Imprisonment and Excessive Femininity:Reading Ulrike Meinhof's Brain
2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13534645.2010.508651
ISSN1460-700X
Autores Tópico(s)Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The author wishes to thank Dimitris Vardoulakis and Jon Stratton for their invaluable feedback on this article. 1 Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ Signs 7:1 (1981) p.43. 2 Though far from a standard procedure, since the inception of neuroscience in the nineteenth century, the brains of a number of notable personalities have been posthumously removed and stored for future examination, including Einstein, Lenin, Anatole France and Jonathan Swift. The removal of Meinhof's brain can thus be located in a long-standing tradition of dissection for the purposes of neuroscientific inquiry. Interestingly, the brains of Meinhof's three RAF colleagues – Andreas Baader, Jan Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin – are also rumoured to have been removed after their multiple suicide in 1977. However, these specimens have disappeared without a trace (Rob Broomby, ‘Red Army Faction brains “disappeared”’, BBC News World Edition (16 Nov. 2002) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2484745.stm). 3 Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ p.42. 4 Rousseau famously opened The Social Contract by saying that ‘Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract, Trans. Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) p.45). The idealised freedom of Rousseau's ‘state of nature’ can never be reproduced in society, thus the political aim becomes instead a rational organization of the society that allows for the operation of the ‘general will’ that guarantees civil freedom. For a discussion of the section on freedom in the Social Contract, see Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 5 These writings are collected in Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, Ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For an interesting discussion, see the recently published lectures by Adorno. Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–65, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). 6 Genevieve Lloyd, Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity, 1988). 7 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 8 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, p.219. 9 See for example, Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 10 Amanda Third, ‘Feminist Terrorists/Terrorist Feminists: Tracking the Rise of the Violent Feminist Threat’, in Susanna Scarparo (Ed.), Violence and Popular Culture (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006) pp.67–88. 11 These attitudes are documented in Eileen MacDonald, Shoot the Women First (London: Fourth Estate, 1991). 12 For an exposition of this argument, see Daniel A. Georges-Abeyie, ‘Women as Terrorists’ in Lawrence Zelic Freedman and Yonah Alexander (Eds.), Perspectives on Terrorism (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1983). 13 Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994) p.8. 14 That there was a popular perception that Meinhof played a key role in the terrorist organisation is evident in the fact that the RAF became popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, both within and outside West Germany. However, most accounts of the history of the Baader-Meinhof Gang suggest that Meinhof did not play the leadership role commonly attributed to her. A film that reframes Meinhof's place in the RAF is The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Dir. Uli Edel, Prod. Bernd Eichinger (Constantin Film Produktion, 2008). 15 It is not uncommon for popular and counter-insurgency constructions of the female terrorist to use madness to explain away women's involvement in political violence. The case of Patricia Hearst, which unfolded in the United States simultaneous to Meinhof's capture and imprisonment, stands out as a case in point. See Amanda Third, ‘Nuclear Terrorists: Patty Hearst and the Terrorist Family’. Hecate (St. Lucia: Hecate Press) 28:2 (2002) pp.82–99. 16 These strategies of containment sometimes included submitting Meinhof's body to extreme interventions. See J. Smith and André Moncourt, The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, Volume 1: Projectiles for the People (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2009) p.241. 17 Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) p.199. 18 Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2001) p.64. 19 Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities, p.65. 20 Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities, pp.2–3. 21 Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities, pp.57–58. 22 Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meanings of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organisation of Consent in Nineteenth Century Britain (London etc: Cambridge University Press, 1984) p.3. 23 Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meanings of Popular Science, p.175. 24 Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman's Nature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993) p.68. 25 The focus of such efforts was middle class women because they would ensure the reproduction of the dominant class. For a discussion of women's confinement within the domestic realm in the nineteenth century, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 26 Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex, p.64. 27 Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex, p.74. 28 J. MacGrigor Allan's essay can be found at http://www.canadiana.org/view/18125/0005. 29 Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meanings of Popular Science, p.271. 30 Jutta Ditfurth as cited in J. Smith and André Moncourt, The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, Volume 1: Projectiles for the People (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2009) p.53. 31 See Amanda Third, ‘Feminist Terrorists/Terrorist Feminists’. 32 Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009) pp.188–189. 33 For an analysis of postfeminism's pronouncement of feminism's death, see Camille Nurka, ‘Postfeminist Autopsies’, Australian Feminist Studies, 17:38 (2002) pp.177–189. 34 Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism, p.189. 35 Dissections were also conducted on the bodies of the poor and ‘foreigners’ of low standing whose bodies were not claimed by family. As Katharine Park demonstrates, dissections were also carried out in conjunction with embalming, autopsy and sectio in mortua procedures. (Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2010)). However, the academic tradition of public dissection depended to no small degree on dissections performed upon criminal bodies. 36 Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) p.66. 37 Katharine Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47:1 (1994) p.3. 38 Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) p.47. 39 Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism, p.47. 40 Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ pp.48–49. 41 Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, The Female Offender (New York: D. Appleton, 1895) p.74. 42 Alison Young, Imagining Crime: Textual Outaws and Criminal Conversations (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1996) p.28. Or, Woman is, in Lacan's terms, ‘not all’. 43 Alison Young, Imagining Crime, p.27. 44 Alison Young, Imagining Crime, p.27. 45 Peter Finn, ‘Germans Studied Brains of Radical Group's Leaders’, Washington Post (21 Nov. 2002) p.A15. 46 Professor Bernhard Bogerts as cited in Peter Finn, ‘Germans Studied Brains of Radical Group's Leaders’, p.A15. Despite Professor Bogerts' statement, many newspaper reports suggested the analysis of Meinhof's brain had pinpointed a biological explanation for her terrorism. These reports, however, did not quote Professor Bogerts directly. Further, whilst the University of Magdeburg summarised their findings, they declined to release the full report. These factors only amplified the confusion surrounding Meinhof's brain, reproducing the construction of the female terrorist as secret.
Referência(s)