#When Is Life Grievable?

[queerographies]

[Regimi di guerra][Judith Butler]

Le immagini della guerra ci sconvolgono, ma spesso ci lasciano indifferenti. È tempo di cambiare prospettiva. Scopri come trasformare l'empatia in azione concreta.

L’indifferenza ci uccide: perché non sentiamo il dolore del mondo? Titolo: Regimi di guerra. Quando la vita è un’istantaneaScritto da: Judith ButlerTitolo originale: Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?Tradotto da: Serena DemichelisEdito da: CastelvecchiAnno: 2024Pagine: 240ISBN: 9791256140152 La sinossi di Regimi di guerra di Judith Butler Perché restiamo indifferenti di fronte alle…

[elwenyere]

"One way of posing the question of who 'we' are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others—even if it means taking those latter lives."

— Judith Butler, from Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

[katherinakaina]

Sadly, this is your worst video, @theabigailthorn . You spend more and more time promoting your other projects, instead of providing the substance for your videos. And it really hurts the quality of Philosophy Tube.

Here you raise an extremely important topic. And yet, instead of thorough philosophical examination, you uncritically accept one perspective on it, to the point where you just give the speaker to its proponent. And then you switch to talk about the societal and political issues, without even noticing that the death acceptance narrative completely undermines them.

Yes, human condition is simultaneously being the super special and unique spark of consciousness, capable of love, reason and art but also being a bunch of matter which is potentially just food for worms. And yes it's unpleasant to think about it for obvious reasons and therefore people usually don't, which often leads to bad consequences. But if you solve this cognitive dissonance by persuading yourself that death is good actually, and that you, and everyone else are not special or particularly valuable, then why would anyone care about the children of Gaza? After all they are also just food for worms, are they not?

The equilibrium of death acceptance, where everyone can look in the face of death due to not considering it bad anymore, isn't a world without horrors of war. It's a world where people do not even need to justify these horrors, where consideration of casualties doesn't even come to mind. It's a world where NO life is grievable at all! You've noticed yourself that trying to adopt this philosophy made you more callous. Now try honestly imagining what would it do to society as a whole, if everyone adopted it.

The reason why we do not even want to think about death, the reason why we are so shocked when an alligator ignores our natural rights is because death is REALLY FUCKING BAD. It's one of the worst thing there is, and it happens to everybody, and you can do very little about it. This is the horrible truth of human condition which you are not properly facing as long as you try to delude yourself into death acceptance.

Were you under impression that it's just such an obvious and therefore boring point? Is that why you managed to make an entire video about death without talking about immortalism? Well, if you thought about it at all, you might've noticed a lot of interesting implications connected to the societal issues you are concerned with. Like how modern society just assumes that lives of the elderly are not worth grieving, how it's just assumed that death of "natural causes" is somehow fine. How worries about existential risks and long term consequences of human activities, such as global warming, naturally much less consider people, who do not expect to witness them. How whole conservative ideology is based around human mortality. How obsession over fertility, enforcement of gender roles and treating women as walking wombs stop having ANY justification whatsoever when there is no need to constantly replenish the dying population. How people in their eighties would be much less motivated to shift into conservatism without age related cognitive decline and if more than half of their life would still be in front of them.

Humbleness is part of the answer. You do need to be humble enough to understand, that its not that likely that you in particular will witness the glorious transhumanist future where people do not have to die anymore, and still fight for this future for the sake of others. Being a soldier who will very likely die doesn't mean you can't still wish for victory.

But humbleness is never the whole answer. Imagine treating any other significant problem that humanity struggles with, like this video proposes to treat death. Imagine someone claiming that sexism is just natural state of affairs and we need to humbly accept this part of our existence, or even embrace it with ~curiosity~, while mocking every attempt to solve the issue as corporate HR culture, virtue signaling or wishful thinking. Isn't it immediately obvious how intellectually bankrupt this reasoning is? Then why do you suddenly treat the exact same approach as insightful in this case?

[violentdevotion]

wait ok if you did your dissertation on nlmg then you’re the EXPERT. would love your opinion on the angle i’m taking if you don’t mind!!!

basically i’m looking at how the text showcases how soft power/ideological structures like schools/church/media/art (specifically schools and art in this case) reinforce the status quo and cause people to internalise their societal roles etc.

i also think the way it plays with utopian/dystopian genres is sOoo interesting like. the pastoral idealised Boarding School Vibes feels very utopian but a lot of utopian ideals require some level of authoritarianism and. hmmm. like a homogenisation of ideals that pretty much always dismisses the wants/needs of more marginalised people. and i feel like nlmg Gets It because the way the world is described for non-clones is kind of utopian with the whole No Sickness thing. and even amongst the clones hailsham is considered a sort of utopia compared to other schools or whatever.

idk honestly i could talk about SO much but my essay is examining it through marxist literary analysis so i’m basically focusing on althusser’s concepts and how they apply to the text but there’s SOOOOOO much to examine from so many different angles i would love to know what your dissertation was about !!! feel free to dm me because idk what counts as spoilers anymore skdhsjd

that sounds super interesting and absolutely a valid angle to take it on. i am absoultely not an expert on it though lmao. my disso was how grief is portrayed in nlmg and one other book so I didn't touch on authoritarian power structures except in relation to who is considered grievable (which if you want to explore id recommend judith butlers frames of war)

I think there's a lot to say on the topic. At the top of my head there's how Tommy was ostracised because he was bad and art and later chose to not take part in the gallery. There's when he was mocked for his little animals. There's when they meet with madame and in the time prior he obsessively draws little animals in order to show her. When they touch madame as kids and she looks at them as if they're spiders. Their limited access to the outside world. Even as adults they have limited time to themselves either being too busy as carers or needing permission to travel. How there's never even rumours of people who escaped. Cathy never really mentions surveillance or something like they're chipped, they're just so indoctrinated that they don't even bother trying to escape the system.

I think boarding schools as well is interesting because it draws on school stories in historical british fiction. Some stories (jane eyre) present these schools as a place of suffering and a child's first insight to injustices in the world, but still preferable to her home life. whereas I think most often they were serialised stories that portray the growing character of a child/children. So I think looking at halisham is interesting as well in this dual place boarding schools hold in the canon and how it fulfills both in nlmg (kathy looks back at this time fondly but most of the stories she tells aren't very happy) I think isolation plays into this as well. I'm thinking of the abandoned bus stop they hang out ??? But I coukd be misremembering. Ya know they live in a pastoral heaven but they also live in the middle of nowhere.

I think it could be interesting to look at how there's the no sickness thing but when kathy and Tommy meet madame and their other teacher again (forgot her name) I think one of them is physically disabled? Or at least she is in the film. Like all ailments aren't eradicated and they can't feasibly be. I think a comparison to the child of omelas could be made, a utopia of sorts built off of the subjugation of a class of people, except instead of walking away the class is so dehumanised the idea of it they even have souls is put to question.

