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Technologies of Power and Resistance: Primitive Accumulation, Gendered Violence, and Capital Power

Just as today, by repressing women, the ruling classes more effectively repressed the entire proletariat. They instigated men who had been expropriated, pauperized and criminalized to blame their personal misfortunes on the castrating witch […]. All the deep-seated fears that men harboured with regard to women were mobilized in this context. (Federici 2004)

The aim of this essay is to explore the ways in which the gender hierarchy works to supress women on the expense of the entire proletariat. Capitalism is dependent on divisions in the working class in order to avoid resistance to it - These bifurcations being of gender and race, sexuality, ability etc. I will especially be looking at the divisions of gender and race. I will do this by interrogating the arguments made by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch (2004) stating that the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries should be understood as part of what she calls the ‘politics of primitive accumulation and capital expansion’ in early capitalism. Drawing on this understanding, I will use the contemporary case of the femicides in the border town Ciudad Juarez in Mexico to illustrate how capitalism still relies on misogynist violence for its expansion and function. In recent years, and especially with economic liberalisation on the US-Mexican border, women working in the factories and in connection to the social life around them have been murdered in the hundreds.

Here I try to show that there is a correlation between misogynist violence and trade liberalisation and capitalist expansion. I argue that neoliberalism should be read as a repetition and new era of primitive accumulation, and that the epidemic of violent crimes against women on the US-Mexico border is happening in tandem with the capital expansion of neoliberalism. I hope to show how capitalism perpetuates (and is aided by) violence against women (and also non-white colonized people) for its growth, by employing Federici’s analytical tools to this contemporary case.

The social theory of Michel Foucault (1976) reads the division and individualisation of the working class as a form of disciplinary power. Here subjectification becomes a mechanism of rule, where discipline turns each member of society into a self-surveying individual. Foucault writes: “discipline tries to rule a multiplicity [that] must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and, if need be, punished.” (Foucault 1976: 242) Whilst Federici is clearly very influenced by Foucaults analysis of disciplinary power, she problematizes his genealogy of governmentality on the grounds that the analysis neglects the importance of witch hunts, (and by extension gendered oppression as a disciplinary tool of the entire working class), which for her is intrinsic to the construction of the whole proletariat under capitalist relations of power - especially in the era of primitive accumulation. Here patriarchal structures as norm are replicated in the working class, thus disallowing solidarity across gender.

Similarily to her appropriation/rejection of Foucault, Federici owes her analysis of the faiths of women deemed witches in the early stages of capitalism, to Karl Marx’s theory of economic history. Whilst Marx (1867) saw primitive accumulation from the perspective of the male proletariat, and as paving the way for human liberation by moving people from scarcity to necessity by increasing the productive capacity of labour. Federici argues that capitalism only allowed for European men to achieve a degree of freedom at the expense of the freedom of European women and colonised subjects. The production of the industry in Europe was dependent on women’s unwaged labour in the home, as reproducers of children for labor power, as well as on the labour, knowledge, and raw materials amassed by the empire in occupied land.  

Marx understood violence as inherent to primitive accumulation; however, he merely viewed it as a necessary step in the teleological march toward revolutionary communism. (In Federici 2004) Federici grounds a lot of her work in Marxist theory but departs from the understanding of primitive accumulation as a single event, arguing that it is a constantly recurring phenomenon, stating that the “continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women, are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times” (Federici 2004: 13)

In Commonwealth Hardt and Negri (2000) outline the cycles inherent to capitalism stating that it moves “from primitive accumulation to industrial centralization up to financial accumulation and then back again, after the crisis that financial accumulation creates” (Hardt and Negri 2000: p. 85) This framing of capitalism as a cycle of crisis and overcoming allows for an understanding of capitalism as a system which renews itself upon failure and resistance, with neoliberalism and its austerity measures and subsequent trade agreements being one form of primitive accumulation.  

Federici argues that the transition to capitalism from feudalism was a direct result of the crisis that the peasant uprisings posed to the feudal lords. Here she does not see a break in the oppressive, expropriating forces with the emergence of capitalism, but rather she understands it as an acceleration of these forces. According to Federici, Primitive accumulation always involve the confiscation of that which is communally owned and free to everyone through enclosures, turning common resources into private property with the use of force through expropriation. (Federici, 2004)

She argues that women were used as scapegoats and as a means of breaking up peasant opposition and resistance to land acquisitions of primitive accumulation in the 16th and 17th centuries. Here proletarian men were persuaded by their feudal lords to utulize their power against women of their own class. She writes that  

In the 16th century, “enclosure” was a technical term, indicating a set of strategies the English Lords and rich farmers used to eliminate communal land property and expand their holdings. It mostly referred to the abolition of the open-field system, an arrangement by which villagers owned non/contiguous strips of land in a non-hedged field.  (Federici 2004: 69)

In a similar vain to the closing of the commons and of colonial robbery in the earliest period of capitalism, what is being privatized today are common goods such as health care and education, under the banner of austerity in Europe, and of land resources and autonomy in the former colonies in the global south, with free trade agreements commercializing farming land and bio-diverse lands.  

In the words of Eduardo Galeano (1997) on the colonial wholesale of Latin America for the benefit of the United States: “As Alliance for Progress coordinator Covey T. Oliver said in July 1968, ‘to speak of fair prices is a "medieval" concept, for we are in the era of free trade.’” (Galeano 1997: 20)

The destinies of deivant women in Europe were similar for all men and women in the colonies; Witch-hunts and charges of devil-worshipping were brought to the Americas to break the resistance of the local populations to colonisation, thus justifying land grabs and the transatlantic slave trade. The conquistadors’ experiences of using claims to devil worshipping in the Americas were exported to Europe as a technology of power to be used transnationally. The idea of entire populations as perverse, anti-god and as witches became wide spread in the social imagination across nations. The force used against women in Europe was the same force that women and men in the colonies were subject to, and the Christianising discourses resonated between the two spheres. About (indigenous) women’s resistance to capital and biopower, Federici notes:  

In the first phase of capitalist development, women were in the front of the struggle against land enclosures, both in England and in the “new world” and the staunchest defenders of the communal cultures that European colonization attempted to destroy. In Peru, women fled to the high mountains, where they recreated forms of collective life that have survived to this day. Not surprisingly, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the most violent attack on women in the history of the world: the persecution of women as witches. Today, in the face of a new process of primitive accumulation, women are the main social force standing in the way of a complete commercialisation of nature. (Federici 2004: 143)  

Primitive accumulation necessitates the forceful removal of communities from land and other common good. As well as worsening material living conditions for the peasants and the indigenous in the colonies, the Christianizing campaigns destroyed local and indigenous cultures, religious autonomy, and sense of community and solidarity. There was a constant cross-pollination whereby forms of repression that had been developed in the Old World were transported to the ‘New World’ and then re-imported into Europe with new characteristics added to it to fit the bill. The charges of devil worshipping and witchcraft were part of the key function of racialization and gendering in the colonization of the Americas and for primitive accumulation and capitalist accumulation in Europe. This allowed for a hierarchy of power were women and non-white men were seen as inferior which in turn was used to justify the material and immaterial inequalities. (Federici 2004)

Witch-hunts in the 16th and 17th centuries became a strategy for instilling terror as well as destroying collectivism and resistance in order for enclosures and land privatisation to take place. Women, and especially rebellious women, became collateral damage in the earliest stages of capitalism with land privatisation, the closing of the commons and the obstruction of labour and peasant resistance to capitalist expansion. The witch-hunts can be seen as a form of disciplinary, biopolitical control, where the murder of women who were seen as socially deviant, and who were sexually active outside of marriage or who avoided motherhood, was used as a tool of control of the entire working class. (Federici 2004)

The witch hunts forced women into marital subjugation as the servants of their husbands, and into the roles as reproducers of the labour force for the whole capitalist system. The hierarchical organisation of power that came from the ruling classes dispersed in the subjugated classes in a capillary way. Here non-normative women were criminalized and handed over to authorian figures even by their own community and kin. Federici understands the forming of the proletariat not only as expropriation of people from their land, but also as the transformation of the body into a technology of potential labour. She argues that the most important prerequisite for this wasn’t the removal of people from their land but rather the extermination of resistance, and the creation of divisions and differentiations within the working classes. (Federici 2004)

In Ecofeminism, Vandana Shiva (2014) argues that biodiversity has long been the principle of women’s work and knowledge. Here capitalism (which for her is a patriarchal construction) carries with it a reductionist epistemology that values everything in its potential for exchange. This has been especially damaging for women and those people who were colonized. She argues that:

The economies of many Third World communities depend on biological resources for their sustenance and well-being. In these societies, biodiversity is simultaneously a means of production, and an object of consumption. The survival and sustainability of livelihoods is ultimately connected to the conservation and sustainable use of biological resources in all their diversity. Tribal and peasant societies' biodiversity-based technologies, however, are seen as backward and primitive and are, therefore, displaced by 'progressive' technologies that destroy both diversity and people's livelihoods. (Shiva 2014: 165)

The development of the western colonial and capitalist system is completely dependent on the accumulation and organization of resources in the colonized world. In places in the global south where people live in co-dependence with the land, it is impossible exist along with the predatory capitalist system. The early modern epistemologies discounted traditional indigenous and women’s knowledge as irrational, and even diabolical, because it didn’t fit into the rationale of primitive accumulation.

Primitive accumulation in the era of neoliberalism requires an increased awareness of the dangers of no longer having access to the surrounding environments, except through the cash-nexus. Neoliberal primitive accumulation attempts to subordinate every form of life and knowledge to the logic of the market economy. Thus the new enclosures are making visible a world of communal properties and relations that many had believed to be extinct or had not valued until threatened with privatization. The new enclosures ironically demonstrates that not only commons have not vanished, but also that new forms of social cooperation are constantly taking place, even in areas of life where it didn’t exist before, an obvious example being the world wide web. (Hardt and Negri 2014)  

Due primarily to the struggle of women and the connection of the American Indigenous with their land, the local religions and nature has survived beyond colonial persecution, proving a source of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. Witch hunting did not completely destroy the resistance of the colonized and of women.  The examples being movements such as La Via Campesina, The Zapatistas, Occupy, student movements in Europe and the US, Movement for Justice and The Landless peoples movement among others.

When thinking about the gendering, racializing and destructive forces of neoliberalism and programs such as NAFTA, Ciudad Juarez is a suitable example to take a look at. Bordering El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juarez has been under fast development and industrialization, especially since the beginning of neoliberalism in the 70’s and 80’s. In his book The Open Vains of Latin America (1997) Eduardo Galeano writes:

in April 1969 Richard Nixon told the Organization of American States (OAS) that by the end of the twentieth century the United States' per capita income would be fifteen times higher than Latin America's. The strength of the imperialist system as a whole rests on the necessary inequality of its pares, and this inequality assumes ever more dramatic dimensions. The oppressor countries get steadily richer in absolute terms— and much more so in relative terms— through the dynamic of growing disparity. The capitalist "head office" can allow itself the luxury of creating and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the capitalist periphery know that myths cannot be eaten. (Galeano 1997: 5)

Galeano shows what it means for Latin America to be, in the words of Henry Kissinger “the backyard of the United States”, arguing that the continent continues to be a source and reserve of cheap labour and raw materials, destined for rich countries at expense of the poor. During the 1980s, the Mexican government undermined national corn production, sending peasants and their daughters into the factories along the US-Mexican border such as the ones in Ciudad Juarez, and across the border into undocumented low paid work in the US. (Prashad 2012)  

Since 1982 with the WTO’s structural adjustment programs including deregulation of markets, privatization of state enterprises, and trade liberalization, farmers in the Mexican countryside have been dispossessed from their lands, leading to the rise in migration to urban cities and ‘illegally’ into the United States. With the heavily armed border enforcement structures in place at the US-Mexico border, Mexican migrants get stuck in border towns such as ciudad Juarez. US companies take advantage of this surplus of potential labour power by outsourcing their production to places such as Juarez.  

