This construction of religion’s place has two consequences. First, it enables mournfulness to become a special statement about the meaning of death. When women lament and wail, they are accepting God's will. Second, this configuration makes people's responses to death relevant to their

42 social standing. This is where the gendering of the discourses of death becomes significant.

Like the code of honor, religious faith provides for mothers of martyrs a principle of social differentiation, a standard by which people can be ranked. They benefit from these principles. Through such enactments of piety they offset some of the negative effects of their inability (because of their economic dependence).

In that sense, martyrdom, as it is discussed above, is a sanctified and exalted event in the eyes of religion. It is believed that both the martyr and his family will be comfortable in the afterlife. They will be rewarded by God. This is a way to cope with the loss of a son: to achieve something sanctified, special, and prestigious in religion. Mothers own this prestige obtained by their sons’ death after martyrdom. By making these mothers comfortable, it also provides them socially important status. Before, these mothers were only ordinary housewives; after martyrdom, they were recognized and remembered by important statesmen, politicians, and commanders. Prestige obtained by martyrdom is not limited to religion. It also has a social side. “Dying for the sake of the nation” is the highest status that can be obtained by those soldiers. Dying for the sake of the nation, providing an important service for society, assures this respected status for the martyr and his family. This newly obtained social and religious prestige makes up for the loss of family, especially for mothers.

In this way, life after martyrdom becomes more bearable.

Comparison of Sunni Mothers with Alevi Mothers: In light of this understanding of martyrdom, why are Alevi mothers affected by the idea of martyrdom, defining themselves as mothers of martyrs, when they do not believe in an afterlife like Sunni mothers do? There are, I consider, two major reasons for this. First, like Sunni mothers, Alevi mothers must deal with the sudden loss of their beloved sons. This death is seen as pointless, because those mothers were waiting for their sons to return home at the end of their military service. The situation is especially tragic because it usually involves a young man of about twenty. It is perhaps the suddenness of these deaths that makes it so terrible at first, because without any logical reason or warning, a mother has lost her son. Mothers, whether Alevi or Sunni, claim that this pain cannot be understood by one who has not experienced it. The only way to cope with the pain is by glorifying the death in an attempt to give meaning and prestige to the martyrdom. The mothers’ narratives present various ways to make sense of a senseless death. Alevi mothers give meaning to this sudden death not by religion, as Sunni mothers do, but rather by nationalism, emphasizing that their sons died for the sake of the nation. Alevi mothers do not place so much importance religious benefits of martyrdom, such as the son and his family being rewarded in heaven, because they do not perceive death as an end. It is easily seen in the narratives of Alevi mothers that they call themselves “mothers of martyrs” because their sons died protecting the nation; in nationalist discourse, such a man is called a “martyr.”

Second, rituals related to death can vary among Alevis depending on whether they live in the city or the country, or due to their level of education. Because Alevi doctrine is based on oral, rather than written, history, and lacks “certain rules,” as in other faiths, due to differences between city life and country life, and regional demographics, it can be said that Alevis develop different rituals and beliefs about death. Most importantly, when they migrate to the cities, Alevi people have to apply to the municipality for their funeral or death rituals, because Alevi houses of gathering (cemevi) are not officially accepted as responsible for such work, not being officially recognized as places of worship. Therefore, the tradition of

43 mosques and imams has started to enter Alevi practice, though not an original part of Alevi doctrine. Secularization did not, however, bode the end of the widespread Sunni prejudices against the Alevis. The Alevis’ gradual integration into the wider society, along with their movement to the towns and entry into education and careers in public service, brought them into closer contact, and sometimes into direct competition, with Sunnis. The official attitude toward Islam since 1980 has represented an even greater departure from the Kemalist tradition, actively fostering a Turkish-Islamic synthesis that began as a doctrine combining fervent Turkish nationalism and Islamic sentiment. Religious education, previously an optional subject, was made obligatory; the Directorate of Religious Affairs was strengthened; numerous new mosques were built and imams were appointed, not only in Sunni towns and villages, but also in Alevi communities. Alevis no longer had a unique religion to which they could turn, because the institutions of traditional Alevi thought were almost entirely eroded.

Alevis are not allowed to learn their own values and rituals. Consequently, Sunni beliefs fill the gaps where Alevi thought is missing in Alevis’ lives. As an unavoidable result of assimilation, Sunni beliefs have blended into Alevi beliefs. Additionally, although Alevis have a fear of assimilation and criticize the state politics that cause this process, Sunni beliefs or rituals can still become dominant in their daily life, despite the fact that those rituals or ideas are not indigenous to Alevi thought. Martyrdom is the best example of this. Although Sunnis and Alevis have different beliefs, they live side by side in cities. Naturally, they can affect each other. As the state continues to impose Sunni beliefs on Alevis, it is impossible for Alevi mothers to not be impressed by Sunni views of martyrdom; nothing else exists to give meaning to their sons’ sudden deaths.

To sum up, if we consider the link between gender and nationalism, we face motherhood as a significantly subjective identity, either supporting nationalism or challenging it. Since the 1980s, in southeast Turkey, an armed struggle has been raging between the PKK and the Turkish army. In this process, mothers enter the public sphere with different demands. Most mothers of martyrs have been seen in the public sphere internalizing patriotism and nationalism in order to support the Turkish army demand of revenge for their dead sons. In that context, I believe that motherhood has a critical identity role in Turkey, in constantly producing militarism. The most crucial role of women is, from the beginning of the nation-building process, to raise children suitable for a militarist, nationalist and patriarchal structure, or, in other words, to be a mother. The mother who has lost her son in a war, defending the homeland, has been one of the most powerful images of hegemonic nationalist culture. In public discourse, the mother frequently represents the nation itself. Therefore, a mother cannot demand a right to her son’s life and cannot question his loss in war, since, as a mother of the nation, she gave birth to a son of the nation, and whenever the nation asks for him, she should give him up. The individual loss of each son is also a collective, national loss. While held up as public symbols, however, bereaved mothers of the martyrs are silenced by society, their voices not to be heard. For both mothers and fathers, the highest level of valor is in carrying their pain in silence.

In this sense, the focus on mothers of martyrs has increased, and they are seen more often in the media, on television and in newspapers, in Turkey. A particularly common scene involves a mother crying at the funeral of her son, shouting that, if she had another son, she would send him to war, too, while cursing the PKK. There are many other expressions of this trend. Women speak in public, in emotional and personal terms, about their sons. Many mothers resent ready-made clichés of national language concerning the tragedy of their sons.

44 In other words, women, as mothers, are taking their rightful place as mourners of their sons, and in doing so, they reproduce the entire discourse around death in nationalism. Funerals of martyrs are rituals that enact a linkage between mothering, death and sacrifice, and the nation in a way that publicly states and validates the mothers’ moral and political standing.