I think your topic is really interesting and like you said there's So Much you could say about it all of the time. I recommend the book to everyone I can and when they finish it I like to ask them what they think it'd About (the same question proposed to my seminar group when I studied it at uni) and everyone's answers differed somewhat but a Marxist reading of 'it's about how our bodies are reduced to our labour" was the most popular one i think. I'm not familiar with althusser and I have work in 10 minutes so i dont think id be able to find + read his work in time but overall I think your idea is incredibly thought out, unique and you could dor sure get an amazing grade in it

[chicago-geniza]

Thinking about The Thing again

Tl;dr Just Weed Pill Thoughts

The sick person as "cursed amulet" who keeps their loved ones in thrall to anticipatory grief, or a private, present-tense grief, a purgatorial grief, for one's past relationship with the person-before-disease [just as the sick person, too, grieves their own Before-Self, Before-Life, & in more timorous, hypothetical tenses, the Self-Life-That-Could-Have-Been-If-Not-For]. This grief, whose public working-through as mourning is uncouth in the present tense, thus looks more and more like oasis, like catharsis, as it collapses into the horizon of the death that will make it publicly permissible, that will make the loss grievable instead of appearing obscene. Anyway my mom was grieving my aunt for the entire time she had terminal cancer but couldn't acknowledge it and just got more and more depressed until she experienced my aunt's death as an unburdening of her own suffering, as a witness to suffering she couldn't alleviate, and a bearer of unbearable anticipatory grief. My stepdad used to tell me as a teenager and young adult that my illness and hospitalizations were making my mom bedbound with depression and her misery was my fault; it made me suicidal. When there is illness and suffering for years without end, and you see others' deaths come as a relief to their loved ones, and that relief gets RHETORICALLY sublimated into obituaries about the DEAD--who so often clung to life--being "released" like a sigh from "their burdens" or "their pain" or "their suffering," when does it mostly mean--their death makes material what everyone has felt about them all along, has, by literalizing the metaphor of social death, enabled COMMUNAL mourning, absolved the mourners of their guilt for preemptively grieving a living breathing person & feeling like illness sapped--stole--something vital, perhaps even a part of their innate 'I'? Perhaps--as Agnes puts it--the part of the healthy mourner that belongs to the sick person? To the person they were before they got sick? To the person the mourner was in-relation, to whatever they built between them, as they were to each other, AS those two people, one of whom no longer exists, in terms of mental or physical capacity, changed personality? Is this ontology, phenomenology, epistemology? Is it material or not? Aw jeez didn't Pinter write a gay-ass play about this. Did I just invent Old Times but for longue duree Disease

[pompompurin1028]

Thanks for the tag Nyusa @nnakahara <33

Rules: in a text post, list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you

Disclaimer: Quite a few of them are not exactly books but like essays or short stories or poetry lol

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

2. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (a letter and self-reflection, trying to find himself again after being sent to jail)

3. A Valediction Forbidden Mourning by John Donne (love poem)

4. The Setting Sun by Dazai Osamu

5. Truth and Lying in the Non-Moral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche (essay)

6. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable / The Forces of Non-violence by Judith Bulter

7. Whatever Hegel is writing about lol (I hadn’t finished his books at all orz but I have learnt about it and I am very intrigued but I don't quite understand it... :') I want to though and he's always on my mind)

8. Blue Bamboo by Dazai Osamu (short story, rewrite of a Chinese tale)

9. The Portrait of Mr W. H by Oscar Wilde (underrated short story)

10. 思考的蘆葦 by Dazai Osamu

open tags <33

[hadasse]

Grievability and Humanity

Image by Jacques GAIMARD from Pixabay The philosopher Judith Butler has developed a concept they call “grievability” – the idea that if someone is grieved when they die, it means their life was considered worth living. In particular, not just by family and friends, but as a generally acknowledged loss, noticed by the dominant society. While Butler does not, to my knowledge, quote Joni Mitchell,…

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

one thing i have been finding with books recently (especially fantasy, and especially YA fantasy, i think) is that so many of them treat life so cheaply. characters die and others immediately move on, skim past it, even if they were responsible or even if they cared about the person. the depth of grief isn't there, and because death is not given the weight it feels like it should have, all of the other emotions also seem... hollowed out, shallow somehow. like, if life is not precious and if these characters are not grievable, why does any of it matter?

and i guess. not every book has to be About Grief™. but books that treat death casually run the risk of making me not care about anything, because the lives of the characters are not valued, are not seen as worth grieving, and so therefore they are not worth my emotional investment, either. it's like they've told me i don't need to care if these people live or die, because none of the other characters will

on the flip side, it means when books DO dig deep into grief and death and the absolute profound awfulness of irreversible endings, i get a lot MORE emotionally affected than i would otherwise because i've got so used to skimming over the surface of characters and never being dragged down into caring, so it catches me out a bit more

[disabled-dragoon]

One of my classes this semester has essentially been about life politics and “grievable lives” in literature and, for obvious reasons (👩‍🦼), it’s really piqued my interest. Even when disability isn’t the main focus of whatever text we’re doing there’s always an overlap where it can be threaded in and it’s fascinating.

[librarycards]

"One way of posing the question of who “we” are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others—even if it means taking those latter lives."

—Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

ALSO the way soooo many people are showing pictures of palestinian children locked in cages, palestinian men being stripped and whipped in public, pregnant palestinian women being brutalized, palestinian children looking up at air strikes, and labeling them israeli and circling them around online as propaganda to support an apartheid is ridiculous.

they call these acts evil when they think the victims are israeli, and yet stay silent when the reality is that those images are of palestinians being oppressed, displaced, and abused.

[johntitusford]

Hauntology week 13? shadow of the absent body

This week in Hauntology, we watched Judith Butler make an argument about Doris Salcedo's exhibit Shadow of the Absent Body. Butler begins the talk by discussing how there is a difference between "counting the dead" and "making the dead count". Individuals who have suffered violent deaths in genocides are often "summed" up as death tolls. But the value of life is incalculable and counting does not equal morning. Butler lets us know that justice is the measure of the incalculable. Salcedo's art is and is not, the body, the violence and the memorial.

One of the exhibits within Shadows of the Absent Body features blouses. The blouses are constructed of needles/ sharp objects. The empty form of the blouses point to the absent body. They become animated this way. They are haunting distortions of the ordinary. Salcedo begins most of her works from nothing. She relates to the victims she memorializes through her artistic process. These victims are stripped of everything. Often even their lives. Salcedo and her team painstakingly create their work with no templates.

Butler ends their speech by saying, "The object bear the untellable, the incalculable, in material form. They obstruct oblivion and bear it's force.". <- god damn. These objects that Salcedo has created establish grievability where governments have failed.