In the development of Ciudad Juarez, policy was determined by both legal and illegal power structures - this ambivalence in terms of legitimacy, and lack of democratic involvement, sanctioned organized crime within the city, which lead to institutional corruption and exemption for violent crime. Most political life was almost completely bought by American capital investors and multinational companies who cared little to nothing about the women of the city and much more so about extracting as much cheap labour power as possible. (

Federici demonstrates in her work that capitalism has always relied on spectacular violence, and contempt, particularly against women, people of color, and workers, for its expansion. This is clearly demonstrated in the gendered violence that can be witnessed in the border town of Ciudad Juarez. (Rodriguez, 2012)

Sergio Gonzales Rodriguez (2012) who has studied the structural conditions that has allowed for the femicides, and who has written the book The Femicide Machine, frames Ciudad Juarez as constructed in the form of a ”pragmatic production complex” where the utmost exploitation of workers is allowed to take place. Most of the workers are women who have been displaced from their lands due to the neoliberal industrial reforms to agriculture, thus they are forced to move to the border towns. The former rural women are seen as completely disposable and this correlates to epidemic of murders in the border town. He writes in the foreword:  

In ciudad Juarez, a territorial power normalized barbarism. This anomalous ecology mutated into a femicide machine: an apparatus that didn’t just create the conditions for the murders of dozens of women and little girls, but developed the institutions that guaranteed imputinty for those crimes and even legalized them. A lawless city sponsored by a state in crisis. […] Ciudad Juarez represents the kind of settlement that results from the destabilizing tensions of geopolitical interests. (Rodriguez, 2012)

Jessica Livingston notes in her article “Murder in Juárez: Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Global Assembly Line” (2004),  that “while some call Juárez the gateway to U.S. prosperity, in actuality, it is the U.S. gateway to cheap labor.” (Livingston 2004: 65) she states that the maquiladoras (factory managers) in Juárez “primarily employ young women” And that “[t]he managers claim that women are better suited to factory work because of their manual dexterity and their ability to tolerate tedious and repetitive work.” (Livingston 2004: 61). Here women become prey in the churning machine that is capitalist expansion and primitive accumulation. The US-Mexican border becomes the site of conquest for capital powers and colonial occupation, and the women workers become the foremost victims.

According to the research done by Livingston (2004), Women in the factories are asked to wear sexualizing costumes to work, and are encouraged to “to utilize their sexuality” in the workplace. Maquiladoras threaten those who attempt at unionizing with blacklisting or moving of the factory and dismissal of reports of sexual violence or other harassment is commonplace. Gonzales Rodrigues (2012) writes that Mexicans native to the area resent both the multinationals who profit from the chaos, and the women who work for them.  

The maquiladora workers are often portrayed as ‘prostitutes’, serving the United States, at expense of their role as virgins or mothers serving the Mexican nation. This of course resonates with the discourses that surrounded the peasant women in early European resistance to early primitive accumulation, where the murder of women who were sexually active outside of marriage or who avoided motherhood was used as a mechanism of disciplinary power. (Federici 2004) the illegitimating of women’s autonomy can be used to turn the working class against itself. Hundreds of women have been murdered in ciudad Juarez and more are found dead continuously. This should be a national security issue but the neglect of women’s lives has become institutionalised as they are seen as disposable in the eyes of the male (often American) factory owners. Here we see the intersections of racial, gendered and colonial oppression in a neoliberal hyper-capitalist context.  

Feminist organizations in Juárez believe that a “macho backlash” is accountable for the murders of women in the border town. This “macho backlash” might be a reaction against the maquiladoras for employing so many female workers. (Livingston, 2004) In interviews conducted by sociologist Pablo Vila, the following sentiment was recorded: “The maquilas are purely pinche puteadero [fucking prostitution], purely pinche corruption. I think that a chingada [fucking] cantina is cleaner than maquilas.” (Vila) Mexico’s regulatory and judicial organisations, supports ‘the idea of masculine authority and ownership’ over the lives of women and grants males impunity in the exercise of misogynist violence. Further, The factory owners draw on local patriarchal practices, discourses, and tolerance of sexual violence against women, and here this violence intensifies.

Thus we see an organisational system whereby free trade agreements strengthens capital powers, especially US capital powers, on the expense of Mexican subsistence workers and farmers. Migrational flows to larger cities, and especially to the US border cities such as Ciudad Juarez, allow for a surge of cheap labour to be taken advantage of. Because many women are enabled to leave their home towns and enter the  labour market, a misogynist violence where Mexican men are experiencing feelings of powerlessness in face of the US maquiladoras takes root. Here women become victim as patriarchal powers can be experienced even by the oppressed Mexican men who are not as likely to experience gendered (however of course, racial and class) violence.  

In this essay I have explored the ways in which capitalism uses disciplinary techniques for breaking up of the global working class. This has been especially detrimental to the women who have resisted capitalist exploitation and enclosure throughout the history of capitalism. I argue that the witch hunts, as well as the Juarez femicides, should be understood as part of the politics of primitive accumulation and capital expansion. What is clear is that women have continuously been displaced and murdered, especially under periods of primitive accumulation. Capital expansion and primitive accumulation should be seen as a recurring theme, rather than static, one-time occurrence. Relations of power are reproduced and constantly in flux, therefore what can be said about capitalism is that it is always murderous and displacing, as it accumulates power and resources in the hands of the few at the expense of the many through violence.  

References

Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of The Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the witch. New York: Autonomedia.

Foucault, M. (1976). Society must be defended : lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. London: Penguin.

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books.

Galeano, E. (1997). Open veins of Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press.

González Rodríguez, S. (2012). The femicide machine. Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e).

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Livingston, J. (2004). Murder in Juarez: Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Global Assembly Line. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 25(1), pp.59-76.

Marx, K. (1867). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. and Vol. 3.. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company.

Prashad, V. (2012). The poorer nations. London: Verso.

Shiva, V. and Mies, M. (2014). Ecofeminism. 2nd ed. New York: Zed Books.

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Violent Resistance to Violent Oppression: Frantz Fanon and the Zapatista movement

“The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another "species" of men and women: the colons, the colonists.” (Fanon 2004: 1)

In this essay I intend to explore the ways in which violent resistance to colonial oppression materialises by interpreting Frantz Fanon’s (2004) understanding of revolutionary violence as always a greater violence. I will argue that revolutionary violence should be read as colonial violence turning back on its source – as the current reaching its limit with the uprising of the oppressed. Further to this, I argue that the struggle does not end with national liberation but rather that the fight against the violence of capitalism, which is born in the hands of colonialism, and continues after national liberation. I will be looking at the Zapatista movement as an example of armed resistance - in this instance to neoliberalism and neocolonialism.

Background - Violent resistance in the colonies Fanon conceives of decolonization as the rupturing of the whole hegemonic imperial order, as an entire social structure being changed from the bottom up, implying “the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial system” (Fanon 2004: 2) His background in working in psychoanalysis in French occupied Algeria allowed for the study of the mind of the oppressed. He saw in the colonized the immediate need for radical change for survival. (C. Alessandrini 2005) Homi Bhabha (1994) writes that Fanon’s “demand for a psychoanalytic explanation emerges from the perverse reflections of civil virtue in the alienating acts of colonial governance” (Bhabha 1994: 94) In the imperialist colonial context civil virtue is portrayed as having to be brought to the colonized who due to their biological inferiority lacks morals. For example, the civilizing mission was done trough an exportation of Christianity in the Latin American context, thus the conquistadors gained the blessings of the church for their exploitative project. Many indigenous people resisted the Christianizing missions and were thus accused of being cannibals or devil worshippers. This was a technique used by the colonial powers to silence opposition, in a similar vein to the silencing of women peasants who fought for the commons and against enclosures in early capitalism in Europe, thus being accused of witchcraft and devil worshipping. (Federici 2004) Fanon writes:

[W]e should place DDT, which destroys parasites, carriers of disease, on the same level as Christianity, which roots out heresy, natural impulses, and evil. […] [T]riumphant reports by the missions in fact tell us how deep the seeds of alienation have been sown among the colonized. […] The Church in the colonies is a white man's Church, a foreigners' Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor. And as we know, in this story many are called but few are chosen. (Fanon, 2004, p.7)

The violence with which the settlers impose themselves is justified because the colonized is depicted as savage. The colonized society “is not only portrayed as a society lacking values, the "native" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values.” (Fanon 2004: 6). The upholding of rationality and of universal values stems from the enlightenment as a self-congratulatory project of the white European male bourgeoisie. The rejection of violence should thus be understood as an attempt at concealing the fact that the colonial system (and the whole of modernity) is at its core a deeply violent system. As Achille Mbembe puts it:

Colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization. (Mbembe 2003: 24) The settler’s intentions are for the negation of any validity of revolutionary violence. By constructing a society based on racial biology - division and hierarchy, violence is justified when it is directed towards those deemed biologically inferior. Sartre writes in the preface to The Wretched Of The Earth that because the colonizers saw it as immoral to kill and enslave other (white) human beings, they lay down the principle that the non-white was de facto not human. This was justified through claims to scientific reason. (Fanon 2004)

Fanon understands decolonization as a violent process, and as the meeting of two forces opposed to each other by their very essence. He emphasises that the colonial system is a system sustained by institutionalized violence, which is always resisted by the native populations; the colonial world being “a world cut in
two”. This cutting in two brings the colonized to a point where resistance becomes cathartic, and the only possible resort. The colonial settler understands that only by violence and intimidation can the system of oppression be upheld:

In the colonial countries, the policemen and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force (Fanon 2004: 4)

Fanon emphasizes that the violence the colonized experiences often manifests in mental disorders, which he sees as violence and pain that is self-inflicted or directed inwards. Or else, in forms of violence among the colonized, including “the muscular tension of the colonized periodically [erupting] into bloody fighting between tribes, clans, and individuals.” (Fanon 2004: 7) The national liberation struggle, then, is for Fanon a kind of training of the body to redirect violence outward, back where it came from, against the colonizer.

So for Fanon, the colonial ecology is always inherently violent, with the body of the colonized being subject to the appropriation of the pain and violence of their colonization. This occurs in such a way that violent resistance becomes the manifestation of the oppression inherent to the colonial structure, turning the force of the settlers back on themselves. Here the reading of pain as inherent to colonization is fundamental for a thorough understanding of the phenomenon of violent resistance. The pain caused by colonial oppression is the source and the drive for national liberation. “To live under […] occupation is to experience a permanent condition of “being in pain”: fortified structures, military posts, and roadblocks everywhere.” (Mbembe 2003: 8) This pain is eventually directed back at its source, at the colonizer, as the structure is filled to the brim with a violence that eventually flows over.

