Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics by Clary-Lemon Jennifer;Grant David M.; & David M. Grant

Author:Clary-Lemon, Jennifer;Grant, David M.; & David M. Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Rhetoric—Social aspects, Decolonization, Indigenous peoples, Posthumanism, Materialism
Publisher: Ohio State University Press

CHAPTER 5

Perpetual (In)securities

(Re)Birthing Border Imperialism as Understood through Facultades Serpentinas

A. I. RAMÍREZ

A central concern would have been to highlight the materiality of the body as the ultimate object of technologies of fear, understood as apparatuses of power aimed at carving into the flesh habits, predispositions, and associated emotions—in particular, hatred—conducive to setting social boundaries, to erecting and preserving hierarchies, to the perpetuation of domination.

—Brian Massumi, The Politics of Everyday Fear

The global border industrial complex (GBIC) is a contradictory, imperial specter—a sensitive, recursive, globalized network or matrix of border (in)securities. As a technology of fear, the GBIC creates and reproduces bordered landscapes and ideologies wherein refugee and migrant mothers, women, and transwomen exist in perpetual anxiety. Brian Massumi describes that “assemblages of power,” such as the GBIC, are experts at piercing the flesh, emotions, and behaviors that shape, not only the individual, but potentially the social network—all to further nonconsensual domination. This perpetual insecurity negatively affects the nervous system and facilitates the internalization of fear, which gets passed through the womb or intergenerationally. Border wall murals, understood as rhetorical texts, can articulate the rhetorical sensations of the GBIC and the consequences of those sensations. Through murals, artists express themselves and create a visual representation of the phenomenological consequences of border imperialism.

As a first-generation graduate student navigating a predominantly white and Eurocentric institution and field, I was laughed at for suggesting serpents and dreams could teach us anything. As a queer Mexicana-Chicana having experienced homophobic comments about my theory of the phallic feminine throughout ancient and contemporary cultural practices, I wanted to give it all up. It was reminiscent of how my grandparents’ Kikapú (English: “Kickapoo”) knowledge was deemed witchcraft and brujeria, and how the undocumented migrant experiences of my parents were characterized as shameful within US social and educational systems. Although I had committed my graduate studies to investigating the marginalization of Indigenous experiences, theories, and knowledge, I instinctively hid the serpent in my writings at first, as if to protect it. These personal experiences influenced my investigations into how serpent methodologies inform analysis on how structures of power are embedded in institutions, and in the case of my scholarship, how these structures of power—like ideology, architecture, and international policy—are embedded in global borders. It was these personal experiences that led me to wonder about the palpability and stickiness of border trauma, as I understand it though the serpent.

In order to describe what the border wall feels like, I apply facultades serpentinas, a pluri-versatile theory informed by ancient Mexican/Mexica serpentine awareness, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of la facultad, which she describes as a psychic reality defined as “the ability to shift between attention and see through the surface of things and situations” (Bridge 547).1 Facultades serpentinas, specifically through the birth sequence of a lecho de serpientes / nest of serpents, a symbolic trope throughout the ancient world, is thus a phenomenological approach to my analysis of the GBIC border murals. I utilize auto-ethnographic observation methods as I describe sensory data gathered

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