How does Salcedo's work relate to my own? yikes. Ill let you know when Judith Butler can talk about my work for 90 minutes. But for real - how privileged am I to not have to make this sort of work. I watched an interview with Salcedo where someone asked how she can manage the grief that she must encounter in her work. Salcedo responded by saying that she does not manage it. Managing it implies putting it aside. She puts it in the center of her life. Otherwise would feel immoral, to Salcedo. She says that if we were all paying attention, then these things would not be happening. These artists (I can name Doreen Garner in this moment) who do "heavy" work impress me so much. What can I offer in the context of this immeasurable work and drive?

Heres a picture of my painting that i just cut up.

AAAAAND a pic of my dog in the studio cuz why not?

[hellomynameisbisexual]

As I understand the context of queer spaces I find it beneficial to first begin with the understanding of orientation, or being oriented towards objects of any sort. In understanding attraction orientation — be it sexual, romantic, or otherwise — there are multiple lenses that must be taken into account. Freud’s sexology, while ultimately problematic, serves its purposes here. In his essays on sexuality, Freud takes the position that inversions are not the “natural” state of sexuality and come from various interruptions, or experiences, that deter the proper development of an individual into heterosexuality. As a presumed condition for inversion, Freud points out in his essays that bisexuality arises from cases of anatomical hermaphroditism. However, he goes on to posit that this form of hermaphroditism belongs to normal sexual behaviour (i.e. heterosexuality) to some varying degree. This means that in the traditional male and female paradigm there are traces of the opposite sex — meaning there are traces of woman in man and vice versa. Freud places the phenomenon of bisexuality as one that is necessary in understanding the sexual development of women and men. With Freud’s research and understanding of sexology here it is very simple to understand the way that sexuality is understood as fundamentally bisexual. Rather, it is more appropriate to refer to it as bisexual in the sense that it is torn from monosexuality (the idea that one’s sexuality is oriented in only one direction). This understanding of sexology is the best way to understand the framing of traditional sexuality, as well as the contemporary understanding of sexuality. This also provides context to the displacement of the Bisexual community within a modern LGBTQ+ population.

Sara Ahmed offers another effective means of understanding attraction orientation that takes Freud’s analysis a step further by utilizing a phenomenological method. Ahmed discusses the conflation of the term “queer” with non-hetero and non-normative sexualities, but for my purposes I will refer specifically to non-heteronormative sexualities. This distinction between the normative and nonnormative sexualities is shown, historically, by Foucault to have translated from having an sexual attraction orientation to being that orientation. However, Ahmed highlights that in this understanding of orientation, it is the non-heteronormative that has an “orientation.” This is very much tied to the ideas of Freud, that the non-normative orientation is equivalent to an inversion. This kind of being, for Ahmed, becomes sexually oriented — spatially pointing to how someone relates to, directs themselves towards, and takes towards objects. Being oriented has, in this context, developed into something of an inclination, deviation, pervesion, or drive when viewing non-heteronormative sexualities.

The status of “normal” that is ascribed to heterosexuality by early sexologists such as Freud is one that develops presumptions about sexuality and creates a line of desire. “The line of straight orientation takes the subject toward what it “is not” and what it “is not” then confirms what it “is.” Ahmed calls this discontinuity with, what I will refer to as the straight line, as going “off-line.” This is an orientation that goes towards one’s own sex, gender, or any non-conforming/non-binary gender and away from the other. Alongside the straight line are straightening devices that posit an ideology, moralistic or otherwise, that maintain heterosexuality as natural, right, normal, or good. I suggest that we consider homosexuality and homonormativity. Through a sort of inversion of my own, I assert that the same criteria allow for the naturalization of homonormative thinking.

Judith Butler’s concept of framing in her book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? is a means to understand homonormative and heteronormative modes of perception towards the bisexual community. Butler’s concept of framing relies heavily on various forms of representation and portrayal that I will address later on. However, framing is important, in the phenomenological sense, for the othering of the bisexual community. Framing is a literal and theoretical way in which information and images are portrayed and perceived respectively. The literal framing refers to various forms of imagery that appear as they are, and the theoretical framing refers to the various ideological or psychological dimensions that influence how the information is understood. The former implies a context with the information or imagery as it is immediately present, and the latter is specific to how the subject interprets that information or imagery. Theoretical framing is more divorced from the content and is more interested in how the content is seen rather than how it is presented.

The theoretical framing of gender and sexuality as homonormative and heteronormative is best illustrated by the Kinsey Scale. The scale takes that literal representation of a line. However, rather than being a line with one direction toward heterosexuality, it has an opposing end of homosexuality. In this model everything else becomes an iteration or manifestation of one or the other as shown by falling in-between the two points. The other sexualities fall into-line — into a straight line. That is to say that the non-normative is now normalized by the straightening of sexuality. Straightening devices, in this context, continuing to be (quite literally) a force of naturalization and a creator of binary structures. This is similar to Jacques Derrida’s use of centrism and marginalization; where heterosexuality was a text constructed to exclude anything unlike it, an external space for everything unlike it is created. Thus, homosexuality develops a text of its own in a similar way after existing in a marginalized space and, ironically, comes to create a new marginalized area. This, however, is not an argument for the inherent negativity, or harm, of marginalization, but crucial to understanding what Butler understands as an inherent exclusion of populations when framing not only identities, but issues as well as being.

Exceptions

Bisexual stigma often includes this idea that “bisexuals don’t exist” or this mis-identification of being identified by the gender of a bisexual’s partner. This easily creates a space of ambiguity in which bisexuals are always in. Similar to the Freud’s ideas around sexuality, the Kinsey Scale posits a direction towards one sexuality or another in a fixed expression. This fixed identity, this “having as being,” best explained through a framework offered by Falguni Sheth. Her position on race is that it is constituted by legislation — by the law. She uses the concept of exception to articulate this in a way similar to Derrida. Sheth’s position on exception asserts that race is created by identifying and isolating a particular population in order to determine who has access to rights, recognition, or what have you. What I suggest is taking this framework and applying it to the LGBTQ+ community. I have already explained the way in which the framing of gender and sexuality has allowed for the marginalization, but now I will explain how this law of exception applies to bisexual displacement.

Individuals that are queer in their attraction orientation are generally identified by their partners. For example, lesbians are identifiable by their partnerships with women, gay men with other men, and heterosexuals by their partnerships with the opposite gender.

Falguni Sheth’s position of race as created through the laws of exception is another framework I wish to apply to this issue. By utilizing this framework and applying it to homonormativity and heteronormativity I will provide a lens for examining the exclusion of bisexuals from the queer community, as well as the ambiguity that is inherent in the empirical verifiability of one’s attraction orientation identity through the recognition of the presentation of one’s partner.

While this is not a legislative law by any means, both homo and hetero norms of recognition determine the what is “properly” queer on the straight line — a fixed line. These kinds of being aid in developing a normative claim to attraction orientation that relies heavily on literal framing. It relies on the empirical representation of a person’s being as seen by an other. Bisexual individuals cannot be identified by this particular method of recognition and verifiability. An inability to present one’s attraction orientation results in a kind of violence that forces a bisexual individual into a literal frame through theoretical framing, or completely outside of either frame altogether.