At the foundation of Fanon’s reading of the violence inherent to the colonial world is the logic of spatial compartmentalization. Fanon shows that the dividing line between coloniser and colonized is upheld by domination and violence; that the frontiers between the two spheres are frontiers of force that “are shown by the barracks and police stations. […] It is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, […] the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.” (Fanon 2004: 3) The police force and army is read here as the epitome of institutionalised violence in its most material form. The diving line between in the settler nation is a “color line” (Du Bois 2007); this division is of the categories of race and expresses itself in terms of economic inequality upheld by force, further entrenching the racial hierarchy and apartheid. The colonial society is completely uneven, the justification for this unevenness being again the racialization of colonial subjects, manifesting through poverty, as well as lack of self-determination and freedom. Fanon highlights that in the colonial context, base and superstructure are one and the same, and therefore: “what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. […] You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.” (Fanon 2004) Fanon understood that even when colonial powers have left the colonies, the economic inequalities inherent to capitalism continues:

When a colonialist country, embarrassed by a colony's demand for independence, proclaims with the nationalist leaders in mind: "If you want independence, take it and return to the Dark Ages," the newly independent people nod their approval and take up the challenge. And what we actually see is the colonizer withdrawing his capital and technicians and encircling the young nation with an apparatus of economic pressure. (Fanon 2004: 53)

And the former colonies are still under vast economic pressure today. Fanon shows that the reason for this global inequality is the colonial history; the reason for underdevelopment in the former colonies should be directly attributed to the development in the empires. Here the myth of modernity as constructed in the ‘enlightened’ west/north and then exported to the colonies is deconstructed. Modernity should be understood as taking place in both hemispheres at once, with the depletion of material resources and labour in the colonies for the development of the empire. European cosmopolitanism and the civilised self-image that Europe has constructed for itself is established on the basis of “refraining from killing other white Europeans, but does not take into account the millions of people killed in the execution of the European project who were not white” (Bhambra 2015: 152) Further to advocating for national liberation, Fanon realizes the importance of a radical redistribution of material wealth (of reparations) for global oppression and inequality to end. This means that for him, the struggle does not end once national independence is achieved. The abundance of European (and US) wealth is a “scandal for it was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world.” (Fanon 2004: 53) In fact, the underdevelopment and draining of the post-colonial world is not over yet but continues; as Arundhati Roy (2015) highlights by looking at the Indian context in Capitalism A Ghost Story, capitalism was born in the hands of settler colonialism and continues under neoliberalism. Here capitalism is intrinsically linked with colonialism. When positing colonialism as a project for capital expansion of the European upper classes, neoliberalism can clearly be seen as a new era of capital expansion, and should be read as a form of neocolonialism. The fight for national independence means the right to self-determination and the right to the organizing against capital, but it does not mean the end to capital. Capitalism is merely upheld by the colonial government on behalf of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie; the economic oppression is waged by the capitalists of the global economic system for capital accumulation and continues once the colonial governments are replaced by national governments. (Fanon 2004)

NAFTA and the Zapatista uprising Commenting on the concept of underdevelopment in Latin America as hinging on colonialism, Eduardo Galeno (1997) writes in The Open Veins of Latin America:

The strength of the imperialist system as a whole rests on the necessary inequality of its pares, and this inequality assumes ever more dramatic dimensions […] The capitalist "head office" can allow itself the luxury of creating and believing its own myths of opulence, but the poor countries on the capitalist periphery know that myths cannot be eaten (Galeno 1997: 24)

In December 1993 agreements were made for the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, The US and Canadian governments, initiating a new era of economic liberalization, allowing for capital to be accumulated freely in North America: the agreement begun a new era of privatizations and corporatization of all common lands and goods. In this context, neoliberalism should be understood as a new form of primitive accumulation, which involves confiscating all that which is communally owned and free to everyone, turning common resources into private property with the use of force through expropriation. (Federici 2004; Hardt and Negri 2004) Since 1982, the WTO’s structural adjustment programs (including deregulation of markets, privatization of state enterprises, and trade liberalization) has forced farmers in the Mexican countryside away from their lands by undermining domestic maize prices, impoverishing farmers and forcing many indigenous peasants to move either to the United States to take up low paid undocumented work, or to slums around metropolitan cities in Mexico, and into factories in border towns along the US-Mexico border.

The indigenous Zapatista farmers in Chiapas who came together to take up arms against the Mexican government understood that the neoliberal trade agreements meant the destruction of the ecologies, cultures and communities of the indigenous people and of small-scale farmers. On 1 January 1994 the Zapatistas launched their uprising with the words ‘Ya Basta!’ - The same night that NAFTA became law in Mexico. The Zapatistas rose up because they understood the implications of the trade agreement: it would be allowing for capital to take hold of all things necessary for their independent, self-governing existence. The Zapatistas declared a ‘war on oblivion’: against the Mexican federal government, the army, and importantly, against oppression, mistreatment, genocide and exploitation, remembering the 500 yearlong history of colonialism, imperialism and exploitation of Latin America. (Prashad 2012) The Mexican government responded with the force of their armies and only did the fighting stop and the demands of the Zapatistas heard when Mexican citizens took to the streets in protest. (Khasnabish 2010) In the “sixth declaration of the selva lacandona” (2005) The Zapatistas (EZLN) state: The people from the cities went out into the streets and began shouting for an end to the war. And then we stopped our war, and we listened to those brothers and sisters from the city who were telling us to try to reach an arrangement or an accord with the bad governments, so that the problem could be resolved without a massacre. And so we paid attention to them, because they were what we call “the people,” or the Mexican people. And so we set aside the fire and took up the word. (EZLN 2005)

The ongoing Zapatista insurrection provides an account of how indigenous peoples have defied the oppression of colonial state violence and capitalist expropriation as well as racialised and gendered violence (Gahman 2016). Many of the Zapatista rebels are women farmers who are concerned for their land and their indigenous traditions. They are resisting the threat of the neglect of indigenous knowledge with the introduction of monocultures and a destruction of biodiversity as well as expulsion of people from their lands. This happens through the restructuring of farming land, but it also takes place with the conservation projects of the rainforests, expelling inhabitants and creating natural reserves and enclosures for tourism. (Vandana Shiva 2014)

Fanon understood the decolonization process as always initiated by the peasants. He writes that, unlike the intellectuals, the peasantry “has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The underprivileged and starving peasant is the exploited who very soon discovers that only violence pays.” (Fanon 2004: 23) The EZLN emerged as, and still continues to operate as, an armed insurrectionary force mainly made up of indigenous farmer.

Further to Fanons analysis of the immediate need of violent resistance of the peasantry is the idea that the intellectual has accepted the universalizing values of the colonizer thus being convinced that that the colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world. What Fanon sees as lacking in the intellectual’s understanding is that the colonial settler is there for the sole purpose of exploiting those indigenous to the land for their accumulation of capital. He writes that the colonist is no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colonial context has disappeared. Thus the neoliberal agenda, which ironically sells capitalism as freedom, does not fit together with indigenous autonomy. (Fanon 2004)

Once national independence has been achieved, the nation as well any attachment to national identity become obstacles to be overcome, in order for further revolutionary action against the capitalist system to take place. Thus the world proletariat must unite as such. However, under the banner of revolutionary nationalism, colonial subjects are able to self-assert their own power and this is where identity politics becomes important. Without self-determination and autonomy of the natives in the global south, there can be no mutual organizing against capital power.

References

Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge. Bhambra, G. (2014). Connected sociologies. London: Bloomsbury. Du Bois, W. (2007). The souls of Black folk. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press. Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of The Earth. New York: Grove Press. Gahman, L. (2016). Zapatismo versus the Neoliberal University: Towards a Pedagogy against Oblivion. In: S. Springer, M. Lopez de Souza and R. J. White, ed., The Radicalization of Pedagogy, 1st ed. Galeano, E. (1997). Open veins of Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Khasnabish, Alex. (2010 ) Zapatistas. Halifax: Fernwood Pub., . Print. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), pp.11-40. Prashad, V. (2012). The poorer nations. London: Verso. Roy, Arundhati. (2015) Capitalism: A Love Story. Tcfhe/Anchor Bay/Starz. Print. Shiva, V. and Mies, M. (2014). Ecofeminism. 2nd ed. New York: Zed

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University Surveillance in Control Society: A critical border studies investigation of ‘PREVENT strategy’ and immaterial borders

In this essay, I argue that the PREVENT duty, which is a part of the UK Government’s overall counter-terrorism strategy, should be understood as a technology of surveillance within a network of power in what Gilles Deleuze (1992) terms ‘control society’. As such, I argue that the program is indicative of the functions of the neoliberalisation of the University.

Background: Control Society and immaterial borders

In Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault (2003) traces the history of society from sovereign power, to disciplinary power and biopower. Sovereign power gives the right to kill, and because life cannot be given by the sovereign but only be taken, the subject owes its life to it. The sovereign has the right to “take life or let live” (Foucault 2003: 223). On the other hand, disciplinary power becomes concerned with institutions, and to “make live and let die”. (Foucault: 2003: 241) It operates in institutions such as the school, the doctor’s office, the factory and the prison. Discipline functions by cementing routines and social striations and by organising bodies accordingly. Biopower is the type of power that turns the population (as such) into a governable body: this is the power over life itself and a normalising power. For Foucault, Biopower does not replace disciplinary society, but rather builds on it, or as he says, ‘superimposes’ it. It is concerned with the fostering of life through gathering of knowledge about “birth, death, reproduction, illness” etc. (Foucault 2003: 243) in populations so as to enable the management of environments. Foucault writes: Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species. To be more specific, I would say that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and, if need be, punished. (Foucault, 2003: 242)

Whilst Gilles Deleuze (1992) on the one hand agrees with Foucault on his analysis of the genealogy and conceptions of power, Deleuze argues that what we are encountering today is the disappearance of some of the mechanisms of disciplinary society and the emergence of what he terms ‘control society’. Whereas disciplinary society is concerned with enclosure and striation (in the school, the factory, the hospital), control society aims to create a smooth surface where power can move seamlessly. Rather than imposing on the body of the individual as in Foucault’s disciplinary society, the power of control society turns on the collection of data about populations of individuals so as to properly manage risk and thus we see an acceleration of biopolitics. Whereas disciplinary society initiates the enclosure of vast spaces, control society makes populations governable through data, rendering enclosures obsolete; there is no longer an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ to power, rather everything is simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Deleuze understands control society as rendering enclosure redundant by extending the scope of knowledge, thereby superseding disciplinary power; as the disciplines, or enclosures, go through crisis, they are subsumed by a power that is more dispersed. Deleuze uses the translation of the factory into the ‘corporation’ as an example, in the context of deindustrialisation under neoliberalism, and the emergence of information economies in place of manufacturing economies, stating that: The factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas (Deleuze 1992: 5)

Whereas disciplinary society for Foucault is centralizing, control society for Deleuze is decentralizing. The dispersing of power is a reaction to amongst many things, the unionizing of workers posing as a crisis of capital, thus meaning capital has to circumvent the power of workers by creating the ‘flexible labour market’ as well as changing working life through a shift from material to immaterial labour. (Bauman 2000, Deleuze 1992, Lazzarato 1996) Capital becomes invested in the subjectification of forms of life, by demanding a labour power that is highly skilled in tasks were previously not considered for productive activities in wage relations such as cultural production, interpreting, predicting and instigating consumer trends. The line between material and immaterial work is blurred and each worker is expected to have their own personal brands, and therefore constantly be working. Thus work becomes dispersed both in time and space. (Hardt and Negri 2010) Disciplinary society is both individualizing and totalizing, meaning that it organizes and constructs individual subjects over whom it exercises power in the form of a single body, a population, and molds the individuality of each unit of that body. However, what is important in control society is not that the individual molds into the form, but rather that there is a way of surveying and codifying behavior and statistical probabilities so as to have knowledge of bodies in the form of patterns (and thus establishing technologies to notice rifts in those patterns). In this way, the unwanted ‘others’ can be removed or detained. Vast amounts of information are collected, allowing for the formation of immense databases, growing with each purchase, check in, and movement. Deleuze writes: what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords […] [t]he numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. […] individuals have become “dividuals" and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." (Deleuze 1992: 5)

In the introduction to ‘Liquid surveillance’ co-written by David Lyon and Zygmunt Bauman, Lyon writes that its not George Orwells’ ‘1984’ that illustrates power in late modern society, but “Franz Kafka’s description of shadowy powers that leave you uncertain of anything (Who knows what about you? How do they know? How will this knowledge affect you?” (Lyon and Bauman 2013: 22) They argue that the operations of power in Kafka’s literature register the conditions of surveillance under late modernity; accordingly ‘The Trial’ is also used by Deleuze to demonstrate the workings of power in control society. Rather than disciplinary, surveillance in control society should be read as liquid, meaning that it doesn’t enforce norms by discipline as in Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, but rather, we find ourselves if the post-panopticon society where the supervisors could be anywhere at anytime. One of the functions of the panopticon is to “be visible […] the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon.” (Foucault 1977: 406) Whereas the panopticon necessarily and concretely striates space and clearly demarcates who observes who and from where, what we see in control society is a type of surveillance that is mobile, and thus all encompassing, subsuming the need for structure. Bauman’s (2013) description of miniature drones, modeled on insects both for surveillance and warfare clearly illustrates the move from the panopticon society to mobile surveillance: “The next-generation drones will see all while staying comfortably invisible – literally as well as metaphorically” (Lyon and Bauman 2013: 35) So whilst there was always the chance that the supervisors were present in the watchtower of the panopticon, power can be anywhere at anytime in the post-panopticon society, making the structure unnecessary. This theorisation of power as elusive, dispersed and invisible resonates with Didier Bigo’s understanding of borders as becoming enlarged, turned into ‘borderzones’ rather than singular concrete checkpoints or barriers. Here “mobility controls are spreading out of any previous locus of control” (Bigo 2010: 20) and borders become disseminated both in time and space through prior check-ins for travel as well as invested in the collection of data for management. The prior submission of information becomes necessary for travel in order for one’s journey to run smooth, thus surveillance works “at a distance in both space and time, circulating fluidly with, but beyond, nation-states in a globalized realm.” (Bauman and Lyon 2013, p.15). The sampling of data here allows for anticipation of risk and in turn the annihilation of risk, before it has even been conceived of, and so the technology for filtering suspects from non-suspects is developed. Bigo (2010) recognizes security as “the programme, the dream of a self-disciplining freedom that realises order without coercion and only by preventive measures.” (Bigo 2010: 20) Travellers therefore self-survey and voluntarily give information in order to co-operate with security personnel so as to move freely across borders that become almost negated for the normalized populations who don’t fit the targets for securitization through detainment and deportation. In correspondence with Deleuze’s ideas about seamlessness and power’s lack of interaction with bodies, Bigo argues by looking at ‘smart borders’ (which allow for travellers within the EU and Schengen, as well as between the US and Canada to speed up their movement, framing the freedom as movement) that The body should not be touched in order for it to be recognised. Fingerprints, even though easily laser scanned, are still too time consuming and produce too much of face-to-face interaction. Facial recognition patterns, especially if they can be developed to work in mass crowds and without long preliminary pattern establishment, are seen as the future for comfortable and smooth travel. (Bigo 2010: 8)

