Social Death

Lisa Cacho’s Social Death provides a critical approach to the construction of personhood and rights in a (neo)liberal “democracy.”  As Cacho points out in the introduction, these ideas (of rights and personhood) are not without racial or gender implications. Liberal democracy is based upon the idea that "we" have inherent rights and the freedom to do what we want provided that we do not inflict harm on others. However, this is established upon the bodies of those who must be "othered" and demonized (gender, race, class, sexuality). Rights are not conferred on everyone, but on only small privileged groups. In order to create legal justification of exclusion or denial of others from the protections of this system, they must be established or normalized/naturalized as inherently flawed--criminal. Without the criminalized body, there cannot be the understanding of what "normal" is in this society. Criminalization of certain bodies also allows justification for not allowing full access or representation under these structures. As Cacho points out, they are bodies to be disciplined, but in no way do they "benefit" (i.e. receive protection or provide authorship of these laws that limit life) from this legal system. She asserts that "the foundation of law...is dependent upon a group's permanent criminalization," making them ultimately "ineligible for personhood" (6).  Neoliberalism further reinforces the exclusion of these groups. It does so by creating a script that shows not that there is a systemic problem that needs to be addressed, but that it is "those" people's/group's fault for why their lives are the way they are. It places responsibility upon the individual, but it also ERASES any way of these groups proving their discrimination (19)

Her methodology was something that struck me instantaneously with the analysis of media coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the perpetuation of the construction of the criminalized body juxtaposed to the surviving body. Cacho performs a type of "eclectic" archival project, in which she pulls from all sorts of sources to create this rich analysis that bolsters her thesis. This allows her to get at "how human value is made intelligible through racialized, sexualized, spatialized, and state-sanctioned violences" (4). I find this quite impressive because of her ability to pull partly from the "public" archive (I recall some of the images or news releases that she refers to, and I have public access to go hunt these stories and images down) and create a deep critical analysis that shows how we need a racialized body to understand criminality, for example.

I'm particularly intrigued by the idea of the social death, or (in Butlerian terms) the unlivable life, the "living death". This begins with something like criminalization, in which there is justification for stripping people of rights. But when a body can be criminalized without being involved in any criminal activity, this calls into questions the idea of personhood and human value ascribed to these bodies. In creating ineligibility to personhood,  this cause these groups to be "refused the legal means to contest those laws as well as denied both the political legitimacy and moral credibility necessary to question them" (6).  By the state and the system in place, these groups are "legally recognized as rightless" (6-7). When one does not have full access to these rights and has been constructed in a way that says "these lives don't matter", or because of who these bodies are, their lives don't matter, these are bodies, people who can never have the status of "living".  She then calls into question the difference between mere survival and living life. 

In her conclusion I was particularly interested in her narrative about her cousin and the idea of resistance. Moving away from a kind of dialectical way of talking about resistance/defiance, Cacho invokes a “politics of deviance” (from Cathy Cohen) to explain the deviations away from the normative structures of society made by her cousin, Brandon (Cacho 167). Rather than being strictly oppositional, this politics of deviance not only “challenge normative order” but also inscribe “new or counter normative structures upon which to judge behavior” (Cacho 167). This becomes particularly important because it unsettles normalcy, pushes us to rethink social worth, and finally makes us responsible for centering our focus on those who have been criminalized and considering "unworthy" of our attention (Cacho 167). This way of resistance (if it can be called this, as it seems that Cacho troubles this way of thinking/talking if I understand her point correctly) isn't so much about upending everything, but noting that one can make a transformation through this type of unthinkable politics. It's a pretty intriguing notion.