The law of exception, as it applies to bisexual displacement, functions in this way: it excludes a population that does not align with the way of life of the dominant population. That is to say that bisexual individuals threaten the epistemological framework of sexuality; they do not fall under either homosexual or heterosexual. Whereas the verifiability of attraction orientation lies within a set of norms and literal frames, the bisexual population exposes the flaw in this way of understanding the phenomenon. Similar to the notion of the pariah as presented by Hannah Arendt, bisexuals pose the threat of exposing the weak foundations to the sexual determinism (being either straight or gay) that places them at the margins.

I think that this is fortified through norms of exception and exclusion through the idea of “human, but not human like us” rhetoric used by Sheth in her arguments around race. Bisexuality has been seen/argued as a challenge to monosexual views of sexuality; it exists as a challenge to views of attraction orientation by interrupting the binary understanding of sexuality and gender that has been established by hetero-normative and homo-normative structures of recognition.

The Rupture in LGBTQ+

“ I’m not sure at what point it was deemed progressive or acceptable to solely talk about gay issues and then think adding the tag “and bisexual people” would actually do any damn good but it’s gone on for too long.”

— Stephanie Farnsworth

These conditions of framing and exception establish epistemological issues that extend into areas that do not adequately service the bisexual community. While fields such as a sexual and mental health can continue to account predominantly for the disparities of lesbian and gay communities, there is a lack of research for that of the bisexual community due to this focus. However, it is common practice for the bisexual community to be continually conflated with the lesbian and gay communities through research and studies conducted towards groups of WSW (Women who have Sex with Women) and MSM (Men who have Sex with Men). Since there is limited research available surrounding the health of Bisexuals this population experiences greater sexual health disparities as compared to the aforementioned populations. Due to this lack of information Bisexuals continue to experience bi-invisibility and biphobia when approaching healthcare providers. Bisexuals are often targeted as transmitors of HIV and STI’s into heterosexual and lesbian communities. This stereotype predominantly affects bisexual men; however, it is difficult to determine rates HIV and STI’s among Bisexuals due to studies failing to make the distinction between bisexual identity and behaviorally bisexual people.

These particular epistemological issues in healthcare perpetuate the lack of care extended towards bisexual communities. These disparities in sexual healthcare attempt to address a community similar to the way the Kinsey Scale is constructed: there are means of treating the homosexual community and the heterosexual community, but nothing to account for the in between. This paradigm of binary monosexual identities can only account for issues that perpetuate their particular needs and way of life. In a study conducted by April Callis in Lexington, Kentucky it was reported from a sample of behaviourally bisexual individuals, heterosexual, and homosexual individuals that understandings of bisexuality only influenced gender and sexuality binaries. Some of Callie’s interviews affirmed prejudices towards bisexuals, mistrust, as well as biphobic perceptions. The study also revealed that the displacement of bisexuals from respective heterosexual and homosexual communities was so traumatizing that it prevented people from identifying as bisexual at all. Not only this, but the conceptions continue to prevent people from accepting bisexuality as legitimate altogether.

In another study conducted by Tanya Rubinstein, Shiri Makov, and Ayelet Sarel, biphobia (or bi-negatviity, as they refer to it) has revealed itself to be more of prominent due to the presence of monosexism (discriminator, or prejudicial practices of non-monosexuals). This study also revealed the possibility that gender binary structures interfere with the acceptance of bisexuals and bisexuality. However, those personally acquainted with bisexuals were less inclined to bi-negative attitudes and perceptions. What does this reveal? It unveils an aspect of relatability to the other that aids in de-centering certain structural norms that contribute to the displacement and discrimination towards the bisexual community. This affinity for binary sexuality and gender structures, as well as the contributions of monsexism, contributes to the tension that comes with a shared identity with dominant queer identities.

Shared Identity

The concept of the “shared identity” is one that is crucial in understanding the framing of bisexuality as an attraction orientation. Bisexuality is disjointed from a shared Queer/LGBTQIA identity. This shared queer identity is constituted by monosexuality (i.e. the central focus of gay/lesbian or straight identities) that the bisexual identity has difficulty fitting into due to the inherent fluidity that is incorporated into their attraction orientation identity. The gender and sexual binary structure that perpetuates monosexism allows for the continued displacement of bisexuals in not only social settings but health care fields as well. This attracts the question of: how much diversity can you have within the shared identity before diference threatens that identity? Earlier I spoke of the pariah as posited by Hannah Arendt as that which poses a threat by looking through the cracks and exposing the contradictions of the systems, or structures that it is built upon. When understanding the role of the bisexual when facing the frame of monosexual attraction orientation identities it is easy to understand the reason that bisexuality exists as an epistemological threat in terms of gender and sexuality. To include, or consider, the bisexual population in this binary structure would disrupt the various systems geared towards monosexuality. A system that takes into account homosexuals and heterosexual, cis-gendered individuals cannot account for its inability to service bisexual trans and cis-gendered individuals due to a distinction of needs within a community that exists beyond their literal and theoretical frame.

The inclusion of the distinct bisexual population to accommodate for this shared identity is two fold. Firstly, the inclusion of bisexuals must start with exclusivity. This is not to say that bisexuals ought to be recognized as separate from the queer community at large. However, it is necessary that like their monosexual counterparts (i.e. homosexual women and men) bisexuals must be allowed affectively assert their identity through various means of framing themselves and information surrounding their community. Bisexuals must have medical literature tailored to their specific needs, environments that do not hinge on linear monosexual frames of identification, and a recognition of the legitimacy of the inherent presentation of fluidity of gender and sexuality in the bisexual identity. All of these, while not primary solutions to bisexual liberation, contribute to a re-framing of sexual and gender identities that reveal the fragility of monosexuality and its binary strucutre. De-centering these literal frames and re-framing the theoretical frames aid in resolving these norms of exclusion that prevent bisexuals from consideration in various institutions. This could extend from informal norms of social institutions that constitute common behvaior and understanding into government institutions that politically determine the identity of certain populations as juxtaposed to their queerness to the normative, or the natural. Secondly, bisexuals must be recognized instead of validated.

The distinction between recognition and validation is tied heavily to the issues of framing that I mentioned earlier. Validation as a political and social activity is one that invokes a particular passivity that works to continue to marginalize certain groups without taking into account their activity and identity as it is distinct and individual. The act of validating through political and social discourse does not work in the favor of the validated population because in all instances of framing they are subjected to conflation with dominant populations (the conflation of bisexuals with hoosexuals, for example). This validation makes light of a presence rather than affirming its overall individuality as constituted by its difference to the dominant population. The act of recognition juxtaposes validation by affectively asserting the presence of a population or community by taking their individual needs, identities, and positionality into account. Recognizability affirms a mode of distinguishing a singular entity from that of all other entities. This does not imply that recognizability deconstructs the presence of overall community, local or global, but it does imply that the distinctions that serve to accommodate dominant populations must be applicable to all populations. The bisexual community requires recognition in this way; it requires that their identity becomes a vehicle for destruction of a structural understanding — a centrism — that disenfranchises their population.