Thus surveillance and power works in a completely discriminatory way. For those who are not deemed targets for insecurity (and let’s be realistic in stating that those people are not the white, middle class, normative members of the population) it might seem as if we are living in a completely free and safe world, moving across a utopian smooth space. For those for whom data incriminates, however, their powerlessness at the hands of the state, capital and police becomes very real. In her essay “Affective Economies” (2004) Sara Ahmed refers to the Australian president John Howards’ speech to the Australian nation in the aftermath of 9/11 saying that he frames the attacks as not only on the “mobility of international capital, but also on the mobility of the bodies of Australians, on their right “to move around the world with ease and freedom and without fear.”” (Ahmed 2004: 128) It is important to consider here the Australian state’s severe immigration policies which lead many to drown in the Indian Ocean due to lack of access to safer means of entry – thus Australian subjects have a ‘right’ to ‘move around the world’ whereas non-citizens are stripped of this right. She writes: The mobility of the bodies of subjects in the West, while presented as threatened, is also defended, along with the implicit defense of the mobility of capital in the global economy (whereby capital is constructed as “clean money” and defined against the “dirty money” of terrorism, which must be frozen or blocked). (Ahmed 2004: 128) Here technology is co-produced with racism. Those bodies coded as potentially dangerous are under surveillance all along their travel and are thus continuously ‘traced’. Some will be put in detention in case their data doubles turn out to be of enough of a threat, and asked questions about their motivations for travel. (Bigo 2010) Therefore control is highly focused on some groups whilst being relaxed for the huge majority of travellers who are not stopped, but nevertheless remain under surveillance. In control society, space is selectively smooth and striated depending on whose movements are under scrutiny. This gives the illusion of freedom to normative and privileged bodies at the expense of bodies deemed a threat, or those who seem to have the wrong motives for moving. And so arrests or detainments can be made on the basis of irregular data. (Bigo 2010)

The ‘War on Terror’

9/11 and ‘the war on terror’ are important events to consider when trying to understand the ways in which power is exercised in the globalized economy and what this means for immaterial borders and movement. It might seem as if we have now returned to sovereign society and the end of dispersed control. It has been argued that we are finding ourselves in a ‘state of exception,’ (Georgio Agamben 2005) where the rule of law is negated by the state of emergency called by the threat of terror and where rights are repealed or revoked in response to the crisis of the war. The problem with terrorism is that it is not a singular event or thing, thus it cannot be conceptualized as ‘the continuation of politics by other means’ (Clautswitz 1976) We need a different understanding of the state in these circumstances, as it is no longer intra-state war that we are dealing with. Events such as 9/11 are deployed to justify new forms of security, policing, othering and surveillance - but it is exactly the idea of new forms that is important to keep in mind. Hardt and Negri (2009) argue that the problem with the depiction of the ‘state of exception’ is that its focuses on transcendent authority and violence, which overshadows and confounds the reality of dominant forms of power that are in actuality embodied in property and capital: “the daily functioning of constitutional, legal processes and the constant pressure of profit and property” (Hardt and Negri 2009: 4), that is: power, which works in network-like formations and in every interaction between bodies and that is sustained by law rather than being exercised coercively. Control society is invested in capital accumulation and negation of risk to capital accumulation meaning that the workings of capitalism must continue. It is true that the start of the war on terror revitalized the sovereignty of the state of exception; however, this should only be seen as a temporary rupture in the capitalist decentralization of power. Fundamentally the mobility of capital, normative subjects (workers, consumers), and surveillance become the ways in which the threat of terrorist attacks is circumvented. (Ahmed 2014) When we understand that power is not to be found in an in the form of an almighty power, but rather in quotidian (although insidious) mechanisms of control society, we can resist, and create counter-narratives to the alienating forces of capital and neoliberal control.

PREVENT duty

What we are encountering (or perhaps not encountering) is power that is seeping into everything, thus only presenting itself to those singled out based on irregularities or ’threats’ in their data doubles. Here, PREVENT duty becomes part of a technology of information-gathering for flagging down of ‘irregular’ data doubles. The neoliberal University becomes part of the ‘border zone’ or immaterial border as a technology for the gathering of information about its students. In the UK Government’s PREVENT Duty Guidance documents, the government states the intended role of PREVENT is to impose a “duty on “specified authorities” when exercising their functions, to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism” (2015) under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act. Additionally, the University is required to submit information or ‘flag’ students who are perceived as having the potential of becoming radicalized, to the attention of government bodies. Here the university becomes another ‘checkpoint’ in the vast, immaterial network of power and control. This is why shocking anecdotes regarding racial profiling have come forth in abundance, since the implementation of PREVENT. When a friend of mine sought counseling from University mental health services regarding radicalization in his own community, he was not helped, but rather flagged down and reported as potentially at risk of radicalization by the service that he had made to think was confidential. With PREVENT and control society, even pastoral services are mobilized in the interests of securitization.

Surveillance within the University becomes especially important as the university undergoes further neoliberalisation. By this I mean the surge in employment rhetoric within universities and the proliferation of careers services and advice. The aim of the University here is to produce highly skilled workers for the immaterial labour economy; marketers, finance administrators, managers etc. In a speech by Minister of State for Universities and Science Jo Johnson in November 2015, it was stated that the aim was to produce “a pipeline of graduates who meet the demands of our businesses and of our economy” (Financial Times 2015). Thus normality is framed as aspiration towards the ideal of being subsumed by an increasingly precarious job market, thus critical thinking and research becomes secondary.

To illustrate the compatibility of PREVENT and the neoliberal University, I wish to draw attention to the following segment from the PREVENT documents: The Prevent strategy was explicitly changed in 2011 to deal with all forms of terrorism and non-violent extremism, which can create an atmosphere conducive to terrorism and can popularise views which terrorists then exploit. (2015) By alluding to the potential threat that “non-violent extremism” poses by creating an “atmosphere” beneficial to terrorism, The PREVENT duty encourages a culture of suspicion and discrimination, placing responsibility on staff to survey students, it thus cements divisions in the student/staff body destroying the trust needed for a truly safe space. It erodes academic freedom by placing restrictions not only on what can be taught as part of the curriculum, but also on invitations to outside speakers. It may also supress any student activism, working to further accelerate the development of the University into career preparation and training, rather than a space for critical thought and free speech. In conclusion – allow me to quote Deleuze from over 20 years ago: Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill. (Deleuze 1995: 9)

  Bibliography Agamben, G. (2005). State of exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective Economies. Social Text, 22(2 79), pp.117-139.

Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Bauman, Z. and Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid surveillance. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Bigo, D. (2010). Freedom and Speed in Enlarged Borderzones. In: V. Squire, ed., The Contested Politics of Mobility. Borderzones and Irregularity, 1st ed. Routledge.

Clauswitz, Carl von. (1976) On War. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press

Deleuze, Gilles. (1992) “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. October 59. The MIT Press: 3–7. References

Financial Times. (2015). UK universities can raise fees if earnings and teaching strong. [online] Available at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/75ad6ab0-83ca-11e5-8095-ed1a37d1e096.html#axzz477FPbIxX [Accessed 28 Apr. 2016].

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended. London: Penguin.

Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2010). Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

HM Government, (2015). Prevent Duty Guidance: for higher education institutions in England and Wales.

HM Government, (2015). Revised Prevent Duty Guidance: for England and Wales.

Lazzarato, M. (1996). In: M. Hardt and P. Virno, ed., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, pp.132 - 208.

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Bodies, Property and Global Medical Power

Commenting on the history of medicalisation of the human population within society, Foucault stated that “there appeared in the nineteenth century –above all in England- a medicine that consisted mainly in a control of the health and the bodies of the needy classes, to make them more fit for labor and less dangerous for the wealthy classes”. (Foucault, 2002, p. 155) This is an understanding of medical practise as something social rather than individual, and more than anything, as something that is informed by, whilst simultaneously informing power. Through this type of medicalisation of society, science and technology become the tools for the wealthy and powerful to control the health of the poor. Foucault wrote about the construction of the nation-state and the subject-ruler relationship and how this relationship was co-constructive of technologies of science and power. Building on from this, Sheila Jasanoff states that “science and technology can be fruitfully studied as social practises geared to the establishment of varied kinds of structure and authority”(Jasanoff, 2006, p.16) It may be argued that the claim to knowledge about bodies through science and technology is a technology of power to control bodies and that the two are co-constructive. Science is politics by other means.

In this essay I will explore the ways in which medical technologies of power transcends the power of the nation-state in the global medical market, especially with the neo-liberalisation of research funding, in search for new bodies for medical subjects; but also how categories of race and nationhood is reified through a focus on diversity - however minor - of the genome, such as in the human genome diversity project. I will argue that there in sociology needs to be an understanding of the relationship between property and the human body as one informed by power struggle in the context of biomedicine, necessarily just because the practice of biomedicine is a type of production and accumulation of power and knowledge. The claim to ownership over ones’ individual body and the genetic and other material from the body is a practice of dissent to the biopower that industry, the state, and scientific experts practice, with the tools and knowledge’s that are developed with different types of technology. We see how this type of power has been exercised over marginalised groups, especially indigenous groups such as the Havasupai in America, who were deemed as having valuable genetic make-up for scientific search of unique genomes in the process of advancing biomedical mapping of the diversity of the human genome.

In this essay I wish to show how biopolitics and colonialism intersect (by drawing upon Schwartz-Marín, Restrepo and others) through the types of control over bodies that often is bound up with reified racialised and gendered categories of marginalisation such as in the case of the Havasupai, as well as of the black woman Henrietta Lacks for the first widely used cell line (the HeLa cell line) which is a cell line that has been invaluable for research throughout the biomedical practice since the 1950’s without any informed consent ever being procured for its obtaining. This is of course symptomatic of racialised power structures and categories that are produced and reproduced within medical science.