Attendees at funerals give a chorus of public, mournful recognition to maternal feelings of loss and also assuage that loss by symbolically supporting the mother. For example, mothers of martyrs demonstrated for the capital punishment of Abdullah Öcalan. One of those women was a nurse, Yıldız.11The public met her as a proud but pained woman, the widow of a petty officer martyred by the PKK. It is expected that these women, like all other female citizens of Turkey, will obey the prototype for the ideal woman figure, as determined by the elite men who shaped womanhood during the nation-building process (Kandiyoti, 1997). On the other hand, for those mothers, acceptance of their situation transforms their narratives of loss into narratives of resurgence. They experience a transition of self-identity, from “poor, repressed women,” to “proud, patriotic women.”

In that sense, when those women come into public sphere with their motherhood identity, they do not question unequal woman-man power relations based on religion and nationalism. They cannot transform their objective position to subjective position. They depend on being the wife of a man and mother of a son. Glorification of motherhood prevents those women to participate in the public sphere as collective actors although those mothers, especially mothers of martyrs, have the chance of shaping politics by inspiring from their own experiences and lives. As Olgun and Yüksel said, for parents, the death of their grown up son is the hardest loss from which to recover. However, they claim effects of mourning are not limited with parents’ emotional worlds. It affects their social relations, too (Olgun and Yüksel: 2001: 41). Almost twenty years of war in Turkey reflects as a trauma to the lives of mothers who lost their sons in the war. Politics of war politicize women, or rather, make them the “tools” or the “victims” of war politics. Moreover, this “politicization” that is constructed over motherhood help to deepen the arguments of politicians about the Kurdish question and national security.

Mothers’ Perception of National Security after Death of Their Sons: Turkey is constructed as a militaristic nation through discourses of Turkish history.

As a result, military service is an unavoidable duty for men in society until recently; a man who does not fulfill his military service is not accepted as a citizen of Turkey. While motherhood is a way for women to symbolically establish their citizenship, military service was a way for men to establish their own citizenship, since every Turk, supposedly, is born a soldier.12 These mothers sent their young sons, between the ages of 20 and 25, to serve the state. While waiting for the sons to come home at the end of their military service, the women are suddenly confronted with grief and loss (evlat acısı): their sons have become martyrs. These mothers do not send their sons away to the war, but rather to the state.

When their sons died for their duty to the state, mothers did not perceive their sons’ service negatively, as a kind of violence. On the contrary, these mothers are proud of their sons’ military service for the religious and nationalist reasons I discussed above. As a result, mothers hang up pictures of their sons in uniform everywhere in the house as a prestige 11

For more information, see http://www.savaskarsitlari.org/arsiv.asp?ArsivTipID=1&ArsivAnaID=37079 In Turkey, apart from citizenship, if a man does not fulfill his military service, he cannot easily get married or find a job.

12

45 symbol. Plaques of service, medallions, and certificates of success are also displayed. It is easily seen in the mothers’ narratives that the military conditions were not perceived as war conditions. They simply sent their sons to the state. So, for those mothers, the patriarchal values framing this structure are not perceived as problematic.

The only way they can cope with the loss is to attribute a certain value and prestige to their sons’ deaths, sanctified by religion. They create special meaning in “martyrdom” to make sense of their loss. Mothers describe their sons’ deaths as “destiny, predestination.”

They often ended their interviews with comments such as, “his fate (nasib)," "his life span was short," or "when a person's life is up…" In their narratives, the women explored the various ways to make sense of a senseless death. In the end, they believe, a person's time of death is God-given or "written." Most essential to faith is an acceptance of God's will. All the mothers I interviewed, including Alevis, hold that a person's time of death is determined in advance by God; some say it is “written on his or her forehead.” For instance, Meryem (45, housewife, lost her son 14 years ago) says: May God rest his soul, there is nothing to do. Is it written on forehead or is it God’s will? However, there is another point that if you believe in God and in martyrdom, at the end, this is written on your forehead. There is nothing to do.

War enters their mind with the death of their sons and is understood as a sole event: terrorism. The women's stories and commentaries implied, on the one hand, that blame for the death could be traced to human decisions or actions, or that their sons had died because of the actions of the PKK. At the same time, they believe that all that happens, especially death, is God's will. Thus, on one hand, these mothers do not question the deaths of their sons. On the other hand, they ask for revenge from the state since their sons died for the sake of the nation’s security. Discourse of martyrdom in religion placates people. It is something that relieves the mothers from their suffering. It is a soothing thing, and its promises of spiritual opulence helps mothers cope with the deaths. When people cannot explain what is happening around them or to them on rational grounds, they are likely to turn to traditional, religious analyses and remedies. Generally, these mothers are unable to explain rationally what has happened to their sons, and they tend to seek explanations within soothing religious traditions. As a natural result of this, these mothers are politically silenced with a focus on “heroism” or “martyrdom.” Although their sons’ deaths seem senseless to these mothers, the loss of a son does not demolish the legitimacy of the state in their eyes.

On the contrary, martyrdom with nationalist discourse and sanctification by religion only strengthens the mothers’ bonds with the state.

Another interesting point is that in the case of mothers of martyrs, they are not only the ones having grief but, in some situations, these mothers are asking for revenge for their sons’ deaths. Moreover, these mothers, especially mothers of petty officers or officers, want their grandsons to become officers or petty officers and give the necessary punishment for those who killed their dads. After martyrdom, sons of martyrs become particularly special to their mothers; sons of martyrs are seen as the ones who will take revenge for their fathers’ death. When we consider the sons of the martyrs, the sons have not entered the military for financial reasons. Sons of martyrs, members of the Turkish Army Force, apply to military school for “revenge” for the death of their fathers. As a result, these mothers are willing to sacrifice other sons, if necessary.

46

In this sense, when I asked these mothers what they think about peace for the conflict in the East and Southeast of Turkey, they got surprised because, until now, they have never been asked what they think about. Mostly, instead of these women, their husbands deal with the problems. As a result, the concept of peace does not make sense for their minds. When I asked the mothers to suggest solutions for the conflict in southeastern Turkey, they said that the solution should come from the political institutions. But the lack of a connection between political institutions and the women makes the words of the mothers “apolitical” (Sancar, 2001). While the mothers’ words do show a true search for an understanding of a solution, they do not hold the power or responsibility to actualize such a solution. Their identity as mothers provides them the ability to speak in the public sphere, but only about their sons. Apart from that topic, mothers remain passive and powerless in the decision-making process. The politicization of mothers reproduces the “victimhood” of women insofar as it fails to cooperate with a political movement against violence, militarism, and exploitation.