Conclusion

The bisexual community faces an insurmountable gap in their expression and actualization in a society that privileges monosexual identities and pejoratively stigmatizes and represses their specific attraction orientation identity. Within not only the heterosexual and homosexual communities, to identify as Bisexual is to be assumed to be sexually promiscuous, a carrier of HIV/AIDS and STI’s, and that your orientation is invalid alongside experiencing erasure through programs, research, theory, and other epistemological structures that are geared toward homosexual communities.

Considering that bisexual research and overall consideration, are scarce, it is imperative that individuals that fall under the umbrella of the bisexual identity be understood and accepted as a community that is different and distinct from gay, lesbian, and heterosexual identified communities. This includes medical and communal spaces targeting women who have sex with women (WSW) and men who have sex with men (MSM) instead of the appropriate women who have sex with women and men (WSWM) and men who have sex with men and women (MSMW).

Re-framing monosexual perceptions of bisexuals and bisexuality that dispel the epistemic hold or gender and sexual binaries are necessary to tackle the issue monosexual centrism. The way this form of authorship shapes the various modes of knowing influence what populations are considered. Exposing the issue of validation versus recognition is a crucial method of establishing the means necessary within queer spaces for bisexuals to assert themselves as recognizable through their ambiguity. The Ardentian identity of the pariah, as it pertains to bisexuals, is necessary for this assertion into, and deconstruction of institutionalized monosexism in various modes of politicized and socialized frames of attraction orientation and gender binaries. Ultimately, while how the bisexual community is understood in terms of the social and the political, it is an issue of framing that disenfranchises an entire population. Bisexual liberation requires a kind of visibility that is recognizable due to its active participation in a community and not simply valid on the basis that is simply is. The recognition of those communities that exist under the dominant populations is a necessary in order to readjust the paradigm that places them beneath dominant populations.

[own-history]

What has been bugging me a lot since I got covid is how many people are convinced about covid being mild, especially when you’re vaccinated. I got my booster and vaccination and my case is pretty awful. While I don’t have to rush to the hospital, my sense of taste is off, my voice disappears every second day. I cough up blood because my throat is so sore, when my voice is back and I try to talk I am overwhelmed with coughs and struggle to breathe.

And I always knew I had asthma and allergies and whenever I got sick my throat and lungs were the most affected by any sickness I had. And I told that to all the people I once considered close to me. And all of them were like: „Ahhh poor you, but you’re young. I don’t think you‘ll have a severe case of covid. You‘ll be sick for three days like I was and then will be fine. Young people are not affected that badly! :):):):)“ and now I am sitting here, being affected by it quite a lot and what bugs me the most is that I cannot bear to sit at a table in the future with those people shrugging their shoulders about my severe case and try to brush it off as „a lack of vitamin d“ or „you should have tried xyz“. Like no… I have pre-existing conditions, I knew this was going to affect me severely, because I know my body and my history. I told you all that and nobody wanted to listen to me. (Funny side note: the same people who do not take my pre-existing conditions seriously are furious when a doctor doesn’t take them seriously about their pain and sicknesses but they do not realise how they are doing the same to me…)

And furthermore I am reminded of this lecture of Judith Butler I once attended where she talked about „grievability“ and how that concept relates so much to me and other people with disabilities. Our lives are often not considered grievable enough. We are considered expendable and people need to be able to shrug their shoulders about our health conditions because otherwise they would probably never be able to „go out and have fun and party and travel the world“, because to them their life of luxury is worth more than the right to live for a disabled person. Our lives as disabled people are always considered expendable, unless our disability provides a unique talent which can be exploited by capitalism. It is so sickening to me to lay here in my bed, coughing and struggling for a calm breath, while others look at me and just say: „we need to learn to live with this virus“ yeah… you get to live with it. Others will die or be severely impaired. Good for you that you get to „live with it“ while others don’t. I hope you feel #blessed and live your life to the fullest, while there is still a huge portion of people suffering from this pandemic. The fact that we enter a day and age where arguments of „survival of the fittest“ spark up so frequently and those arguments are used so normally is disheartening to me.

It is not survival of the fittest that has brought us this far, it is our compassion for others, our empathy, our willingness to help others that has brought us this far. If we would take the ideology of survival of the fittest to the test, infants would literally die if they were not being cared for by parents or other people. We exist only because other people have cared for us in some way, shape or form. for others to sit on their throne and wield the sword of Damocles, deciding who gets to live or die because they prefer fun and joy over empathy and nurturing others is so baffling. At what point did you miss the mark at what point did you become so heartless monsters that made you say such vicious things?

I am beyond tired of having conversations with people who say the pandemic has been soooo hard for them because of xyz and that it is time to go back to normal for them and that others need to take care of themselves now. Like we have all been going through it. And yes there are others who are better off than others and people less affected by being alone. But your struggles can be talked about and addressed. What is not okay is for those people to run around and say stuff like: „take care of yourself. Just isolate on your own.“ like… that is not how this stuff works. Before we could very easily see friends and family if people regularly isolated for a few days and got tested. If everybody follows this „great advice“ there are no safe spaces for disabled people to go to, because literally every place will turn into a huge risk. That wasn’t the case before. And besides: covid tests don’t do their work any more. I did the rapid tests for four six days and only on my third day of symptoms I started to test positive for covid. This is all spinning way out of control.

Why is my life considered expendable or less grievable? Because it is what other people‘s minds tend to do in order to stay sane and keep things simple. I just wish that people would learn to see beyond that one day and find out that every life is grievable. That every life is worth saving.

[cmspl348blog]

Eighth Reading Response

Readings: Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 from Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (2004)

Judith Butler's blog post "Precariousness and Grievability—When Is Life Grievable?" (2015)

Regarding the pain of others

This week’s readings deal with the issue of war photography. Susan Sontag argues that photography is the main way that people who have not experienced war firsthand come to understand war. Photography, in contrast to painting, is commonly taken to be an objective portrayal of reality. However, Sontag argues that no photograph should be seen as a transparency of what actually happened. Her point is that every picture is chosen and framed, and the photographer decides what is included and excluded from it. Sontag also argues that the meaning of a photo and viewers’ response to it largely depend on the words that accompany it and the context in which it is understood.

Sontag traces the history of war photography from its early days in the 19th century. She argues that many famous photographs from early wars were actually staged, but this does not necessarily mean that they are inauthentic in terms of representing what really happened in the wars. At the same time, there is pressure on photojournalists to always produce the most dramatic images of conflict. Many conflicts remain underphotographed; only certain conflicts get the public's attention. Awareness of the conflicts is constructed "in the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view" (Sontag, p. 2).