In their study of Mexican and Colombian struggle for genetic sovereignty, Restrepo and Schwartz-Marín explore the ways in which institutions have been set up in order to protect the genomes of populations within the Mexican and Colombian nation-states and how genetically reified constructions of race is produced through this. They perceive this as a new type of biocoloniality and use the example of how the Mexican and Colombian governments have set up institutions in order to claim power over indigenous and mestizo (‘mixed race’) genetic material that is deemed unique and valuable in the global medical market. They have done so in order to protect bodies from ‘external’ powers such as scientists and researchers who are funded by companies that most often are situated in Europe and North America. Here we see how biopower is dispersed throughout society and how it not only plays out between coloniser-colonised, or state-subject but rather that it is in constant fluctuation between individuals, nation-states, global medical companies and other stake holders. The body is a constant site for struggle for power; Instances such as the Mexican and Colombian genetic institutions, together with other cases such as that of Henrietta Lacks and The Havasupai tribe, demonstrate this. It is interesting to look at the genealogy of how the study of human diversity was carried out by former European colonial settler powers and how they were able to exercise authority over non-European subjects through science and medicine, to understand biocoloniality today:

According to Quijano, Cartesian thought established a strict dualist ontology that separated body/nature/object from reason/subject, allowing for a version of Eurocentrism in which some (non-European) races were seen as closer to nature, […] therefore suitable to become objects of knowledge and of domination and exploitation (Restrepo and Schwartz-Marín, 2006, p.994) Euro-centric claims to knowledge allow for the domination and exploitation of those who are deemed less civilized and racially inferior within the deterministic, reductionist, essentialist, system of racial categorisation and hierarchy invented through western medical practice (especially within the capitalist economic system today). The ‘Othering’ (Said, 2003) in this type of scientific production is what drives the research. Science in (settler) colonial times was a technology to ‘prove’ the inferiority of the colonized subjects; In the preface to the fifth edition of Franz Fanon’s ‘the wretched of the earth’, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that because the colonizers in the 19th century saw it as a moral trajectory to kill and enslave other human beings, they lay down the principle that the native were in fact not human. (Sartre, 2001) This dehumanization was justified through scientific claims about the biology of the colonized, this links back to how categorization, differentiation and a focus on ‘diversity’ is a technology of power. The human genome project (HGDP) is a project that is worth looking at when discussing the co production of science and power. The HGDP has been on-going since 1991 when it was first drafted, and has since then changed many times; its central purpose however, has been to map the diversity of the human genome, specifically looking to indigenous groups for their supposed uniqueness in genetic build up. (Reardon, 2001) This is a way in which biomedicine uses radicalized social categories (that has been dismissed by post-structuralist and sociologists thinkers (see Goffman, 1990, for an example)), to further biotechnology by trying to find meaning in these categories; although the diversity of the genome has been shown to be minimal, the search for differentiation carries on. Reardon (2001) argues that biology has always been invested in the study of diversity from 18th century taxonomy to today’s genetic studies. We can see how the object of differentiation is on going but that the technology has changed. With the help of the methods that for example the HeLa cell line contributed to biomedicine, the study of diversity has been revolutionised even when the aims of finding difference in human populations is the unchanged. This shows signs of lack of reflexivity within the biomedical community as a focus on ‘diversity’ within biology has had detrimental effects before in terms of slavery, colonialism and ethnic cleansings.

It is helpful to look at the case of Henrietta Lacks when trying to understand the power relationships that are produced between scientists and subjects in biomedicine because of how in this instance white, male scientists exercised power over the black female body of Lacks and the cell-lines of her blood in their claims to knowledge. Lacks was a black woman from the American south who despite knowing that she had a ‘knot’ on her cervix refrained from seeking medical help for a long time. This made her fall ill and eventually she died before being able to go through successful treatment. Rebecca Skloot (2010) notes in her book about the (immortal) life of Henrietta Lacks that Lacks husband had to drive her twenty miles to get to John Hopkins hospital to seek treatment but also that “For Henrietta, walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. She knew about harvesting tobacco and butchering a pig, but she’d never heard the words cervix or biopsy“ (skloot, 2010, p. 25) We see here an instance of health inequality in how Lacks social and economic situation prevented her from taking part of positive aspects of medicine even though her body has since revolutionized the medical technological practice in ways that were previously unthinkable. Lacks’ medical doctor took a sample of her tumorous cervix that was then sent (without her consent) to the laboratory of Dr. George Gey who was trying to grow cervical cancer cells in vitro (that is outside of the rest of the body). (Skloot, 2010) Gey succeeded in growing the cells outside of the body of Henrietta Lacks and then shared them with the rest of the scientific community for biomedical purposes; Henrietta Lacks’ body was shared among the white, male scientists in their search for accumulation of wealth and power and whilst her family is still poor, the scientific community has gained massively from her. The hierarchies here are evident. Hannah Landecker (1991) describes in her findings of studying the way Henrietta Lacks was personified through the HeLa cell line that at first she was seen as a virtuous, young, housewife; But as soon as it was discovered that the cell line had ‘contaminated’ cell lines obtained from other bodies, disrupting what had previously been seen as successful advances in biomedical science, she was described as a “promiscuous, malicious black woman” (Landecker, 1999, p.213). Henrietta Lacks becomes personified through the cell line of her body showing that knowledge really is power. The use of Henrietta Lacks’ cell line throughout biomedical research and the complete lack of compensation for her and her family is entagled with racial and gendered power relationships that are bound up with the same types of racialised and gendered constructions that are produced and practiced within biomedicine today in projects such as the HGDP.

In 2004 the Havasupai tribe who are indigenous to the Grand Canyon, filed a lawsuit against the Arizona State University (ASU) in order to claim back the rights to the blood samples that had been taken from members of the tribe by the ASU in order to conduct genetic research studies on diabetes type 2. The samples were initially collected for the supposed benefits of the community, but the Havasupai discovered that the genomes derived from the blood had been used for other purposes than that which they were informed about in the first place (such as the production of genome studies of schizophrenia) and therefore they took legal action against the university practises. Here we see how a struggle between the scientists at the ASU and the indigenous Havasupai community for the right to property over, and essentially for right to power, control, and, sovereignty over the body and the mind was played out (note that it can be problematic to assume any distinction between the body and the mind as demonstrated earlier with reference to settler colonialism.) (Garrison, 2012) Foucault stated in his paper on the birth of social medicine that in the 1800’s, English speaking “religious groups were combating medicalization, with asserting the right to life, the right to get sick, to care for oneself and to die in the manner one wished.“ (Foucault, 2000, p.155) similarly, the Havasupai were challenging scientists at the ASU who were asserting a right to the Havasupai tribes genetic history, and although the community might not be strictly a religious groups as in Foucaults example, but rather a community with a common culture and religion, (especially one that differs from the neo-liberal western hegemony) this is a good example of what he was trying to demonstrate. The tribe have knowledges and traditions that are very much different to those of a scientific community and have managed to live for a very long time in the Grand Canyon surely struggling against colonial settlers before. Building on from this, Anne Phillips (2011) states that The capacity to resist intrusions on the body, and determine for oneself what can or cannot be done to it, has been central to the struggle for human rights. It is sometimes formulated in what sound like ownership terms (Phillips, 2011, p.2) The struggle for the human right to autonomy over one’s body within biomedical practice becomes the point at which the body is considered property. The body isn’t in itself essentially property because the word ‘property’ only comes to be in the power relationship that makes its claim necessary. The samples of the Havasupai were returned to the community but no legal repercussions followed for the researchers, despite the fact that they had breached the initial consent forms. Through semi-structured interviews with “institutional review board (IRB) chairs and human genetics researchers at US research institutions” Nanibaa' A. Garrison (2012) has tried to gain an understanding of how institutions view the case and what the possible consequences for future research involving the genetic materials of the body could be. What she found was that the biomedical institutions did not see the case as something that could potentially have an impact on how their research should be carried out, or on any types of epistemological changed having to be sought out, but rather that there were understandings of the implications as to how to better obtain consent from subjects in order to avoid legal outcomes or ethical reprimands. For example one of the IRB chairs said that: We encourage people to describe the types of research that may use the sample in the future, if applicable. […] rather than being advocates of tiered consent, . . . we’d rather say, ‘‘Listen, you’re giving broad permission for use of this, and that broad permission might include some of these kinds of things and if you don’t want your cells used that way, then don’t participate in the research.’’ (IRB chair Int22) From this comment it is possible to draw some conclusions about how scientists are encouraged by the IRB to find more ways to thoroughly safe guard properties of subjected bodies once the materials have been obtained for research, in order to avoid individuals or communities to intervene in how their bodies are being used. The consent forms become technologies of power where science and politics is co-produced; instead of the power becoming more evenly distributed where scientists change some of their claims that they make about knowledge of the body of subjects, the methods and technologies of obtaining these knowledges change. This is an example of the power that science is co-constructive of as the scientists in this instance were not willing to look at their own positionality within research and therefore run the risk of advancing exploitation for their own claims to knowledge about the body.

In this essay I have tried to demonstrate how through the technology of biomedical science, the body becomes a constant site of struggle for rights and that the claim to property over one’s own body is a dissent to the biopower that biomedical actors exercise. I have demonstrated this by drawing upon work about Mexican and Colombian state institutions of within ‘biocoloniality’ and by trying to gain an understanding of what property of the body means in the contexts of the Havasupai tribe and of Henrietta Lacks. This work has its limitations in trying to show some of the different ways in which power is exercised but I hope that I have been able to demonstrate that biopower entangles technologies of science, the body as property and knowledge even where the contexts differ. I would propose (as many others have before me) that sociologists develop an understanding of the importance of the meaning of sovereignty over the body, and the right to property over the body and what this means in a time of technologization and scientific authority.

References Foucault, M. (2008). The history of sexuality. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2002). The essential works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984. London: Penguin. Edited by James D. Faubion. Garrison, N. (2012). Genomic Justice for Native Americans: Impact of the Havasupai Case on Genetic Research. Science, Technology & Human Values, 38(2), pp.201-223. Goffman, E. (1990). Stigma. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jasanoff, S. (2004). States of knowledge. London: Routledge. Landecker, H. (1999). Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science. SIC, 12(01), p.203. Reardon, J. (2001). The Human Genome Diversity Project: A Case Study in Coproduction. Social Studies of Science, 31(3), pp.357-388. Said, E. (n.d.). Orientalism. Sartre, J. (2015). In: F. Fanon, ed., The Wretched of the Earth, 1st ed. London: Penguin, pp.7-26. Schwartz-Marin, E. and Restrepo, E. (2013). Biocoloniality, Governance, and the Protection of 'Genetic Identities' in Mexico and Colombia. Sociology, 47(5), pp.993-1010. Skloot, R. (2010). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers.

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Is it ‘racist’ to limit immigration?

“In July 2013, the UK Home Office launched an advertising campaign with the slogan ‘In the UK illegally? Go Home or face arrest,’ mounted on a billboard and driven around ethnically and nationally diverse areas of London. A few weeks later, the @UKhomeoffice Twitter account began to publish tweets about arrests at locations around London, with the hashtag #immigrationoffenders and with some photographs of arrests, drawing attention to increasingly visible stop-and-check operations by immigration officers at tube stations and elsewhere in the capital. Later in August, further posters were displayed inside immigration reporting centres in Glasgow and Hounslow, where asylum seekers were faced with images of aeroplanes with the slogan ‘This plane can take you home. We can book the tickets’.” (Jones et al, 2014)

In order to assess the question as to whether it is ‘racist’ to limit immigration, this essay will take a theoretical approach to border politics, using the UK Home Office ‘Go Home or face arrest’ campaign as a case study. The aim of the essay is to shed some light on deterrent migration policies and border politics in contemporary Britain; I want to argue that the campaign by the UK Home Office is one of the expressions of a racist and xenophobic politics sustained through national border politics and immigration control and that the construction of race, the displacement of migrants and construction of global inequalities has a racist colonial history that is vital to take into account when doing this analysis. Adding to this, I wish to argue that racism and specifically xeno-racism is part of wider system of oppression within contemporary British neo-liberalism as well as global capitalism, and the product of technologies of state securitisation and ‘the war on terror.‘

In answering the question as to whether it is racist to limit immigration, I will argue that national borders are a part of what sustains an uneven global system of power; this global system is based in economic oppression along racialised lines; The strategies that are taken by the UK Home Office in order to control and limit immigration are situated within the intersection of race and class oppression and is perpetrated by historical colonialism as well as the modern globalization of capitalism and in the ‘state of emergency’ produced by the ‘war on terror’ and economic crisis. The ‘go home or face arrest’ campaign needs to be situated in the context of a colonial history of racialization as well as in the context of the modern era of economic liberalization, austerity, and inequality, and in the context of securitization post 9/11 and specifically 7/7 in Britain.