Conclusion: By exploring the narratives of mothers of martyrs, this study first gave an understanding about being a mother of martyr within nationalism in Turkey, where patriarchal values dominate. It is evident that patriarchal society’s underlying ideology influences women’s evaluations of mothers of martyrs, and also their self-evaluations in terms of ideal mothering qualities. Moreover, it can be said that the influence of martyrdom reshapes women’s daily lives and identity. Second, it is seen that all mothers attribute great worth to being a mother of a martyr, although more than half of them believe that a woman is not given any independent value by society in general. Related to this fact, social and personal responsibilities on the part of the mothers of martyrs was emphasized by most mothers. The feelings of pride and sanctity are common among mothers.

The above narratives have made immensely valuable contributions to our understanding of the relations between women, nationalism, security and war, and of the construction of militarism through notions of motherhood and masculinity and their impact on women’s lives. They have also produced key analytical frameworks and tools through which women’s experiences and the relevance of martyrdom have been approached. This approach often assumes a direct link between women’s agency and women’s participation in the public sphere, and understands the discourse of war as potentially empowering, especially when linked to the support of nationalist movements. This research on the militarization of mothers’ lives, be it militarization through direct relations with the military, or militarization through family associations, relied on the concept of women’s agency and empowerment. However, as I argue, mothers’ presence in the public sphere or politics does not seem to change the masculine nature of these institutions, nor does it contribute to a general advancement of the mothers’ social positions. It does not tear away the legitimizing camouflage that has sustained martyrdom as a symbol of national pride and security.

Depending on the conditions, motherhood is either sanctified or degrading. In the case of mothers of martyrs, these mothers are sanctified in double ways. On one hand, they are nationalist icons of the war. On the other hand, they are sanctified in religion by being

47 rewarded with heaven. These women invoke the other discourses: references to God's will or letting the men in the family/the army talk instead of themselves. In that sense, they are valuable tools to justify policies of either the army or the governments about national security in Turkey. As a result of this research, I claim that, while mothers’ roles do change in war, even dramatically, and mothers do take on new responsibilities within the household, community, or organizations. Instead, war is actually used to preserve gender roles and order in Turkey. War, martyrdom, and nationalism become means of preserving, achieving, and reclaiming dominant masculinity as well as dominant gender hierarchies based on national security issues. From the interviews, it is seen that as a consequence of being a mother of a martyr, these women gain the right to become visible, publicly known, and to participate in the public sphere. However, they use this right not as an individual or as a woman, but by depending on their newly gained identity of national motherhood. In short, with their sons’ martyrdom, they have begun to exist in the public sphere for the first time, gaining public respect. However, this transformation, from ordinary housewives to mothers of martyrs, is used to justify the discourse on national security issues. They do not question what happened, or why. They are seen in the public sphere, but not as individuals. They are seen as mournful mothers, speaking of the glories of their sons, both in the past and at the present.

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51 for this earth too long hauled -Bob Mulligan nice to see the sky again way back then when the world left thinking it would never return attributing the cause to not-so-original sin stigma stigma stigma stigma and its corresponding spread initially blaming Eve then Adam in the sequence so carefully tilled and taught then later with enlightenment a therapy ridden fFather took the brunt in those years before knowing we are all of us really Buddhas Buddhas with a most unfortunate amnesia the better moments were created ones cultivated within like Russian dolls silently nesting the life of life inside a poem long before hearing the sounds of the poet pre-empting the solicitous distractions which accompany the titles of men gliding on extended wings substance becomes evasive episode upon episode collide corporeal dreams divide with both patience and panic announcing the arrival of an age when at long last we accommodate the proliferation of insights soon to blend anew with the thinking and the dreaming and the thinking archeology began soon after excavating soil from childhood places filling every pocket with the land yards sidewalks basements schools churches gardens desiccated river mud fragrant summer dust of playful fields weighing then wedging

52 this stuff of gathered past both hands buried in a prelude to finality adding liquids to ease the extrusion fashioning a bowl to provide brief containment for this earth too long hauled measuring its immensity against the size of night

53 later valorization -Bob Mulligan soon after i was born two important things occurred New York beat Brooklyn to win the World Series and i fell in love with my grandparents driving home last night i was reminded of them the Yankees were in a tie on the car radio when a fox sauntered through the headlights returning openly from her dark ramble on the banks of the Manasquan River musty sensations enveloped me nearly half a century had unraveled since i thought of my grandmother’s fox stole suspended in an oak armoire in an apartment above the tavern she owned and ran with my grandfather i recalled that fox’s soft stillness biting chemical scent, lifeless eyes, needle-like teeth that by design carnivorously clasped its storied red tail forming a circle of warmth and attachment it was then i understood something vague and uncomfortable felt fifty years earlier but never voiced – that grandma and gramps who likewise circled me in arms secure in whose home i rolled wax fruit across a table while spooning pungent love from cabbage soup would someday share the fate of that timeless fox and be the first to leave me lonely in this world quietly buried in potent loam that heavy seed lay forgotten until last night’s valorization when something sprouted in the center field grass driving home that certain understanding from which i had been running all these years as the sacred fox walked calmly toward the light

54 The Embodiment of Collective Exclusion: Transcending the Borders of Social Segregation in Harry Potter -Alyssa Hunziker J.K. Rowling’s series, Harry Potter, centers on a young wizard who enters into the wizarding world at the age of eleven, unaware of the various social boundaries that divide the magical and non-magical worlds. Ethnically, wizards and non-magical humans (muggles) are shown to have divergent cultural practices, and are further statutorily separated by the Ministry of Magic’s Statute of Secrecy, which outlaws any wizard from performing magical acts in the presence of non-magical humans. In addition to this division of the human race into two separate communities, the human characters in the wizarding world are shown to be further divided by issues of blood status and family lineage, and interschool house affiliation. Kate E. Behr describes the relationship between the magical world of Rowling’s text and muggle realm for which she writes, stating that in the novels “mundane elements of life—bureaucracy, tradition, becoming independently mobile—are renewed when represented via the wizarding world” (Behr 123). With Harry, a magical human, as the reader’s entry into the wizarding world, the racial, ethnic, and cultural differences between magical creatures and magical humans can often be forgotten. Rowling uses the issue of blood status and species difference as a means through which she can comfortably discuss race relations, as many of the racial issues present in her novels are removed from real-world contemporary conflict. Through the distinct categories of exclusion set up throughout the series, the text argues that constructed communities can be dangerous if they begin creating artificial borders between societies and are used as tools of oppression—in other words, when these communities go from being inclusive to being exclusive. Because the series features its characters’ socio-economic, racial, and ideological differences and, according to Jackie C. Horne, showcases “four types of racial other”—“evil other; dangerous but used other; enslaved other; and separatist other”—Harry’s status crosses these boundaries as he is a victim of exclusion (as a result of his status as orphan, his muggle upbringing, muggle -born mother, and his often ridiculed ability to speak parseltongue), and is also an effectively assimilated (or included) member of the hegemonic white wizarding society by virtue of his celebrity (Horne 89). Rather than isolating himself from those surrounding him, Harry chooses to assimilate into the dominant culture by fulfilling the role of “the Chosen One,” though he uses this assimilation as a means to revolutionize wizarding society in order to establish a regime of acceptance of all magical and non-magical beings. Ultimately, Rowling’s distinctly divided communities serve to complicate the ways in which the wizarding world views difference as each of these divisions spawns further separations within each group.