Source: Vintage.es

Sontag discusses this famous photograph of the Spanish Civil War. She argues that photographs like these come to define how conflicts are remembered. What is interesting is that this photograph is now believed to be staged.

Source: CBC.ca

This picture is a more recent example from the conflict in Syria. The Syrian boy on the beach has come to represent how the war in Syria and refugee crisis are commonly remembered.

Sontag argues that "the more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying" (p. 24). In this way, not all conflicts are portrayed in the same way. The dead bodies of people from Africa and Asia are more likely to be shown, while within Western countries, there is somewhat of a taboo against showing Western victims of conflict in graphic detail (where it would be possible to identify them). This can be seen as being related to an old-fashioned mindset where exotic "others" can be displayed because they are inferior to Westerners.

Precariousness and grievability

The theme of different victims being portrayed and reacted to in distinct ways is picked up by Judith Butler. She argues that war can be seen as "dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all" (Butler, p. 6). In this way, it is not considered appropriate to mourn for the enemy dead, because they were not really lives in the same way that "we" have lives. Rather than being lives, the enemies are seen only as a threat to life. So, their destruction is considered to be justified.

Butler argues that reactions to war are influenced and controlled by those in power in order to harness support for war efforts and minimize criticism. In this way, war images can be used as important tools of propaganda. At the same time, anti-war images can also have a powerful effect to influence public opinion. However, people's reactions are always regulated by their interpretive frameworks—their lenses for seeing the world and the assumptions about what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Overall, Butler ends with an important message: we are not really free to destroy other nations and people. This is because we are all bound together by the factors of power and precariousness. This bond means that we all have power but also have precarious lives which can be taken. So, it is wrong to view some people as being lesser than us.

[dabistits]

To talk about Twice and villainy is to talk about class and criminality (IV)

(Masterlist)

cw: references the dehumanization of “terrorists,” like, irl

The trash of society

“Disposability” is a framework that interrogates the way human lives are valued. Arising from observations about material disposability in the rapid industrialization of post-’45 and the increasing hold of mass-production and consumerism, “disposability” eventually expanded to an investigation of the human cost of this modern landscape. Theorists raised the question of how the disposability of human lives could be understood in tandem with the disposability of material goods, linking together issues of class, poverty, migration, imperialism, race, production, and consumerism. In essence, disposability as a framework investigates how human lives come to be rendered as disposable—and thus, like waste, byproducts of a lifestyle of endless growth.

This concern is one that receives frequent exploration in fiction that delves into the framework of humans-as-waste; for example, the sci fi dystopian short story Folding Beijing follows a waste worker in his efforts to fund the education of his adoptive daughter, who he found abandoned outside his waste-processing station. Although the conditions in BNHA aren’t nearly as grim, there are nevertheless clear connections drawn between its villainous characters and the concept of humans-as-waste, to the point where villains refer to themselves or are referred to by others as “trash.” Quirks may have effected a massive social upheaval, but that didn’t do away with, only shifted, the specifics of the idea that there are people who are deserving and people who are not, innocent people and criminals.

Throughout the series, we see characters mistreated while a society of deserving innocents looks on. There was little concern from the public when Izuku was mocked and bullied for his Quirklessness, when Rei was sold into a marriage for the benefit of a wealthy and abusive pro hero, when five-year-old Tenko wandered the streets alone, and when Jin was left to fend for himself as a teenager. Under the framework of disposability, they might as well have been rendered “waste,” as Zygmunt Bauman writes: “[t]he story we grow in and with has no interest in waste[...],” instead

“[w]e dispose of leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking. They worry us only when the routine elementary defences are broken and the precautions fail—when the comfortable, soporific insularity of our Lebenswelt which they were supposed to protect is in danger.” [source]

It is, interestingly, a bigger-picture version of the charges Shigaraki Tomura directs against the world of BNHA: like Bauman says, the innocent civilians are oblivious, recognizing neither the fragility of their peace nor the artificiality of it as it is maintained by heroes, unwilling to acknowledge the "leftovers”—the people who weren’t saved—until they return as villains and that very peace is threatened.

As for the leftovers themselves, they feel their alienation acutely. According to Bauman, to be “redundant” in a productivity-driven economy is to “share semantic space with ‘rejects’, wastrels’, ‘garbage’, ‘refuse’—with waste.” He outlines the conditions of redundancy thusly, describing it as a kind of “social homelessness”:

“To be redundant means[... t]he others do not need you; they can do as well, and better, without you. There is no self-evident reason for your being around and no obvious justification for your claim to the right to stay around. To be redundant means to have been disposed of because of being disposable[...]”

The experience of this kind of disposability is evident in BNHA, as class and exploitation seem to be highly correlated with social isolation. The members of the Shie Hassaikai were used and abandoned, and bonded strongly to one another after joining Overhaul. Jin’s experience of “social homelessness” shows him walking alone through empty city streets, before he ends up talking to his own clone below an overpass. Jin, too, finds companionship in joining a group, the League of Villains, but fears of disposability and further isolation plague his thoughts. Whether or not he genuinely believes League of Villains would abandon him, Jin feels the need to continue justifying his place among them. The societal bleeds into the personal; Jin’s disposability to society, best represented by his interactions with law enforcement and with his employer, also becomes an anxiety in his interpersonal relationships. Horikoshi’s decision to characterize Jin in such a way makes it impossible to ignore the larger issues that created him; namely, class issues that reflect real-world concerns.

As Jin sits below the overpass, talking to his clone, he asks whether he went wrong somewhere. The other Jin responds that it must have been “being born without an ounce of luck.” Bauman comments on unluckiness thusly:

“In Samuel Butler’s Erewhon it was ‘ill luck of any kind, or even ill treatment at the hands of others’ that was ‘considered an offence against society, inasmuch as it [made] people uncomfortable to hear of it.’ ‘Loss of fortune, therefore’ was ‘punished hardly less severely than physical delinquency’.” [source]

These observations are perfectly applicable to the characters we’ve met. It’s often the “unlucky” who get treated the worst: Izuku was bullied relentlessly for his “unlucky” Quirklessness, and Rei wound up trading her “unlucky” marriage for an institutionalization of ten years. Jin was fired from his job after an “unlucky” accident, fell into a life of crime, and is finally killed by the same hero who offered him a second chance. When Dabi probes Tokoyami Fumikage in an attempt to make him contend with Jin’s “ill treatment” at Hawks’ hands, Tokoyami dismisses it and justifies Jin’s execution, undoubtedly because it would be uncomfortable, possibly even world-shattering, to acknowledge Dabi’s charge. The fact that these people have been unlucky, or have even been actively mistreated or failed by others, turns the public’s gaze away in an attempt to escape the discomfort elicited by these embodiments of society’s waste. For the “redundant” to remind society of its human cost—or even to remind the non-redundant of the small gap of bad luck that separates them—they become objects of revulsion, to be forgotten or discarded as quickly as possible. Rendered “invisible” and “unthinkable” as leftovers, they become “ontologically non-existent.” [source]