In the preface to the fifth edition of Franz Fanon’s ‘the wretched of the earth’, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that because the imperialists of the 19th century saw it as immoral to kill and enslave other human beings, they founded their deathly practices on the principle that the colonized were in fact not human. (Sartre, 2001, p.13) This dehumanization was justified through scientific claims about the inferiority, as well as on the racialised biology of the colonized. The construction of race through the scientific claims to evidence for the natural hierarchies of the human race allowed for domination through exercises of essentialising and Othering for economic exploitation and resource extraction in the colonies. Indeed, we still live in the aftermath of imperial colonialism; racist practices today are based in colonial legacies. The occupations by Britain as well as other colonial powers in the 19th century of foreign lands can be said to be the very reason why some countries are still struggling with civil war, poverty and oppressive regimes; This is also some contributing factors as to why so many people today are being displaced, forced to leave their homelands and migrate to Britain and other places in Europe as well as to the northern hemisphere/the west such as North America, but also New Zealand and Australia. Those in power might not explicitly use the rhetoric of hierarchies of race today, however this doesn’t mean that the system of power isn’t built upon these structures as a result of history. Contemporary geographies of and within late capitalismcan be argued to be a continuation of 19th century colonialism and should be diagnosed as perpetrating global inequalities with the outsourcing of cheap labor to the global south, and draining of skilled labor to the north. Neil Smith (2010) argues that “the industrialization of the third world and a new international division of labor, intensified nationalism and a new geopolitics of war” needs to be attributed to the globalization of capital. (Smith, 2010, p. 1) Liz Fekete (2001) has argued in a similar vain that global migration management strategy since the 1962 commonwealth immigration act drains the global south as well as the former communist part of the world of their “economic lifeblood, by creaming off their most skilled and educated workforces”(Fekete, 2001, p. 29); whilst actively working against those migrants who are in need of asylum for their protection or who are escaping poverty as well as war. This, I would argue, is a modern form of imperialism that isn’t occupational per se but where former settler nations control the resources and labor power of former colonized nations. With the break up of the Soviet Union, The economic zone of influence has further expanded to countries in the former communist territories allowing for the racialization of white migrants from Eastern Europe. This is what is called xeno-racism. In trying to define xeno-racism, Sivanandan states that:

“It is a racism, […] that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and is therefore passed off as xenophobia, a ’natural’ fear of strangers. But in the way it denigrates and reifies people before segregating and/or expelling them, it is a xenophobia that bears all the marks of the old racism. It is racism in substance, but ‘xeno’ in form. It is a racism that is meted out to impoverished strangers even if they are white. It is xeno-racism. ” (A. Sivanandan cited in Fekete, 2001, p. 23-24)

It is evident that the imperial racist practices that constructed differences in race for its exploitation of natives in the colonies have become powerful economic tools making the construction of race based on skin colour and other physical attributes redundant. The policing and discrimination of migrants brings together the most racist practices of modern times: scapegoating, victimization, segregation, as well as internment. These practices show how oppression of migrants is not only based in the constructions of race hierarchy but also in the hierarchical economic class systems. (Fekete, 2001) Migrants from Eastern European countries are criminalized as a collective and constructed as ‘bogus benefit scroungers’ who fail to adhere to liberal conceptions of the community of value, (Anderson, 2013) not because of their skin colour but because of British economic power over those countries who are economically deprived. This as a result of the globalization of capitalism and of liberal ideology where the state and economy is separated and the welfare of citizens is outsourced to the market - leading to a competitive system of inequality and poverty.

Some of the sources of contemporary patterns of migration can be argued to be the break-up of former communist zones of influence and the impact of globalization and the insatiable demands of neoliberal hegemony and austerity demands by the World Trade Organization and the World Bank on ‘developing’ countries. (Fekete, 2001) Both these sources of migration can be understood as the global domination of the northern hemisphere/those countries that are constructed as the ‘west’ (including Australia and New Zealand) of those countries in the southern hemisphere. Coincidentally, these are the countries that have benefitted from colonial imperialism: The power inequality could be read as further evidence of a modern continuation of imperial domination and of economic colonial practice with the expansion of neo-liberalism globally.

The construction of the British neoliberal nation-state is the construction of a state of security/emergency as a result of both the economic crisis of 2008, as well as of the ‘war on terror’. Human life needs to be quantified and calculated for its net worth because this is the way that the neo-liberal state functions. The claim that immigration (as well as benefits and social security for ‘naturalized’ citizens) needs to be limited, is done on an economic basis that references the state of perpetual economic crisis that is constructed through discourse by the government and by the media.

Mark Fisher (2009) writes in ‘Capitalist Realism’ that: “The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?)” (Fisher, 2009, p.1) So the revoking of the welfare system becomes normalized with reference to economic crisis. This is also how limits to immigration are justified – both in reference to economic shortages as well as in terms of threats of terror (especially since 9/11 and more recently, the attacks in Paris 2015). There is little room for discourse that challenges the view of austerity and emergency, because capital power benefits from it. Racism and xenophobia can be theorized as an affective assemblage, or a kind of racist collective consciousness that is the result of a particular kind of affective training and indoctrination of fear and emergency. This education of the senses fosters affective circumstances usually in relations to the presence of the ‘other’. Les Back writes that “the end result is the production of a racist nervous system that structures emotional life and filters the senses” (Back, 2011, p.314) This is an alienating process that disables citizens from connecting with each other and creates a continuous paranoid state of ‘us and them’ where the control, threat of deportation and Othering of migrants is normalized. So when the UK Home Office launched “high profile interventions aimed at directing public attention to and increasingly ‘hard line’ of the government in controlling ‘illegal immigration’” (Mapping Immigration Controversy, 2015) they were taking part in an affective practice of indoctrination of fear and intimidation; This can be seen as a contribution to the education of the senses and a normalization of harassment and racist propagation by the government. Commenting on this in a video made by the founders of the ‘Mapping Immigration Controversy’ project, Dr. Hannah Jones says that: “We found that several people who weren’t previously aware of the go home van, thought that maybe it was the work of extremists, someone compared it to the EDL.“ (Mapping Immigration Controversy, 2015) In this campaign, the UK Home Office took it upon themselves to determine for migrants that their ‘home’ (which in itself is a very affective concept) couldn’t possibly be in the UK, because they might not have the necessary paper work sought after by the state. National borders and border controls are ways in which nation-states are defined and become material, - but borders are not only situated at the edge of the nation or in between different nation-states, they also materialise in the discourse of ‘us and them’ (Anderson, 2013) creating false dichotomies of the immigrant and the citizen. Bridget Anderson writes:

“Central to my argument is that modern states portray themselves not as arbitrary collections of people hung together by a common legal status but as a community of value, composed of people who share common ideals and (exemplary) patterns of behaviour expressed through ethnicity, religion, culture, or language-that is, its members have shared values. They partake in certain forms of social relations, in ‘communities’: 'bound by common experiences … forged by friendship and conversation … knitted together by all the rituals of the neighbourhood, from the school run to the chat down the pub’ […] The British people uphold the rule of law, reward hardworking families, respect human rights, etc.” (Anderson, 2013, p.2-3)

This discourse of community of value, or ‘us and them’ functions in determining which lives can be valued or respected as well as mourned at death, and which lives can be dismissed as unworthy. (Butler, 2004) Border practices of control define the nation-state through ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991) of insider and outsider and through affective production of racist ‘nervous systems’ and discourses such as the ‘go home’ campaign and other anti-immigration discourse; the practices which define the borders of the nation-state are practices such as detainment, deportation and denying of asylum or citizenship to those deemed unworthy. The British governmental bodies such as the UK Home Office can determine who is welcome, and how many are welcomed, based on economic calculations rather than on humanitarian bases. But the borders today are not only managed by national governments, but also through supranational governments and in between countries with similar economic power. Commenting on this, Liz Fekete writes:

“The state racism of today, however, differs from that of the earlier period in that the national state is not its primary originator; rather, state racism is derived from a globalised racism which is designed by supranational bodies, incorporated into EU programmes and transmitted to the member states for inclusion in their domestic asylum and immigration laws” (Fekete, 2001, p. 29)

This highlights the ‘us and them’ mentality that is sustained by nationalistic discourse, along colonial, racialised lines. The countries that have benefitted from white supremacy and who propagate for economic liberalization are managing the flow of people who migrate. This because of the ‘modern fortresses’ that these countries maintain through their oppressive international politics. The United States, Canada, Australia, and the European Union have been collaborating in sharing information, establishing supra-governmental organizations and collecting resources in the global control of migration movements of subjects. An example of this is the ‘International Center for Migration Policy and Development’, which was founded in 1993. This center was created after intergovernmental negotiations on asylum and migration policies in places like Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia (Cheran, 2001). Taking class factors into account, xeno-racism is a concept that might enable us as sociologists to understand the intersectionality of class and race. In the oppression of migrants and in the control of social and geographical movement the construction of racism has local expressions whilst it also manifests as a construction of global economic class division. This takes place between the southern and the northern hemispheres, creating core and periphery economies in an uneven global economic world system. (Wallerstein, 2004)

When answering the question as to whether it is racist to limit immigration, one is really opening a whole can of worms. It is a hard question to get a definite answer to; I have tried in this essay to outline some of the problems such as colonial construction of race, neo-liberalist ideology and the state of emergency, which allows for economic/security arguments for control and oppression of migrational movements. I have argued that the strategies that are taken by the UK Home Office in order to control and limit immigration are situated within the intersection of race and class oppression globally and is perpetrated by colonialism as well as the modern globalization of capitalism and in the national ‘state of emergency’ produced by the ‘war on terror’ and the economic crisis of 2008. The control of National borders and limits to immigration are part of an uneven global system of power that is based in economic oppression along racialised lines. In this essay I have tried to take an intersectional perspective with regards to class and race in my analysis, but of course it is lacking in that I did not mention that things such as gender, ability and/or LGBTQI rights add more layers to the discussion to be had; and to add to this that immigration controls and borders are of course not the only expressions of racism and other forms of oppression that a person or group of economic and racialised minority might face. I have tried to point to the structural issues that face migrants in need of crossing borders, be it for economic, safety or any other reason and to highlight the uneven system of power that prevails in the UK and globally as a result of colonialism and the deterioration of civil and human rights in the neo-liberal state.

Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991. Print. 

Anderson, Bridget. Us And Them?. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print. 

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004. Print. 

Cheran, R. “Xeno-Racism And International Migration”. Refuge 19.6 (2001): n. pag. Print. Discover Society, ““Swamped” By Anti-Immigrant Communications?” N.p., 2014. Web. 15 Dec. 2015. 

Fekete, Liz. “The Emergence Of Xeno-Racism” Race & Class 43.2 (2001): 23-40. Web. 

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009. Print. 

Sartre, Jean-Paul. (2015). In: F. Fanon, ed., The Wretched of the Earth, 1st ed. London: Penguin, pp.7-26. 

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London [etc.]: Penguin books, 2003. Print. 

Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital And The Production Of Space. 3rd ed. London: Verso, 2015. Print. 

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. World-Systems Analysis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Print.

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Blue is the warmest color: challenging heteronormativity or fetishizing the lesbian experience?

In this essay I am going to explore the different ways in which compulsory heterosexuality is challenged in cinema and how the film making industry has been influenced by feminism. I am going to do this by using Blue is the Warmest Colour (original title ‘La vie d’ Adele’ (Kechiche, 2013, France)) as a case study in order to explore the idea that the feminist issue of heteronormativity is challenged and put in contrast to lesbianism. However, I will argue that the film isn’t in itself liberatory because the lesbian relationship (which is the main part of the plot) portrayed in the film isn’t in itself feminist or empowering for women. I will argue that the film must be criticised with an understanding of the male gaze (and with the lack of contestation of domination portrayed in mind) to deconstruct what might at first glance seem to be in opposition to the heterosexual oppression of women and to explore how the relationship portrayed is oppressive and normative in other ways. I will try to uncover how this contemporary film is inspired by feminism in the issues that are tackled whilst at the same time being ambivalent about feminism. I chose this film because it has been one of the most acclaimed films about a lesbianism in the last years. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival and has had a big effect on the film industry, both in terms of its realistic cinematic style and the themes that are covered (something that I unfortunately wont have time/space to cover). 