One of the more obvious ways Rowling discusses issues of race and racial oppression in the series, is through the status of magical creatures in relation to magical humans. Language and autonomy in language are particularly important for species such as house elves, goblins, and trolls, who are the most loathed of all loathed magical creatures in the text. House elves, who function as Horne’s “enslaved other” as they are forced to serve a single wizard family for the duration of their lives, are the cast as the most assimilating race and therefore the most explicitly enslaved magical creature in Rowling’s world (Horne 89).

Despite the fact that they possess magic that is even more powerful than wizards’, they do not question the human-run Ministry of Magic’s decree that “no non-human creature is permitted to carry or use as wand” (Goblet of Fire 132). In addition, the house elves are so

55 fully entrenched in the dominant culture’s rhetoric that they knowingly and compulsively punish themselves for acting outside of their masters’ orders without having been told to do so. When discussing the house-elves’ representation, Horne references the works of “Farah Mendlesohn, Elaine Ostry, and Brycchan Carey [who] all point out [that]…Rowling’s depiction of Dobby and his fellow elves contains uncomfortable echoes of many of the stereotypes held by whites of enslaved African Americans” (Horne 80-81). Thus their subjugation is shown to be even more fully orchestrated than one might imagine, and it is through this caricature of complacency that Rowling asks her reader to question the ways in which institutionalized slavery can affect both the enslaved and the enslaver. While other magical creatures, such as trolls, are culturally misunderstood by wizards who state that “anyone can speak Troll…all you have to so is point and grunt,” and goblins are seen as untrustworthy creatures whose language, “Gobbledegook,” is implied to be nonsensical because of its dissimilarity to the English language, house-elves are not even identified as having their own language (Goblet of Fire). By contrast, house-elves speak broken, accented English, which serves as a symbol of their subjugation by hegemonic society, while continuing to highlight house-elves’ stark difference from magical humans. Ironically, it is Dobby who speaks most clearly about house-elf enslavement, and does so without a hint of broken or accented language. He describes house-elves as “the lowly, the enslaved, [the] dregs of the magical world,” and therefore points out the ways in which the master race’s rhetoric can be used in a subversive way in order to address the inequalities house -elves face.

In so doing, Dobby forces both the reader, and Harry, someone who is born into the hegemonic dominant class, to read this moment as one in which the house-elf transcends his usual role as a comedic figure in order to decry the effects of institutionalized slavery.

Despite their closer connection to the human race, half-human species, such as centaurs, half giants, and werewolves, are stigmatized even more than their distinctly nonhuman counterparts. Hagrid’s large and “wild” appearance stems mainly from his giantess mother’s side of the family, and Hagrid is often described as looking “simply too big to be allowed” (Sorcerer’s Stone 14). This distinction of “allowance” is particularly interesting in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when Professor Umbridge tells the centaurs that they “live [in the Forbidden Forest] only because the Ministry of Magic permits [them] certain areas of land” (Order of the Phoenix 754-755). The caging of both the centaurs in the forbidden forest and the giants in the mountains is eerily reminiscent of concentration camps, and as centaurs at the very least are shown to be an ancient, well developed people, it seems that the necessity to cage them is the result of some misguided, perceived threat to wizards. Ultimately, the magical creatures in the novels are depicted as subservient to wizards, as they are regulated by the Ministry of Magic’s Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, and are therefore segregated from human society. Thus, wizards are depicted as the enforcers of exclusivity as they attempt to dominate and control magical beings. Even so, unlike the house-elves who are supposedly complicit in their subjugation, the centaurs are noticeably contemptuous of other magical creatures, and often claim to possess a higher level of intelligence than both the other creatures who inhabit the Forbidden Forest, and the humans who trap them within the Forest itself. Interestingly, Rowling is unclear about whether the centaurs’ self-worth stems from a similarly institutionalized form of exclusion. In the same way that wizards are shown to attack members of their own species, such as muggles and squibs (non-magical humans born to magical parents), the centaurs of the Forbidden Forest attack Firenze for helping Harry and remove him from their pack when he begins interacting with wizards, suggesting that

56 centaur culture operates with a similar bent towards exclusivity. In this way, Rowling seeks to further complicate the divide between magical creatures and magical humans by demonstrating that exclusionary practices exist both within the community of magical creatures and half-humans, as well as within a unified, insular culture, such as that of the centaurs.

This division of racialized communities is echoed by divisions within the human race. Throughout the series, Rowling’s text struggles with the idea of normalcy among its human characters as each side of the human race, both magical and muggle, have different criteria for evaluating what is and is not normal. Despite Horne’s claim that “no Muggles speak of their oppression, oblivious as they are of it,” Rowling very quickly presents readers with a pair of muggles who are aware of their oppression—Vernon and Petunia Dursley (Horne 93). Through these characters, the text is able to invert the cycle of oppression established later in the series whereby magical humans seek to dominate their non-magical counterparts, as the Dursleys’ treatment of their nephew, Harry, is notably abusive. Early in the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry’s rigidly, though oft comically, evil aunt and uncle define themselves as being “very normal, thank you very much” (Sorcerer’s Stone 1). In this way, they instantly set themselves apart from the wizarding community, which they know about even earlier than Harry does through their “[shameful]” familial ties to Harry’s mother (Chamber of Secrets 4). Wizard “abnormality” is ultimately defined in the ethnic and cultural differences between wizards and muggles, particularly through the former’s lack of “normal clothes” and differing terminology (Chamber of Secrets 2, Goblet of Fire 40). Even this difference in lexicon is so disparate that muggles and wizards seem to speak two separate languages, as one can often not understand the other, signifying that the difference between these two human groups is strained in a similar way to the divides that exist between magical creatures and magical humans.

