Re-creating ‘the Feminine’ through the Tortured Body: Gender as an Implicit Script

• In Event: 3257 - Contemporary and Enduring Violence

Abstract

Gender matters in understanding torture, beyond sexual violence and assaults on women’s reproductive bodies. Based on 52 oral testimonies of women who survived clandestine detention centers in Argentina, this study shows how the treatment of detainees’ bodies was infused with gender ideologies and hierarchies. As a practice that takes the body as an intense site of domination, torture overlaps with social constructs traditionally associated with femininity, which have been functional to securing women’s subordinated place: (1) the conception of women as just bodies, (2) the expectation for women to be hyperaware of their bodies, (3) the construction of women as vulnerable, and (4) the association of women with monstrosity. Torture does not happen in a vacuum but is embedded in social systems of inequality, including gender in intersection with other regimes of power. As a method of subjugation, torture carries that broader social model as an implicit script.

Author

• Barbara Sutton, University at Albany, SUNY