Femina sacra from Waldenburg- a testimony

Ewa Charkiewicz

presentation at 7th Feminist Research Conference, June 6th, 2009

• On April 14th. 2008 without any prior notification, municipal employees of Walburg City Hall entered flats in a poor area of the city (White Stone), and proceeded to pull electricity cables off, cut water pipes, and demolished partitioning walls to make the flats uninhabitable - in order to force inhabitants to leave.

• For young women who were at home at the time, with their children, the experience was not unlike rape. The perpetrator was the state. The eviction was extrajuridical.

• 24 women, all of them young mothers with children, organize a hunger strike to protest evictions. The strike lasts over a week, and is given publicity in the media.

Walburg is in an ecoomically depressed area of Poland, mines and factories closed; population migrating abroad

To make a living, some people turned to open pit mining. The open pit miners organized to make a deal with the state to allow them excavate coal; they were

not successfull. The president labelled them as criminals.

Evicted from municipal flats for non-payment of rent, some people had nowhere to live but in the abandoned coal pits

White Stone – area of Walburg, where evictions and women’s hunger strike took place

Demonstration in front of the City Hall: 'you get delicacies,we get rubbish bins'

Comments made in political chatrooms: - It’s a pathology, these are parasites that live off our taxes (~jolka)

• This underclass breeds another underclass [margines] (~ alicja)

• Why do I have to pay for their housing. I’d rather pay for sterilizing these females (o90).

• -they have had an accident? Did they get cancer? No!!!!! They grab for the money of somebody else !!!!!!!!!!!

• Orphans of communism! Parasites! Fuck off from my money! Child breeders, where are your husbands! Having a vodka? Go to work, parasites! Why on earth somebody should pay their bills from my money. Cut off their electricity and gas, kick them out into the street! They should have studied or taken up an honest work ….! (Dolny Slask menelski)

• Take their children! Sterilize them! The children would be better of in an orphanage than with their hyperactive, unfit mothers. The only solution is to use force to sterilize these women to stop them from blackmailing society with their children. (~RhapsodyFan)

Policing solidarity and compassion• The truth is there are many flats abandoned years ago in Walbrzych,

nobody lived in these flats for years, the state could renovate them and give to people who need them, and if they do not do it, people occupy the apartments on their own, instead of waiting for years. This is the fault of the president of Walbrzych (wałbrzyszanka)

• Wałbrzyszanka, you can occupy your own property, otherwise this is a theft and it should be severly punished. And if someone dreams of communism let them go to Korea (~ adela)

• Go and buy these parasites flats. The cows live in the flats illegally, kick them out flat on their face !!! Since when thieves are allowed to take somebody’s else property? (dragonis)”

• We are in the hell of the extreme right. The herd of people who hate each other, liberal fanatics, and fanatical egoists (this means the same) . Their slogan is to stomp other people into the ground ….Zero imagination, not to speak of empathy. (~Euron)

• Bolshevic brothel! Pay for their flats with your own money.! That will be the end of touching compassion? (gość)

What is happening here?

• Suicidal parody of neoliberal newspeak?• Taxpayer is the only available form of political

subjecitivity. • Unprocessed trauma of violence experienced

with transition (sudden experience of existential insecurity, rapid, and compressed transformation of state, political institutions, values, gender roles (but not gender relations), violent resubjectivisation. Abandonment.

• The norm: responsible, prudent, fit, flexible neoliberal market citizen capable of living on individual subscription

Lecture March, 2008, by prof. Balcerowicz, presumed architect shock therapy, head central bank, minister finance

• „The socialist economy is a very bad social system… it has to perform badly… it is incompatible with democracy, as naive collectivists would hope for… The desired norm is the system of freedom, decentralization, with people having freedom to start their own business or ngos.

• The strategic moment was a state of exception which has to be used well, it had to be prepared intellectually and organized well (He refers to early months of transition and to his role)

• Those who criticize the market are etatists, collectivists, they have soviet mentality or they are ideological aberrations if they support democracy and oppose capitalism

• Work is a productive activity. Unproductive activity includes thieving, war, or simple idlessness…

• The biggest problem for Poland is a large number of people who do not work. If it is possible to get money easily and for long period, and without work, then there will be many people acting like this. Not working takes many forms, such as earlier retirement, easily accessible disability payments, social allowances. When there are people who do not work, do not pay taxes, and they live off allowances – those who work have to pay high taxes…”

(neoliberal legend, poverty comes from lack of employment, and low wages; via the VAT taxes the poor contribute a larger share of their income to state revenue than the rich who pay low income tax)

Neoliberal governmentality • Political rationality: marketization ( ‘free market’ as regulatory ideal and

permanent economic tribunal (Foucault, 2004)

• Political technologies and technologies of the self: fit, flexible (plastic), entrepreneurial subjects

• Neoliberal biopolitics: the state & market invests in resubjectivication to produce wealth generating, cable of living on private subscription (Bianco) human economic units; adjustment of human subjects to new forms of accumulation of capital (Foucault, 1976)

• Recategorisation: economicallly useful and human waste. New sharp eugenic distinctions are drawn along the lines of economic utility

• The other side of neoliberal biopolitics is thanatopolitics (for the sake of its own survival the state protects the population and therefore is entitled to slaughter, Foucault,1982; also Foucault on state racism, 2004)

Life that does not deserve to live - collusion neoliberalism/conservatism in motherhood

economic fitness tests

• In extreme poverty, and with children? (~Gocha)

• Do they think they are sacred cows if they are pregnant? (m_sasin)

• Instead of stupid health checks at 18, when they measure people’s weight and height, they should conduct psychiatric tests to check if somebody should not be prevented from breeding children, because it’s them that suffer. (~Ina)

• How come they breed children if they do not have a place and means to live? What do these misfits think that they would live at the expense of somebody else? This species will exist as long as there are social security handouts! (~sta)

• Where are their husbands? Why don’t they provide for their families? And if they do not have husbands why did they make themselves kids? They should start thinking, instead of crying, and asking everybody for help (daren)

• They broke the law and now they endanger they lives of their children. Sent them to the joint (sawa)

Femina sacra

• Agamben: homo sacer (the originary structure of politico-juridical order, the one that can be killed with impunity, eg, only after being stripped of nationality, political rights and property Jews (bare life) were moved to the camps, and killed with impunity); State of exception as political paradigm.

• Agamben’s work useful for feminists but ungendered and disembodied

• Femina sacra – a body that can be killed or impregnated with impunity (Lentin)

• My take on the argument: in western political order life the originary inclusion of life in law gender differentiated: patria potestas (father’s right to kill) and cura materna – women’s duty to care

• Women included by triple exclusion: along the axis of economic fitness, sex/gender, race.

• Are all of us feminae sacria?

Resistance

• Resistance – action on the limes, on abandonment and disposession, where life defends its capacity to live;

• Political challenge to the split biopolitics/thanatopolitics

• Bring subjects back from bare life.

• Condition of indistinction between economic and political require the revisioning of feminist theorizing