While Harry does not view the Dursleys as a representation of all muggles, the magical humans in the series are nonetheless portrayed as being as prejudiced as the Dursleys when it comes to the idea of a universal standard of normalcy among all human figures. Behr asserts that “Rowling shows us wizards treating Muggles much as the colonialists treated the natives…[as] intolerance, snobbery and ethnic hatred—all commonplaces of our Muggle world—are reproduced inside the Harry Potter series via wizard-muggle relations along socio-economic lines” (Behr 125). Thus, while the Dursleys may reinforce their own perception of wizards’ cultural “abnormality,” wizards are shown to be just as discriminatory against their non-magical counterparts. When Dumbledore initially leaves the infant Harry at the Dursleys’ doorstep, Minerva McGonagall, a witch, argues tha t the child should be kept by a wizarding family because “[one] couldn’t find two people less like [wizards]” (Sorcerer’s Stone 13). Even muggle-tolerant wizards are shown to have a complicated relationship to non-magical culture as Arthur Weasley, a character who is often ridiculed in the wizarding world for his interests in non-magical humans, is shown to be fairly unknowledgeable about typical muggle customs. While he expresses a true fascination with the workings of telephones, cars, and electric fireplaces, his engagement with nonmagical humans seems to verge on the wizarding world’s version of Orientalism. Even worse, perhaps, is Hagrid’s assertion that it was Harry’s “bad luck [he] grew up in a family o’ the biggest Muggles [he] ever laid eyes on” (53). Through this statement, Hagrid implies that the unjust, serventile treatment with which Harry grows up is not a result of individual cruelness, but is a result of some shared vindictive spirit possessed by all magicless humans.

57 This prejudice, it seems, is purposely instilled by the Ministry of Magic’s Statute of Secrecy, which seeks to limit all magical and muggle interaction as a precaution to the magical communities. In this respect, the magical community exists in a state of invisibility from muggles so as to avoid the same persecution that their ancestors experienced in Salem.

Similarly, despite the fact that non-magical humans are unaware of their exclusion from the magical world, they too have been segregated from wizarding kind, a point which is reinforced by the text’s magical children who are often unaware of muggle customs, geography, and government. In essence, Rowling’s depiction of exclusivity within the nonmagical and magical human communities demonstrates that, despite their distinct differences, these two communities can be united through a shared space of exclusion.

Rowling attempts to further complicate issues of racial difference and racial oppression in her series by reinterpreting racism through dichotomies based on blood-status rather than on skin color. Among Harry’s peers, it is not phenotypes that cause the characters to treat one another differently, but blood status—something that cannot be seen and can only be determined by cultural difference. In establishing this internal racial dichotomy, Rowling rarely mentions the marginal characters descended from colonial backgrounds, but instead mentions those of a supposed ‘lesser’ blood status, who often belong to white hegemonic society. Lee Jordan, for example, is described only as “a boy with dredlocks,” and Dean Thomas is only briefly described as “a black boy even taller than Ron” (Sorcerer’s Stone 94, 122). Similarly, Padma and Parvati Patil, who are assumedly of South Asian descent, are only described by their hairstyling, their relationship as twins, and their fame for being the “two best-looking girls in the year” (Goblet of Fire 411). Rowling’s brief, and often nonexistent, descriptions of these marginal characters lie in contrast to the oft-repeated descriptions of white-muggle born characters with the derogatory term “mudblood” (Chamber of Secrets 112). Ultimately, the First and Second Wizarding Wars derive from Lord Voldemort’s quest to rid the world of all magical beings who are “unworthy to study magic” (151). The idea held by many, but not all, pureblood characters that muggleborns are “filthy,” “dirty…[and] common” is a nonphysical way for Rowling to discuss contemporary race relations within the wizarding world. Ultimately, even the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge, “[places] too much importance on the so-called purity of blood” rather than instead “[recognizing] that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be” (706).

This message becomes especially salient when considering the differences between Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter, who each inhabit a similar status as excluded figures and operate within their own exclusion in varying ways.

While the Triwizard Tournament highlights the cultural divisions that exist within the overall structure of wizard society, the magical community is also revealed to be domestically divided even within the confines of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Because of his initial contact with Slytherin Draco Malfoy, as well as both Hagrid and Ron’s assertion that “there’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t a Slytherin,” it comes as no surprise that Harry begs the Sorting Hat to place him in any house other than Slytherin. However, just moments before the sorting, Harry is fearful that he will not be placed in any house at all and wishes “the hat had mentioned a house for people who felt a bit queasy” (Sorcerer’s Stone 119). In effect, Harry feels that it would ultimately be worse to be placed in Slytherin than it would to belong to no house at all. Throughout the series, inter-house competition goes beyond friendly rivalries and often leads to exclusionary behaviors. While each house’s dormitories and common rooms are established to give

58 students a shared space in which they can interact amongst their peers, the fact that these common rooms are hidden throughout the castle and require the knowledge of constantly changing passwords indicates a problematic system present in Hogwarts’ foundational structure. Rather than being inclusionary to the group, these houses become exclusionary to the whole, and encourage students to segregate from and dislike one another purely on the basis of to which house one belongs. Like with the founders of Hogwarts, division amongst students proves to be dangerous to the school’s overall well-being, and just as Salazar Slytherin once abandoned the other founders, so too does the house named in his honor in the Second Wizarding War. In this way, Rowling continues to complicate the constructed boundaries that divide various groups in her text while demonstrating the ways in which the institutionalization of exclusionary practices can be detrimental to the success of a unified wizarding world.

Although Harry is a part of the dominant, white wizarding society, his role as a halfblood orphan who was raised by muggles segregates him from the wizarding world. This idea is brought up again and again as Harry’s ability to speak Parseltongue causes many to feel that he is untrustworthy, or inherently evil. In this way, wizard society asks Harry to silence his inherited language, and to instead speak only the dominant English. Even this, however, is complicated as Harry is often restricted from speaking in both the muggle a nd magical worlds. While living with the Dursleys he is told “[not to] ask questions,” and to go to his bedroom, “[make] no noise, and pretend [he’s] not there” (Sorcerer’s Stone 20, Chamber of Secrets 6). In addition, within the Dursley house, Harry is not called by any name and is instead referred to as “boy” or “him.” In this way, Harry’s very existence in the muggle world is made to be a nuisance, a point which is then reinforced by Uncle Vernon’s restriction of the words “magic,” “wand,” or “wizard.” Thus, the Dursleys censor all words that define Harry himself, thereby rendering him something close to nonexistent and undefinable. In effect, Harry can be seen as an excluded figure in both the wizarding and muggle worlds as he is forced into silence by those who have a higher standing than he does.