Some of the anxiety towards the “redundant” is precisely because the framework of “becoming waste” is permeable. This permeability accounts for the possibility of transforming from citizen to disposable human; perhaps, then, when “all it takes is one bad day,” the line which separates citizen from villain is just as permeable. In the framework of hero society, it may be argued that villains are not simply redundant waste, but the trash whose alienation hero society relies on in a highly visible way. "The disposable, the waste as objects and humans, inhabit a place of exclusion from society which provides not only an unrecognized space of reinforcement for society itself, but also the fuel and the labor for maintaining the status quo.” [source] In BNHA’s terms, not only are villains excluded from a deserving, innocent society, they are also the fuel for maintaining it by embodying its opposite—the guilty and undeserving—their exclusion constantly reinforced through the public spectacle of their arrests and the public idolization of heroes. Villains are no longer simply inert leftovers that can be easily ignored, as Bauman described; villains have broken past hero society’s elementary defenses, and threaten the Lebenswelt of deserving innocents. While their visibility transforms villains back into an acknowledgeable existence, the very act of breaching their invisibility renders them a kind of waste that must be permanently disposed of.

A livable life?

Heroes do not kill. This is stated in 251 by the death-seeking Ending, who, despite his best efforts, is spared an unceremonious execution at the hands of a hero, who the readers know is a domestic abuser. The deathless resolution to Ending’s conflict, then, further compounds the horror of chapter 266, when Jin is eliminated with extreme prejudice by Hawks, who admires the aforementioned hero. The irony is shocking and bitter as readers witness the violation of one of heroism’s fundamental tenets, broken no less for the elimination of one of the series’ most sympathetic villains, after Hawks himself concedes that Jin is “a good person.” It may be said that heroes do not have carte blanche to kill, but neither is it an inviolable principle, and of course a no-kill mandate says nothing about the ways villains have been injured or tortured at the hands of heroes. While arguments can be made about the imminent risk of certain occasions, the issue remains that it’s often the most vulnerable people who pay the highest price for maintaining a nebulous definition of societal “safety” (a “safety” which always seemed to exclude certain people), a concept that is primarily defined by the state and the policing class. Furthermore, the willingness of a hero to kill in defense of hero society begs the question: who may be killed without consequence, and under what circumstances?

In her collection of essays addressing responses to terrorism, Precarious Life, Judith Butler writes:

“Certain lives will be highly protected, and the abrogation of their claims to sanctity will be sufficient to mobilize the forces of war. Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as "grievable."”

The notion of a “safe” society hinges on the protection of those sanctified lives, at the expense of vulnerable lives deemed “disposable” through poverty, homelessness, or criminality. A threat against the deserving innocents or the murder of a hero unites every other hero and every citizen in public mourning, and then in opposition against murderous villains—there is no such mobilization for the suffering of Quirkless kids, abused women, or orphaned, destitute teenagers. The threats against their well-beings are considered part-and-parcel to their world—normal, unavoidable, and indeed not violence at all. Certainly, a murdered villain will not find such unanimous grief nor anger mobilized in the wake his death, not even directed toward changing the isolated, impoverished conditions which made villainy an appealing choice in the first place. Jin’s death is privately witnessed and privately mourned, only by those who comprised his ibasho. It’s through these uneven displays of grief that Butler questions: “what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?”

Butler argues that certain lives are removed from the bounds of “normative” humanity, and thus “grievability.” Violence against vulnerable lives is dismissed or legitimized by the state through their dehumanization: in the world of BNHA, villains are “presented [...] as so many faces of evil” and treated as mere vessels of a killing instinct.

“Are they pure killing machines? If they are pure killing machines, then they are not humans [...]. They are something less than human, and yet somehow they assume a human form. They represent, as it were, an equivocation of the human, which forms the basis for some of the skepticism about the applicability of legal entitlements and protections.”

This kind of dehumanization is, of course, explained through the claim that certain people are “dangerous,” a designation which (as Butler points out) is determined by none other than the state itself.

“A certain level of dangerousness takes a human outside the bounds of law[... T]he state posits what is dangerous, and in so positing it, establishes the conditions for its own preemption and usurpation of the law[...]”

Perhaps, then, if villains are something other-than-human, something so dedicated to violence that they can be stopped only through death, no "sanctity,” and no law, is violated if they are killed.

The ability of the state to designate certain people as “dangerous” is linked to another political strategy: defining the difference between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence. Butler explains:

“The use of the term, "terrorism," thus works to delegitimate certain forms of violence committed by non-state-centered political entities at the same time that it sanctions a violent response by established states. [...] In this sense, the framework for conceptualizing global violence is such that "terrorism" becomes the name to describe the violence of the illegitimate, whereas legal war becomes the prerogative of those who can assume international recognition as legitimate states.” [source]

In the world of BNHA, clearly such a discernment exists between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence. Although certain readers have been quick to draw the “terrorism” analogy, the series itself tends to differentiate between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence not through charges of terrorism, but through the designation of “hero” and “villain.” Legitimate violence is wielded by heroes in defense of the state, in defense of property, and against villains, whereas illegitimate violence is wielded by villains against the state, against property, and against heroes. This difference between “hero” and “villain” is, in actuality, insubstantial as far as the question of morality, as even labeled villains such as Gentle Criminal behave within a palatable frame of ethics, while some career heroes are just as capable as villains of taking and ruining lives; nevertheless, the state has a vested interest in strongly promoting the idea of this divide—of legitimate, heroic violence as moral, justified, and legal, and illegitimate, villainous violence as immoral, unjustified, and unlawful. In this way, the state can engage in “legal war” with very little questioning or dissent from its populace, and it further delegitimizes the violence of its opponents. The violence of heroes is justified, and therefore they have an understandable human rationale; on the contrary, the violence of villains is unjustified, it is attributed to their innate violence, which is incomprehensible and inhuman.

“The fact that these prisoners are seen as pure vessels of violence [...] suggests that they do not become violent for the same kinds of reason that other politicized beings do, that their violence is somehow constitutive, groundless, and infinite, if not innate. If this violence is terrorism rather than violence, it is conceived as an action with no political goal, or cannot be read politically. It emerges, as they say, from fanatics, extremists, who do not espouse a point of view, but rather exist outside of "reason," and do not have a part in the human community.” [source]

No one personifies this better than Tomura himself. He is named the “Symbol of Terror” by AFO, and is undoubtedly viewed as such by the heroes and civilians of BNHA. It has been repeatedly emphasized that to everyone but the League of Villains, Tomura is not so much a human as he is the embodiment of thoughtless destruction. Tomura is referred to as a monster, as someone unshackled to humanity, as an “it,” as something that cannot be reasoned with. This is an idea that Horikoshi himself seems to play into somewhat, because although Tomura voices certain critiques of the hero system, he nevertheless seems to remain rather apolitical in who or what he decides to target. It’s Jin, then, who lends a political voice to the villains by criticizing pro heroes from his very first narrated chapter, but even a clear articulation of his grievances gets him no understanding reaction from the hero in front of whom he raises these charges.

