About the Author
This website represents the culmination of my time at the University of Texas at Austin receiving my Masters in Media Studies.
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I first began to take an interest in machine-human interactions and relationships in Dr. Sharon Strover's "Communication, Technology, and Culture" class, where I was first introduced to the digital influencer Lil Miquela. Miquela was the start of my thinking about the ways that we integrate machines and technology into our daily lives. In following this line of enquiry, I found myself contemplating the way that in taking a recuperative stance toward technology, and in looking at our images of machines and tech through a queer lens, can reveal new modes of being in the world. I found myself transfixed by the ways that these creations are frequently the backdrop that allow humans a way to imagine a different world and a different self. More often than not, these imaginings take on a distinctly counter-hegemonic sensibility.
Halfway through “Communication, Technology, and Culture” (Spring 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic forced us into remote online courses. I’m writing this section on the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a worldwide pandemic. Since then, I’ve completed the majority of my Masters remotely.
Discipline and Punish
"We don't have any gays."
-Ramzan Kadyrov
Earlier in 2020, the U.S. State Department officially sanctioned Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation, citing “gross violations of human rights in the Chechen Republic.” According to The Department there is credible information that Kadyrova has been torturing and killing LGBTQ persons in Chechnya (a semi-autonomous republic of Russia) for more than a decade. The first reports of the human rights violations were reported by the Russian news outlet Novaya Gazeta by Elena Milashina, who has since left Russia fearing for her safety.
Within this section, I position Chechnya’s treatment of LGTQ persons in a liminal space between Foucault’s theories of punishment and discipline. This space is best theorized by Achille Mbembe in his piece, “Necropolitics.” Below, I use “Necropolitics” as a way to place the survivors featured in the documentary in the space between punishment and discipline.
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Brief Overview of Foucault's Discipline and Punish
In Foucault’s 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, he describes how the application of power has evolved and changed forms through the centuries. Prior to the 18th century, torture and imprisonment were the standard way that power was applied to bodies. As evident in Foucault’s example of “Damiens the regicide” (3) being drawn and quartered in a public square, torture was a public spectacle. This spectacle was intrinsically tied with punishment and the application of power on individual bodies. With the advent of the 19th century and its subsequent industrial revolution, power shifted from being
applied to individual bodies in the form of punishment and shifted to disciplining large groups of people in an efficient manner. This took the form of controlling the body at “the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures, attitudes...the efficiency of movements, their internal organization…” (135). Here Foucault is asserting that power is maintained over the body as a daily process not the end result of a spectacle. The spectacle has been replaced by the “uninterrupted play of calculated gazes” (177). Power is asserted by the disciplining of bodies—making sure that they conform to the normalizing ideals of the governing body. Using the timetable created for “the House of young prisoners in Paris” (6) and examples of children at school (29), Foucault depicts how bodies are disciplined and regulated in all spheres of life. This process of normalization, coupled with surveillance, became one of the “great instruments of power” toward the end of the 19th century (184). Bodies that are seen as aberrant are examined and “corrected” to conform to the norm or their humanity is denied as they are expelled from society.
The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity. The violent tenor of the slave’s life is manifested through the overseer’s disposition to behave in a cruel and intemperate manner and in the spectacle of pain inflicted on the slave’s body. Violence, here, becomes an element in manners, like whipping or taking of the slave’s life itself: an act of caprice and pure destruction aimed at instilling terror. Slave life, in many ways, is a form of death-in-life. (21)
-Achille Mbembé, "Necropolitics"
An interview between David Scott and Ramzan Kadyrov
Occupying the "In-Between"
In Chechnya bodies are hyper-surveilled not only by the state, but by friends and family for any sign of deviance. This constant fear of being discovered, and the violent consequences, produces “practised [and] ‘docile’ bodies” (Foucault 138). In simple terms, this means that the constant pressure and feeling of being watched, coupled with the immense fear of discovery and torture, means that the queer bodies in Chechen society lose their sense of power and agency. In order to survive and not be found out they regulate themselves to fit the heteronormative gender norms, as laid out by Kadyrov. The Republic disciplines its citizens as Foucault theorizes, but queer Chechens are not “treated” with the intent to normalize or correct through combinations of psychology, medicine, and surgery. Rather, through surveillance both by the government and its citizens, the Chechen government tracks and separates queer Chechens from their families and friends. The targeted Chechens are then forced into camps and punished through captivity and torture. In this way, the Republic’s treatment of queer Chechen’s aligns with Achille Mbembé’s concept of necropolitics.
In “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembé builds upon Foucault’s notion of “biopower,” theorizing the way that groups of people occupy a death-world. Mbembé defines death-worlds as “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life…[and] the status of living dead. (40). Death-worlds are created by sovereign powers and their ability to “dictate who may live and who must die” (11). Death-worlds or death-in-life are characterized by being kept alive, but in a constant state of injury and terror. Living in Chechnya, under a power that vehemently denies the existence of gay Chechens, queer Chechens occupy a death-world. Surveilled both by the state and by friends and family, they are posited contra to Chechnya’s (normative and hyper-masculine) national identity. Mbembé theorizes “that national identity is imagined as an identity against the Other” (27) and that “killing becomes precisely targeted” (29). Due to this segregation and violence, whole groups of people disperse over large areas of land and are no longer “contained by the boundaries of a territorial state” (34). Welcome to Chechnya highlights this dispersal as the activists desperately try and smuggle as many queer Chechens out of Chechnya as possible. The ones that manage to escape live away from their family and home as refugees. Many of them spend months in hiding hoping that they are granted asylum to legally live in a different country.
“My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14).
Thinking Onward: What are methods we by which we are conditioned to behave a certain way? What are the stakes for noncompliance with these methods?
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