Like the house elves, goblins, and trolls, Harry’s language is restricted, even from within the wizarding community. While he often questions Hagrid, who is also an excluded figure, and Dumbledore, who is constantly called “not...normal,” Harry is still unable to communicate his ideas among his peers and his professors as they are often “deaf to Harry’s stammers” (Goblet of Fire 161, Chamber of Secrets 98). In fact, although Harry is charged with being a frequent rule breaker, he rarely breaks a school rule without the aid of his invisibility cloak. By literally rendering himself invisible to those around him, he is shown to fully assimilate into the culture only by accepting their wish for him to remain mute and disappear into the dominant culture. However, this action also helps to rid him of his physicality, and particularly his scar, which is the defining feature that indicates his celebrity, and thus, allows him to participate in the dominant culture. In using the cloak to literally erase these features, Harry can be said to intentionally identify more fully as other. It is through his assimilation, then, that he can foster change through revolution, or through acts of rule breaking.

Ultimately, in the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry becomes outspoken and often screams in order to be heard and understood by those around him.

Rather than simply allowing others to believe falsities, Harry expresses his opinion adamantly, even in the face of punishment. In effect, he breaks away from subjugation in order to incite revolution. Unfortunately, it is at the end of this same book that Harry learns his status as “the Chosen One.” Ultimately, it is his choice to accept this role and to use it as

59 a means to incite revolutionary acceptance of all magical peoples and creatures from inside the system that sets him apart from the other wizards in the story.

In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Lord Voldemort points out the “strange likenesses between [Harry and himself]…Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by Muggles.

Probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since…Slytherin himself” (317).

This similarity demonstrates the ways in which both Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort represent figures excluded within the magical community. Although they share this experience, it is the ways in which each character chooses to operate within his exclusion that sets them apart. Unlike Lord Voldemort, who has many followers, but no friends, Harry accepts that his community of friends and supporters are often the ones who get him the farthest in his goals. While Harry is often alone in the face of Voldemort, and thus in the face of death, it is only with the help of his friends and companions that he even gets to face Lord Voldemort at all. Thus, it is through his imposed symbolic status as both “The Boy Who Lived” and “The Chosen One” that Harry represents the importance of having an inclusionary community. In the face of war and the threat of Voldemort’s terrifying domination, it matters not to which house one belongs, under what conditions one is born into, nor what type of magical being one embodies. Voldemort kills without reason or remorse, and thus, it is only through unity within the magical community that Voldemort’s regime can be challenged.

Ultimately, Rowling seeks to complicate the many boundaries dividing the wizarding world, and furthers this complication through Harry’s figure as an excluded orphan child.

Because institutions of exclusion operate both within the wizarding world, and between wizards and muggles, Rowling successfully allows her reader to fall deeper and deeper into the increasingly complex distinctions that categorize Harry and his classmates as being intrinsically different. This collective exclusion then, allows the wizarding world to be unified through their shared experience, which, in turn, renders them an inclusionary society by virtue of their shared degrees of exclusion. As a child born outside of the wizarding world, Harry serves as the reader’s guide to these various concentric communities, and it is through his interaction with these supposedly disparate groups that Harry is able to unify the wizarding world against Voldemort’s threat of apocalypse. Thus, Harry’s status as both an excluded figure and as a member of the white wizarding dominant culture renders him a successful leader who chooses to accept his title as “the Chosen One.”

60 Works Cited Behr, Kate E. ""Same-as-Difference": Narrative Transformations and Intersecting Cultures in Harry Potter." Journal of Narrative Theory 35.1 (2005): 112-32.

Horne, Jackie C. "Harry Potter and the Other: Answering the Race Question in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter." The Lion and the Unicorn 34.1 (2010): 76-104.

Rowling, J. K., and Mary GrandPré. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Scholastic, 1999. Print.

Rowling, J. K., and Mary GrandPré. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York, NY: Scholastic, 2000. Print.

Rowling, J. K., and Mary GrandPré. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York, NY: Scholastic, 2003. Print.

Rowling, J. K., and Mary GrandPré. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. New York: Scholastic, 1997. Print.

Rowling, J. K., and Mary GrandPré. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York, NY: Scholastic, 1999. Print.

61

XX Chromosome (1) Peggy Coots

62 Exploring Security: Discussions with Jane Guyer, Stuart Elden, Russ Castronovo, and Michael Hardt Jane Guyer Jane Guyer is the George Armstrong Kelly Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research is devoted to economic transformations in West Africa, particularly the productive economy, the division of labor and the management of money. Theoretically she focuses on the interface between formal and informal economies, and particularly the instabilities that interface gives rise.

Interviewers: Mary Beth Schmid and Tom Loder DC: Since this is a security journal, we should look more at that. You sa id that you started within the past decade to look more at American questions, I think, about economic behavior. Maybe you could speak about how an American view of livelihood security and insecurity contrasts with a Nigerian or African view and what parallels or what we could learn from one another.

JG: I think that there certainly will be. One of the reasons that I started to even think about our situation, coming from Africa and having thought about the instabilities of Africa especially during the period under structural adjustment, and having collected a huge amount of newspaper articles that were commentaries on the economy in Nigeria and structural adjustment and military rule when life was very unstable. Then you have a great deal of attention to people trying to find landmarks, points of reference: Where are we in all of this as currency devalues and the price of this goes up and the availability of something disappears and so on. It was having been attentive to that that made me attentive to the change of rhetoric in our own public life that started in the last ten years. I started to read the newspaper with the eye of the anthropologist. What are people supposed to understand by that? Those kinds of questions. It is less that I thought that there was something specific about Africa that I thought we could learn from, which we can’t always, but rather the sensibility of having tried to understand the kinds of instabilities with which ordinary people in Africa lived in that period that made me very aware suddenly of our own concepts being not so self-evident, not so transparent, not so graspable. Even not so coherent, not internally coherent with each other: How is that supposed to add up with this one? How are they supposed to exist within the same frame of reference? This is how I did this paper on the near future that came straight out of my African notion that people are living day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year. But if all of our writing is about the distant future, the markets reaching equilibrium or clearing or the markets solving everything, what is supposed to go into that space? And this had come up in the Nigerian newspaper analyses.

It was really that attentiveness to instability, in coherence that I began to think that there was at least a sensibility that needed to be applied to our own situation in the last ten years as this financial world has driven us in certain particular directions. And certainly, the livelihood question: How do you get from A to B? One day to the next? In some parts of our own economy there are people that I know at the bottom of the scale where getting your children to school on time when you have to get to work and you don’t have a car is difficult. You have to get a taxi and the taxi has to drop off several other people so that he can make money on the trip; he isn’t taking individual people. Everybody is trying to put that into a

63 budget that doesn’t include enough money to pay for the cab. You have an impasse situation. I wrote a little paper on this. Where you just can’t get to it. You get your children to school late, they get some kind of a black mark, you get a black mark as a bad mother, you end up somewhere in the welfare system as not being responsible and so on and so forth.