While the fictional heroes may see villains as nothing more than vessels of violence, it can be argued that Horikoshi himself went through an extensive effort to depict the rationale and humanity of the villains. As I’ve stated before, Jin is very clearly connected to the real-world struggles of certain Japanese citizens, making him real and relatable in ways other characters may not be. At the same time, the rationale and humanity that Horikoshi recognizes are things that heroes like Hawks can’t grasp: as someone who idolized a hero as a child, and who was, for better or worse, enveloped by the hero system, he does not question the legitimacy of the hero system. Hawks understands only unluckiness in Jin’s circumstances, and shows little awareness of the fact that Jin was failed by the very society Hawks defends, that his suffering was both enforced by the legal system and by his boss, and ignored by institutions supposedly designed to help. Jin, of course, is not so obtuse—he reiterates his awareness that he is one of those disposable, ungrievable lives that heroes don’t save, and he is ultimately proven right—when Hawks’ offer of rehabilitation is rejected, he instead moves to kill. Jin, and other villains, are so thoroughly dehumanized, likened to killing machines, that it doesn’t occur to any hero that they can possibly be reasoned with. 

Could there have been any other conclusion? I don’t believe so—not without a significant shift in thinking from heroes. For many of the villains, there’s very little to gain from rejoining the society that they were ejected from. Bauman writes that, for “disposable” humans:

“Unwelcome, tolerated at best, cast firmly on the receiving side of socially recommended or tolerated action, treated in the best of cases as an object of benevolence, charity and pity (challenged, to rub salt into the wound, as undeserved), but not of brotherly help, charged with indolence and suspected of iniquitous intentions and criminal intentions, [they have] few reasons to treat ‘society’ as a home to which one owes loyalty and concern.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Jin rejects Hawks’ offer of a “socially tolerated” rehabilitation into the society that both caused and ignored his suffering, which he has no reason to believe wouldn’t outcast him again for another slip-up. Of course, he instead chose the place he was understood, where his mistakes were met with patience, where he wasn’t forced to justify his presence, where his sense of belonging felt stable. The people he called his ibasho were a home, a place he was allowed an ontological existence—the very inverse of that old, disposable life.

Conclusion

Bubaigawara Jin should be read as class commentary. The various obstacles in his story are all too reflective of the systemic issues of real-world Japan, concisely highlighting the shortcomings and common abuses of the alternative care system, the justice system, and the workplace. It’s also highly likely that Horikoshi himself is aware of economic inequalities on some level, which seems to reflect in the obvious and less-obvious ways he addresses class in BNHA. I think this probable intentionality is important, as it can lend itself to our speculation on the series’ messages and themes. Importantly, if Jin’s story is a commentary about the real-world trials of economic marginalization, then surely this also applies to the way he is treated by heroes and by wider society. Beyond simple evaluations of “X did this, which forced Y to respond,” certain narrative choices may be better understood as a pattern of illustrating disposability, of the way this fictional society creates “human waste,” and to relate them to real-world patterns of which lives are considered worth saving.

I somewhat downplayed the real-world inspirations for Bauman and Butler’s texts, because I believe those are true and serious topics about capitalism and war that should be discussed on their own merits, unrelated to a fictional series; however, they also perfectly show how certain beliefs in the real world are transferrable to BNHA’s world. Because these beliefs are transferrable, readers’ reactions to certain narratives in fiction are rooted in certain truths we believe about the real world as well. For example, it would pointless to call the League of Villains “terrorists” as a condemnation, unless someone believes that the charge of “terrorism” in itself tells us anything meaningful about morality. As Butler has explained, and as real life shows (e.g. through the designation of black radical groups like the Black Panthers or antifascist groups as terrorist organizations), the term “terrorism” alone holds no inherent moral implication. Imagining that the label of “terrorist” can meaningfully convey anything about morality, and that "being a terrorist” removes a person from the boundaries of “normative humanity” (and thus due legal process in-universe, and reader sympathy out-of-universe) reflects an ignorance about certain real-world political processes.

Injustice in the world doesn’t only take the form of obvious oppression and violence; manipulation is also involved. There is a vested interest by the ruling class in guiding the ways people think and perceive reality, teaching us what we deserve and don’t deserve, what prices are acceptable and unacceptable to pay for human life. These lessons must be rejected from the outset, leaving rules and definitions open for interpretation. What qualifies as violence? Is violence more than a physical act of harm? Is it violence to isolate “unproductive” members of society? Is it violence to deny them food and shelter? Is it then violence to cage and execute them when they do not non-violently accept their subjugation? What forms of violence are unacceptable and why? Where does violence really begin?

Dismantling oppression can only be achieved by questioning its very foundations and the language used to justify it; fiction, by enveloping us into a new reality—a new world with new rules—should make this questioning easier if we’re willing to divest ourselves of certain beliefs fed to us by those in power. BNHA, as imperfect as it is, certainly tries to raise some of these questions about the designations of “heroes” and “villains,” about the deserving and undeserving, about who is saved and who gets left behind. I would go further, and argue that to invest legitimacy into the hero system is to invest legitimacy into everything that perpetuates it: the poverty, the violence, the disposability of those judged “villainous,” and the idea that agents of the state are uniquely positioned to enact legitimate violence. Confronting crime means eliminating the need for it and the conditions that give rise to it, and only then, not a moment before, will the problem of villains largely cease to exist.

[thylacine-dreams]

The Cultural Politics of Mourning in the Era of Mass Extinction: Thylacine Specimen P762

“What happens when thylacine bodies are afforded the status of what Judith Butler calls a ‘grievable life’? What might be gained from spending time dwelling on the remains of one particular animal body? With these questions in mind, I turn to P762, a female thylacine pup in alcohol, dated 1866. She was about six months old at the time of her death (Archer) and now resides in the Australian Museum in Sydney. We know the exchange value of specimen P762 in 1866 because of a letter written by the entomologist and naturalist George Masters to the Australian Museum about the trade he had negotiated for the institution of ‘a large container containing black fish and a young thylacine (in spirit)’ from the Tasmanian Museum for ‘birds, shells and another small box containing 2893 insects’ (quoted in Sleightholme and Ayliffe). This pup, who died 70 years prior to the extinction of her species, has been suspended in alcohol in a museum collection for over 150 years.”

Poignant article written by Hannah Stark for the Australian Humanities Review, November 2018.