In ‘compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’ Adrienne Rich (1980) sets out, in typical radfem manner, to critique and deconstruct the heterosexual institution, by arguing for an understanding of heterosexuality as an enforced system of male domination over women. Rich identifies heterosexuality as a hegemonic ideology that silences alternatives, when there are other forms through which women can organise their emotional lives. Rich highlights the fact that women have engaged in non-heterosexual relationships through history, and in many different parts of the world, but that they often have been persecuted, marginalized, and made invisible. She argues that heterosexuality is imposed onto women culturally through different means of propaganda such as film, print media and pornography. Further, she argues that all women exist on a lesbian continuum from childhood attachment to the mother; drawing on psychoanalyst feminists writers. She argues for a kind of feminism that doesn’t take heterosexuality as the norm or the absolute, but rather sees it as a political institution materialised by power. Rich argues for a feminist discourse that sees the potential for women-empowerment through equal romantic relationships and lesbian existence. (Rich, 1980)

“Blue is the Warmest Colour,” which is written by Abdellatif Kechiche might be said to challenge heteronormativity through telling the story about the young woman Adele who falls in love with the slightly older art student Emma. The film is set in contemporary Lille, France, and follows Adele from her last year of high school until she is in her early twenties, working as a schoolteacher. In the introduction to the film we see how discourses of compulsory heterosexuality are played out in the life of the main character when she starts to date a cis-man from her high school, whom she isn’t interested in. She starts the relationship because of pressure from school friends. She is essentially forced; at an early scene in the school cafeteria, the boy walks past and her friends ask her whether she thinks he is attractive. She replies that “he is cute but he is not Brad Pitt” to which they respond by saying that he is “pretty close [...] our choice at school sucks.” I read this as an insinuation that a choice must be made, taking for granted that she would be interested in a man, simply for the reason that he is (in their eyes) attractive, and interested in Adele. As the conversation in the cafeteria ends Adele is shot up close clenching her jaw and twinning her hair between her fingers. This scene sets the backdrop on from which the rest of Adele’s exploration of her sexuality and love life develops through the plot; From this scene on there is an evolution in how Adele expresses her sexuality and how she allows herself to challenge things that has been taken for granted in her own life. This is one of the ways that Abdellatif challenges the norm: he doesn’t romanticize heterosexual love but rather shows us how heteronormativity is forced upon young people.

After Adele has broken up with the guy, one of her girlfriends kisses her whilst they are outside the school building smoking a cigarette. The friend tells her she is pretty and Adele blushes. This is the first time an alternative to heterosexuality is represented in the film. Adele’s gay male friend Valentin senses Adele’s confusion and takes her out to a gay club. She then wanders off into a lesbian bar close by; the bar is dimly lit, with “spacey” electronic music playing and women kissing in frame. This is when Adele and Emma have their first actual interaction. (Except for a scene in the beginning of the film when Adele spots Emma at a crossing and later that night masturbates whilst fantasising about her). At first they only exchange looks from a far; another supposed lesbian woman then comes up to Adele to speak to her but Emma swiftly interrupts them asking the woman “Are you ok...are you talking to my cousin?” in a slightly threatening manner. The woman leaves and Emma asks Adele “why are you here alone?” to which Adele replies, “I don’t know, I came in here by chance”. Emma replies “By chance” nodding her head as if to say that there is no such thing as chance. It becomes obvious that Emma is made to seem like the more dominant person in their relationship from the get go; she is already very well versed in the lesbian club scene for example, pointing out that Adele is drinking a “butch” type of beer and thus marking Adele as femme. Emma’s costume is very important to the reading of this scene; she is wearing a denim vest, short blue hair and no make up; this could be read as butch costume, enhancing the fact that they are both doing some sort of gender performance; this is one way in which Emma is made the more active, dominant character in the relationship and Adele’s character takes on a passive “feminine” role. Judith Butler’s take on gender performance is important here:

“...Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration.” (Butler, 2007, xv)

Butler shows us how gender is not a set category but something that must constantly be produced and reproduced. Emma’s dress and mannerisms in the film speak for the intention of the relationship to be portrayed as gendered; Adele and Emma both take on their gender roles in relationship to the other. (and it is very important to highlight that this is only intrapersonally between the two main characters.) When Emma neglects the relationship, Adele takes on a more nurturing role, this in turn allows Emma to dictate a big deal of their life together. The lesbian relationship that Adele enters into isn’t as equal as Rich sees potential for in 'compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’; the power inbalance allows for Emma to take a dominant role in the relationship and for Adele to take on a very nurturing and caring role from which Emma is allowed to develop herself artistically and socially. She carries the relationship in terms of emotional labour, which is something that feminist scholars such as Hochschild (1983) have argued is typical of the feminine role within heterosexual relationships.

When the two eventually become involved in an intimate love relationship, they do so despite Adele’s school friends’ initial protests and harassments. These harassments could be seen as a portrayal of the heterosexual patriarchial backdrop against which the queer relationship that the women engage in has to struggle. It is noteworthy that Adele’s male friend Valentin is accepted for his homosexuality and that there isn’t even any discussion about his lifestyle, but rather it is taken as granted whereas Adele is completely shunned by her friends who in one scene call her a slut and tell her that they are disgusted with her when they find out that she might have a sexual interest towards women. It could be worth posing the question as to whether this is done purposely or if the director takes for granted that lesbianism is less normative than male homosexuality in which case it could be said to resonate some of the ideas put forward by Rich (1980).

Because the relationship is so centered on passion and sex, it makes me think that it is informed by the male gaze – the portrayal of the relationship often borders on fetishism. It is important to remember that the director is a straight male, and thus cannot have direct insight into the lesbian experience, when doing a reading of the film: one of the scenes that is the most important to analyze to understand how the film is informed by the male gaze is the 7 minute long sex scene. Although the scene portrays two women having sex (or maybe even because it portrays two women having sex) I would argue that it is clearly saturated by the male gaze and made for patriarchal, eroticised pleasure and spectatorship. Van Zoonen makes the argument that

“In mainstream Hollywood film, women function simultaneously as erotic objects for the male audience who can derive scopophilic pleasure from their presence, and as erotic objects for the male protagonists with whom the male audience can identify.” (Van Zoonen, 1994, 89)

This statement isn’t perfectly accurate for Blue is the Warmest Colour because it portrays two women and not a man and a woman; however it may be argued that because the two women take on gendered roles, it doesn’t matter that one of them technically isn’t a man. I would argue against Van Zoonen and say that a scene can objectify women for the erotic pleasures of men even if there isn’t a male character present. Especially today when “lesbian” porn is so prevalent. The fact that the sex scene is shot up close and also the nature of the length of the scene speaks for its pornographic, voyeuristic character. In an article on the lesbian culture website Autostraddle writer “Kate” has weighed in on her opinion on the scene:

“All I could think as I watched the scenes was that there were not two people fucking because they were desperately, even harmfully, in love. It looked like two women fucking in a way that would be stimulating to a viewer with little expectation for queer intercourse.”

However, in contrast to the first sex scene between Adele and her cis-boyfriend, it is clear that the director has used the scene between Emma and Adele to explore how Adele is allowed to completely give in to her passions, as opposed to the first sex scene with the guy where she looks like she is completely disassociating. However, this doesn’t take away from the fact that the director is a man and that the scene is arguably pornographic.

The juxtaposition of the two family meals is an important window through which we can see the class difference of the two girls and thus where some of the power inbalance might stem from. Emma’s family is portrayed as having a lot of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986); there are beautiful paintings in the kitchen, they drink white wine with much attention and they eat fresh oysters; during the meal Emma has to teach Adele how to eat them, taking on a very protective, pedagogical role. Emma’s family dinner is juxtaposed with Adele’s where spaghetti Bolognese is served and more mundane every day topics are discussed; the family assumes that Adele and Emma have become friends through Adele being tutored in philosophy by Emma (the film again plays with themes of power and initiation here). Adele’s parents challenge Emma’s culturally radical lifestyle by commenting on her blue hair, artistic career choice and even ask if she has a boyfriend who can support her financially; while Emma’s family cheers to the love between the girls, Adele and Emma have to hide their relationship from Adele’s family. Class is something that severely informs the relationship between the girls, with Emma having more freedom to express herself artistically and sexually – a theme that runs through the whole film, and something that could be potentially be seen as the demise of the relationship. 

The relationship is almost portrayed as an ecstatic paroxysm of passion framed by the mundane heterosexual/normative working class lifestyle that Adele experiences both before and after Emma: at the end Adele is ‘unfaithful’ with a man from work because she is neglected by Emma in favour of the art; subsequently the ending scene is of her being chased up by a man after leaving an Emma’s art show. This is how the lesbian experience is framed. Adele even tells Emma that she doesn’t think she couldn’t be with a woman again when the two meet up for a drink after being broken up for a while. Emma has already moved on with a woman who can be said to be of the same type of social group in terms of class and culture but Adele is still somewhat grieving at this point, she has to go back to her old life whilst Emma moves on to a more mature type of flamboyance, living with the other woman and her child and working as a professional artist.

What is being portrayed in the film is a relationship based on hierarchical power structures that adhere to heteronormative standards of monogamous relationships. Even when Adele has been with another person it is out of the question to think that Emma would have any sort of understanding of Adele’s decision to do so, even though Emma had been extremely dismissive of their relationship, and Adeles emotions. What is portrayed is not a lesbian, but rather a heterosexual relationship disguised as a lesbian relationship. The heterosexual, patriarchal hierarchies that Rich explores in her text are being reproduced and projected onto a lesbian relationship as a canvas. With that in mind, I do think that the film is offering a contestation to heterosexuality to some extent, because Adele is struggling to exist in between two worlds, one which is tainted by a conventionally heteronormative existence where she has her family, friends and her workplace (she doesn’t tell her co-workers that she is in a relationship with a woman for example) and one in which she is allowed to explore alternative and to have a very passionate relationship with an artist woman, even if that relationship is very centered around sex and passion as opposed to companionship and mutual care (not that the two are mutually exclusive). 

The main problem in achieving something which is close to a contestation to heteronormativity seems to me that the director isn’t himself a lesbian woman so he can’t fully step into that mode of existence; he is stuck in the heterosexual way of thinking, even when he is trying to portray something that could be the opposite to heteronormative. We must however remember that the film is a drama and maybe that an equal, loving, caring and nurturing relationship wouldn’t be interesting to make a film about; it wouldn’t be dramatic. It is interesting to consider how gender can be performed “outside” of normative bodies and how the two women constructed themselves in relationship to one another based on class, culture and mainly dominance.

Bibliography

Butler, J (2007). Gender trouble. New York: Routledge

Blue is the warmest color (2013) Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche [Film]. Frace: Quat'sous Films

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In: J. Richardson Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood. 241-258

Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press.

Kate. (2013). Blue Is The Warmest Color: The Male Gaze Reigns Supreme. Available: http://www.autostraddle.com/blue-is-the-warmest-color-the-male- gaze-reigns-supreme-203158/. Last accessed 10 March 2015.

Gender, culture and popular media Student ID 1317747

Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. signs. 5 (4), 631-660.

Van Zoonen, L. (1994). Spectatorship and the gaze. In: feminist media studies: Sage.

[sophiayacoub-blog]

How is consumption made possible: how do brands make use of western conceptions of the exotic other to sell notions of authenticity?

Commenting on how ideas of authenticity and counter culture are used in advertisement to further a brand’s value, Jacqueline Botterill states that: “While authenticity once served as an antidote to mass society, today advertisers use it to soothe their young audiences’ anxiety that authenticity is no longer possible” (Botterill, 2007, 106). Further to this, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that the west is in perpetual rejection of conformity as a result of the experiences of trauma due to the Second World War and the totalitarianism of nationalist socialism, and that this is shown in the way people consume for their own individuality- and supposed nonconformity projects. (Heath, Potter, 2006, 327) Thus experiences of constraint and lack of meaning as well as organic spontaneity are common, and to look for authentic alternatives to mass society become frequent practice.

In this essay I will explore the idea that counter culture, and that which is deemed outside the norm, inevitably becomes subsumed by the capitalist market through advertisement and branding, and that this search for individuality and alternative might even be what drives the consumer market, especially in terms of fashion and lifestyle products. I argue that the search for authenticity has a way of not only being hijacked by the market (whilst at the same time playing an important part in it) but also that members of dominant cultures use conceptions of the ‘other’ in their individual identity projects. I will look at how tropes of marginalized groups are used to make products seem authentic and desirable.