Those kinds of incoherencies in life we can’t fit together. I think that we are seeing that in this country.

DC: How do you see economic security relating to food security? It seems to me that there has been a somewhat incoherent situation since 2008. Was it an economic crisis and /or a food crisis? Additionally, how do you understand the implications of fuel as tied into this context and these social questions?

JG: Bringing together the so-called essentials of life, food, shelter, medical care and transport is part of that. You can’t get medical care without getting in some kind of bus or on a motorcycle and going somewhere. So, the consonance of those prices and people’s livability is really very important. In Nigeria, I work in an area where people still produce a lot of their own food. They are commercial farmers, but they also produce for themselves and their own families. The food crisis doesn’t hit them as hunger in that particular area. We have to think about in particular configurations of these crises: Where does the pressure come on the food system? Is it in the regularity of access? Do people go without? In the cities in Nigeria, they had this saying that you only eat twice a day or twice one day and once the next. They had a rhythmic kind of little saying about that. There is the regularity of eating. There is the sharing of eating: Who gets to eat first if there is not enough to eat? Who gets to eat most? How is that conceptualized, justified, made acceptable as a micro-ethical resolution? Is it the people who are working hard who need the most food? Is it the children who are growing? I think that the food security issue raises its profile differently in different contexts. The price issue and the availability issue raise itself in this country with respect to people eating very cheap, prepared food. If you don’t have a kitchen or you have a kitchen with two burners or you don’t have pots and pans or whatever it is, then you are in that market no matter what.

Saving all the coupons and doing all the cut-rate things that all applies to a very particular band of food.

Stuart Elden Professor Elden teaches in the Department of Geography, Durham University, UK. His research is at the intersection of politics, philosophy and geography. In 2011 he was given the Royal Geographical Society Murchison Award for his contribution to political geography.

Interviewers: Malene Herschend Jacobsen and Lee Bullock DC: Regarding the War on Terror, the question has been asked – how do we wage war on a feeling…terror? There’s a rhetorical dimension in that formation. And you point to this in Terror and Territory as well, in how the concepts terrorist, enemy combatant, legitimate and illegitimate states, and so on, have been encoded in legal and policy declarations. Does this rhetoric translate geographically, even if in just a broader kind of cultural imagination?

64 SE: I think that a number of people have said how do you declare war on—you called it a feeling, or an affect is another way that people have thought about these ideas and things.

In a sense, I was less interested in that as a critique of what was happening, because there have been declarations of war in that sort of sense about other things that are sort of fairly intangible as say, the War on Poverty or the War on Drugs. It’s not a war in an obvious opponent, but it’s a war on something that structures or changes the way that relations in a society are working.

I try to work through what terror might mean, how terror gets labeled. And so you find things like the U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations. Almost all of those are self-determination movements. Now, are they legitimate or illegitimate selfdetermination is almost a separate question. These groups are all ones that are seeking control of territory that is currently controlled by a recognized state. Now, that may groups like the Basque separatists in northern Spain, or it may be movements in China, or it may be in Chechnya in Russia or so on. But they’re all seeking control of a political space, an area of territory that they’re trying to take away. So what’s the relation between the terror and the territory?

And there’s an etymological relation between those terms, but I think much more interestingly, there’s always a relation between those kinds of questions. So, I try to make the argument that not only is the challenge to territorial situations something that is increasingly seen as terrorism, but that territory in itself is shot through with those kinds of relations of power, that the idea of drawing a line is already a kind of a violent inclusion/exclusion, policing it, controlling it, maintaining it, preventing it from being challenged. These are all using various mechanisms of power, which could easily be understood as terror.

So it was to try to think through those relations, not simply in the etymological sense that terror and territory share a similar root, as people sometimes suggest, but to work that through in a more practical register. And so in a sense, I was more interested in that way of thinking rather than simply saying, the War on Terror, what does it mean? It’s so vague as to include everything. So it was trying to work those through in a more practical register, I suppose.

DC: We’ve talked about how territory is often imagined as a bounded space and the state is imagined through its boundaries and through its borders. You’ve argued instead that we shouldn’t think of it as flat, but think of it as more three-dimensional. What work has been instructive in this regard?

SE: In terms of the three-dimension, it would be the people I was mentioning before, particularly Peter Sloterdijk’s work that was useful in thinking that kind of question. On territory itself, it’s a concept where there is actually relatively little that takes it as a difficult concept. There’s loads of literature on particular territorial disputes, particular territorial arrangements, the history of the territory of a particular country, why the borders of this state here, why the states of the U.S. are the shape that they are. There’s that kind of work.

There’s a lot of work on that, but on taking territory as a concept, and saying that’s a problematic concept, there’s actually relatively little work.

65 And so it was taking people who had done work on related spatial categories, such as Edward Casey’s work on place, or some of the work on landscape like that of Denis Cosgrove, or the work that’s on space—Henri Lefebvre’s book, The Production of Space, for example. Could you do something in a similar vein to that kind of work, with the concept of territory? And that you maybe take some of the ideas, and the ways that they’ve approached those questions, to think through the question of territory.

So people like Lefebvre are important. Foucault too, though a lot of what Foucault says about territory is, I think, misleading. But the kind of approach that Foucault has to the historic investigation of conceptions was very helpful for me in this work. And then a more traditional history of political thought approach, people like Quentin Skinner, which is doing much more work around concepts like the state and sovereignty and political thought more generally. But the kind of approach they were taking, I found really useful for thinking through territory.

Russ Castronovo Dr. Castronovo teaches and researches American literature at the University of WisconsinMadison. His current project, Propaganda 1776, examines how the formation of popular consent and public opinion in early America relied on the robust dissemination of rumor, forgery, and invective.

Interviewers: Lee Bullock and Christina Williams DC: Our theme for this issue is security. Let’s talk about this for a moment.

RC: I think the conversation we’ve been having is all about security. Can I send you an email and know that it’s going to be secure, or – imagine this table as the landscape – is my communication to you going to spread across the flatness of this table with nothing to check its flow? It’s all about controlling and keeping information running in prescribed channels and what happens when the banks of a river swell and information suddenly leaps its banks and spreads across the flat geographical expanse that is what we can think of as the terrain the political. Everything we’ve been saying is about how to keep information secure. How to keep messages docile so that they don’t reproduce themselves.

DC: So then, it becomes a question of whose information and about what.