Concepts such as otherness and authenticity is often used in the discourses of marketing; being aware of authentic social markers and products, often taken from those outside of the Eurocentric norm and to be able to mimic them (to a level that is fairly easy to understand) is viewed as a form of social and cultural capital. (Bourdieu, 1986) Cultural capital allows for the dominant social classes, races, ethnicities, genders and sexualities to further their quest for image building signifiers of cultural intermediation and taste making. This can be linked to a form of cultural appropriation, where traits of culturally marginalized groups are used mainly for the identity projects of the white, heterosexual, middle class, to express a level of social awareness, ‘worldliness’ and individuality whenever deemed suitable by these dominant groups. This is problematic, as groups of marginalized people only are seen to inhabit aspirational qualities and ascribed social value in cultural contexts when they become valuable for the consumer market and by dominant fractions of consumers. 

Take for example trends such as wearing bindis, Native American headdress and colourful, “tribal”-patterned scarves and other ornaments; brands such as Urban Outfitters and Topshop co-opt these cultural signifiers in order to offer mainstream consumers a way into ‘unexplored realms’ of expression. So when a white middle class american grows bored of the mundane everyday, comfortable life, they might put on an American headdress and go to a festival in the Nevada desert without consideration of the anti-colonial struggles for land rights and identity of the Native American people. Similarly, white British people will put on ‘Bollywood’ themed parties without consideration of the Imperial British colonial remnants in India and the rest of the world today. (Hook, 1995)

In his groundbreaking postcolonial work, Edward Said coined the term Orientalism, which refers to the exotifying depicting that European and American writers created about the colonised other. He argues that the way the ‘orient’ has been constructed by the west is mainly in Eurocentric terms that exotify the other. (Said, 1977) This becomes relevant in terms of consumer culture as these sorts of narratives of the exotic makes consumption of the ‘other’ possible. Contemporary consumers look to brands for contributions towards identity projects. Authenticity becomes a marker of how well a brand constitutes a cultural resource for these identity projects. (Holt, 2002) Brands thus aim to fufil the desire for authenticity by offering consumers objects and artifacts such as clothes, accessories and home decor that allow for access to the world in new and supposedly creative ways that contribute towards individual cultural, and social capital projects. This can be juxtaposed with earlier, modern marketing that mainly constituted of ‘culture-making’ rather than ‘culture-imitation’. Holt writes that:

“The postmodern branding paradigm is premised upon the idea that brands will be more valuable if they are offered not as cultural blueprints but as cultural resources, as useful ingredients to produce the self as one chooses.” (Holt, 2002, 83) Here Holt describes how contemporary marketing and branding offers consumers access to cultural resources to produce the self, or the image of the self, as opposed to earlier marketing which would have focused on offering culture in itself.

bell hooks provides further analysis on the topic of cultural appropriation in the contexts of “consuming the other” where she refers to the colonial discourses surrounding cultural co-option in terms of the longing for exotic “otherness” and the wish to consume tropes of those deemed ‘other’. She writes “Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes a spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (hooks, 1992, 366). hooks argues that using race and ethnicity for commercial and consumption purposes allows members of dominant classes, races, genders and sexualities to reassert their power over the ‘other’ by using the cultural markers of those who have been colonialized by the imperialist nations in the west.

Similarly, Crockett describes how ‘blackness’, or traits of black and urban culture, is used in advertisement by ‘idealizing and essentializing blackness’ as a form of ‘consuming others’ strategy in marketing (Crockett, 2008, 255). He describes that blackness is exotified and commodified by marketing companies in an array of ways to make brands seem to be in contestation of the mainstream consumer market, and to give access to a sense of worldliness and experience to its consumers. Jacqueline Botterill gives an example of this in a European Levi’s commercial, myths of black and urban culture is used:

“A young black, but not too black, man walks down a city street dressed in baggy jeans, tee shirt, leather jacket and baseball cap. He walks by a black bouncer dressed in a suit, protecting the entrance to a club. [...] The bouncer provides the perfect, silent, authoritarian foil against which the young man’s authenticity is expressed. Street wise, the young man begins his patter by pointing out he is aware he cannot enter the club because of his inappropriate dress, but goes on to defend his style, thereby challenging the social convention that prevents his entry. [...] Authenticity is encoded by depicting a tension between work, formality and rules, versus play, rejection and creativity.” (Botterill, 2007, 118)

Here Botterill is describing the type of othering that allows those who fit the norm to access novelty ways of consumption. In the example, a black man in urban clothing is contrasted with another black man, only that the latter is deemed “inauthentic” because he has succumbed to performing that which is presumably coded as “white”. Here we come back to the idea of cultural identity production in the practices of commodification and consumption of the ‘other’; Individuals of often marginalized groups, who have less access to work, education and other material necessities in underprivileged urban areas in Europe and North America are made to seem as rebellious heroes in reaction to the modern western society. They are romanticized and made examples of authentic individuals free from the mainstream all for the pleasure of the neo-colonialist consumption culture. (Botterrill, 2007, 111) But these authentic/romanticized narratives about certain marginalized groups is only temporary, because the consumer market changes rapidly and something is only seen as ‘cool’ by advertising companies as long as it hasn’t been done yet because there is a constant need to reinvent the brand and what is offered to the consumer. (Heath, Potter).

Similarities can be drawn about the commodification of LGBTQ+ culture. Lesbian women’s lives are fetishized in fashion advertisements such as in a Christian Dior as from the year 2000, where two half naked young girls, oiled up and dressed in a little bit of denim are portrayed in objectifying sexual poses insinuating strong attraction to one another. The photo could be perceived as an intimate meeting between two lesbian women but are clearly aimed at the straight, male gaze for the consumption of mainly straight people. This strips lesbian women of their own agency to define what lesbian existence means as it becomes sold for the patriarchal mass market. Similarly, gay men’s lives are often used in advertisement to make brands seem attractive and progressive and at the same time Gay men are depicted in TV-series and films such as Sex and the city and Glee as the stereotypical gay best friend, always there to make the straight girl chose the right dress and tell her she’s pretty. This type of representation has been used in marketing by for example apple: In one apple advertisement, workers who can be said to carry some social signifiers associated with the LGBTQ+ community and their families and friends, are depicted taking part in the San Francisco pride festival. The atmosphere of the advertisement is very bright and cheerful and later on an upbeat song by Coldplay starts playing, accompanying a big crowd of apple workers marching through the streets of San Francisco with pride flags in their hands, waving and cheering. The advertisement finishes in the slogan “inclusion inspires innovation”. This is a clear example of something so subversive as gay pride being appropriated by the mass market for branding purposes. The ending slogan can be interpreted as slightly naive and maybe even a bit thoughtless of Apple because it may as well be read as apple admitting that non-normative sexualities only are valuable if they can contribute to the ‘innovation’ of the company. Of course Apple profits from this type of pinkwashing, in contemporary western culture, where allegiance to the LGBTQ society is seen as progressive. This can surely be described as commodification of ‘otherness’ in terms of the gender, sexualities and sexual practices that are showcased and that are viewed as outside of the norm.

In Kozinet’s ethnographical study of the festival and social project ‘burning man’, he notes that the dominant ethos of the counter culture project, which springs from a neo-anarchist group, is about contesting the values of the market economy, and creating new discourses and modes of interaction by for example using gift economy and by having a ban on logotypes (Kozinets, 2002). Kozinets recalls one of his interviews:

“I interviewed Crucifix George while he was masking out the brand name of his van with duct tape. After identifying myself and gaining permission to videotape him, I asked if he was simply following the rules, or whether he really believed in them.

‘I really believe in them. You can see all this shit [advertising and brand names] all the time, anyway. [...] There's so much creative energy here that you don't need the stuff, the symbols that are imprinted on your brain on a day-to-day basis by marketing people who come out of schools such as the one that you go to. Okay? You can create a whole fucking world like this if people were open” (Kozinets, 2002, 25).

It is clear that Crucifix George is tired of the rationality and conformity of mass society and that he is looking for alternative ways of existing, be it only temporary, for one week in August. Even though it can be argued that Burning man constitutes of some anti-market traits and that it is an attempt at community building in separation from the market, it is clear that because it is only a week long event, it is more of a temporary experience (although it might a powerful one which may evoke some anti-market values in its participants), rather than a rigid attempt at creating true counter cultural modes of being. Kozinets remarks that mainly middle- and upperclass, white people attend the event and so it potentially comes under the category of consumer culture which is driven by a conquest for the same types of individual culture projects as have been mentioned earlier on in this essay. Kozinets even mentions that workers from silicone valley are sent by their companies to get “Inspired” and to network with members of the creative industries at the festival. There are similar events to burning man in Europe that focus on new ways of contesting the mass market values, such as Fusion Festival in Germany and Boom Festival in Portugal.

In The Rebel Sell, Heath and Potter argue, drawing on Frank (1998), that the idea of mainstream culture and counter culture is a false dichotomy. They argue that rather, all consumption culture is driven by that same search for individuality, ‘coolness’ and rebellion against the conformist, orthodox system. In their description of counter movements, they use examples such as 80’s punkers and the hippies of the 60’s and 70’s (Heath, Potter, 2006). I would argue that they are right; If we presume that the idea of counter culture has all to do with standing out and being an individual then there is no distinction between consumer and counter culture. The consumer market and the branding of products is targeted towards the masses, which is logical as that is where profit can be made by companies who act on that rationale. When counter cultures are based on wearing and consuming that which is deemed outside the norm, or showcasing individuality and subversiveness in terms of appearance and image, there can be no counteraction to the consumer culture, especially considering the othering of minority groups and the rampant colonialization of cultures that aren’t dominant in mass society. Bell Hooks describes how the dominant cultural elites always have longed for the exotic experience that will bring them back to a romanticized and constructed idea of what primeval community means. She describes this as imperialist nostalgia for primitivism (Hooks, 1992, 369).

In conclusion, I would argue that it is evident that lifestyle brands use conceptions of the ‘other’ to sell products by appealing to dominant groups of the mass market longing for the exotified, romanticized, authentic, lifestyles that are depicted as in contestation of the rationalized, modern society. Brands do this by for example marketing co-opted cultural markers such as ethnic clothing and through the pinkwashing and use of those sexual practices, which are made ‘other’, and by appealing to consumer’s identity projects in search for distinction and individuality and longing for freedom from capitalist modes of existence. It is clear that counter culture is sold as individualized lifestyle projects and subsequently that the concept of counter culture needs to be reimagined in terms that are including for all and that don’t exclude and exploit marginalized groups for the pleasure of dominant fractions of society.

Bibliography:

Boden, S. J Williams, S. (2002) Consumption and emotion: The romantic ethic revisited. Sociology - The Journal of the British Sociological Association, 36 (3)

Botterill, J. (2007). Cowboys, Outlaws and Artists: The rhetoric of authenticity and contemporary jeans and sneaker advertisements. Journal of Consumer Culture.

Boyle, D. (2004). Authenticity: Brands, fake, spin and the lust for real life. Harper Perennial; New Ed edition.

David, C. (2008) Marketing blackness: How advertisers use race to sell products. Journal of Consumer Culture, Jul 2008; vol. 8: pp. 245-268 – how hip hop becomes mainstream

Frank, T. (1997) The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Guinon, C. (2004) On being authentic. Routledge.

Commercial Cultures in Global Capitalism SO240-15 Student ID 1317747

Heath, J. Potter, A. (2006) The Rebel Sell: How the counterculture became consumer culture. Harper Collins Publishers Canada.

Holt, D. (2002) Why do brands cause trouble? A dialectical theory of consumer culture and branding. Journal of consumer research.

Hooks, B. (1992) “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”. Black Looks: race and representation. Boston, MA, South End Press.

Said, Edward. (1994) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Advertisements mentioned:

Dior 2000:

http://media3.popsugar- assets.com/files/2011/03/09/5/166/1668379/df9408a6fd704919_4d770e458b7 0.jpg http://fashionindustryarchive.com/Campaigns/Dior-Campaign-SS-2000-Gisele- Bundchen-and-Rhea-Durham-by-Nick-Knight/PHOTOS/Thumbs/Dior-Campaign- SS-2000-Gisele-Bundchen-and-Rhea-Durham-by-Nick-Knight-051641.jpg http://s50.radikal.ru/i128/0907/b9/47d2986e55f8.jpg

Apple :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdjAX5A-6qE