RC: Yes, but again, one of the things I do want to resist is that the “whose” information implies proprietorship. And if we start asking about “what,” we miss the political aspect of communication. The political is not so much about the content; it’s about the fact that the message circulates itself and that’s what becomes political. The content sure can be embarrassing to a regime. Wikileaks can make Hillary Clinton look bad; it can make Tony Blair look like he’s petulant. All these things that happened are important, but I think what is also important and what we don’t recognize enough is the fact that those things circulate is in itself political – apart from the message itself. And that’s what’s insecure. Once we begin to focus on the message, then we begin to do that depth thing. What’s potentially more troubling is the fact that there’s a type of flow and dispersal and evenness that can beset

66 communication, then communications themselves become insecure. Not so much the fact that you can hack my emails, as has happened to Sarah Palin’s emails. People wanted to find a kind of smoking gun or conspiracy. Her emails turned out to more or less banal; instead what’s more important is that private emails of a government official can circulate apart from what they say. The fact of circulation is the meaning. You know one of the things I sometimes like to say is that it’s not the medium – the network is the message.

DC: I’m trying to contextualize this in terms of what Brian Massumi calls the future birth of the affective fact.. .or the idea that some event is always on the horizon such that is always already happening. What happens to the circulation of information within that kind of a mindset. How does that information circulate in a structure of fear or a state of perpetual anxiety?

RC: Propaganda, as we know, historically has always made the most of that—that fear and anxiety. This is one of the danger points. For instance, Joseph Goebbels in his diaries from 1932-33 writes about the campaign to overtake the German state, and he is everywhere impressed with speed. Printing pamphlets one after another, radio addresses delivered and broadcast quickly—it’s always about speed. And so the problem becomes that these media don’t necessarily allow time for reflection. They appeal to that type of future oriented fear and don’t allow for moments of deliberation (which, you will remember, I maligned that type of deliberative process). One of the things about propaganda that interests me in the colonial era as well is that it ebbs and flows—how people and organizations such as the Boston Committee of Correspondents or the Sons of Liberty are controlling the rate at which information moves. So that sometimes they want to slow communication down to allow a message to resonate and sometimes they want to speed it up because American dissidents in the eighteenth century want to stoke popular passions. Here’s where fear enters the picture: Paine was exploiting the fear that the future of America fears looks like the past of India. And not just Paine—other unnamed propagandists or people like Benjamin Rush or John Dickinson who are all writing at this time under names like Rusticus and Americanus Junius or under pseudonyms alluding to the English Civil War like Hampden share this concern of a temporal conjunction between America and British India. . These propagandists are always spelling the future threat of the East India Company, and what they worry is that the East India Company is going in the future to reduce America to a state of vassalage similar to what has beset British India. So I guess what I would say – to just put it in a nutshell – is that fear of the future is so crucial, in the ways you have identified, and it depends upon retrospective examinations of the past and particular uses of that past, which is why literary historians and other “antiquarians” have such a critical and important role to play in public discourse of humanities.

Michael Hardt Dr. Hardt is Professor of Literature and Italian Studies at Duke University and Professor of Political Literature at the European Graduate School. He studies globalization, political and cultural theory, and modern Italian literature. His co-publications with Antonio Negri include Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth.

Interviewers: Jason Grant and Vanessa Marquez

67

VM: Alright. Okay, so, um, I guess, we've been reading parts of Commonwealth and The Multitude in this Security seminar. So, how does security fit into this idea you've been elaborating with the multitude?

MH: Mhm. Let me think of the right way to go. Okay, in some ways security has been used as a general framework for understanding contemporary issues of control. That security has been the legitimation of a generalized submission to forms of surveillance and domination.

What do I mean by that? I mean something I think quite obvious. That the reasons we accept the contemporary security regime involving not only surveillance and information gathering in specialized institutional locations, but also in a much broader social field. What I mean by that is that if you start with a notion that, say similar to Foucault's thinking in Discipline and Punish, in which surveillance and the corresponding production of subjectivity is related to specific institutional sites, so that in the prison, there's one form of discipline and subjectivity, and one kind of very intense surveillance. In the hospital, there's another one; in the barracks, there's a third; in the school, there's another. All of these, both the forms of surveillance and the mechanisms of discipline, and the production of subjectivities are tied to its institutional space. One way of characterizing the contemporary security regime is a generalization of those logics, so that they're no longer confined to specific spaces. I think the examples of that are very easy and common. I mean, in the sense that one instead, of a panoptic architecture only of the prison, we have security cameras, more or less, in every classroom. I don't see one right here but certainly in all kinds of stores, in many countries. I think in Britain more than in the U.S. almost every street in urban areas has a security camera, so that there's a generalized surveillance. It's true, also about, I mean you can think of a number of other ways in which we are, even outside specific instances, outside of the airport check-ins, or when you apply for a job, or something but even just every time you use your credit card, or every time you visit a webpage your data is being recorded and being surveilled. I would put those things together and think of those as the way, or at least one way, that a concept of security, or security regime is becoming generalized.

So, okay, all that was just preface. You said, what does that have to do with the multitude, or what does that have to do, like,‌you know many times I too get tired of using concepts we've developed even if I think they're good. But anyway, rather than the multitude, let's just say, what does that have to do with any project of not only liberation but political action. I think that it's a clear objective that one would have to not refuse interactions with technologies but rather, find mechanisms that we can take control of in our interaction with them.

Okay, that's one task, but maybe before that, I think even before we can propose mechanisms for autonomy with regard to those elements of the security regime, by which I mean surveillance, information gathering, the materials of control. Before we can even think about an autonomy of them, I think we have to find ways in a much more basic way that we can combat fear. I guess this is a very abstract proposition but, I guess, I'm working from the assumption that we accept all of these mechanisms of the security regime because of fear.

You can say in part, but maybe this is the minor aspect fear of the ruling powers, like, why do I submit to that at the airport? Or, when a cop stops me, why do you submit to that? You submit to that because you're afraid of the police, you're afraid of being put in prison, you're afraid of the ruling powers. But, I think the more active fear, the more essential one here, is a

68 fear of abstract, unknown threats that you assume those ruling powers are protecting you from. All of this seemed so much more pressing during the Bush presidency but, it hasn't, in fact, declined very much since the end of the Bush presidency. The constant, I'm referring there to a constant public elaboration of threats, of terrorist threats, of unknown threats. It's hard not to think of that Rumsfeld line, "there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns." I mean, it was his way of imposing the necessity of a security regime because once the fear is located in unknown unknowns then it's so easily generalizable. Yeah, so I think that one, even before the question—this is where I was going a minute ago—which was that, even before addressing the question of how we can actually take control of these social mechanisms of information, one has to find a way first to combat that fear. It's not immediately clear how to do that.