Gender in Suspension: Race, Captivity and Enclosure

Satellite view of Irwin County Detention Center, via InmateAid

With the passing of justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and the inauguration of Amy Coney Barret into office, anxieties mounted again over the preservation over people’s reproductive rights. However, for many, their reproductive choice has long already been curtailed through the closure of clinics, unreasonable abortion timelines, and overall lack of adequate healthcare, long before any new judge has been appointed. This becomes overwhelmingly clear when we look at the incarcerated population, namely women in ICE detention centers. 

The Trump administration in its waning weeks, as they struggle to grip to power, is working fastidiously to deport the 43 women who spoke out against state-sanctioned sexual violence at the Irwin County Detention Center, in Ocilla Georgia, from genealogical examinations administered by Dr. Mahedera Amin. These violences became public knowledge, as Dawn Wooten a nurse at the facility, who has now been touted a whistleblower of the operations, reported of Amin’s practices of large-scale non-consensual hysterectomies at the facility. In recent weeks, several women have now taken their stories to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One part of the testimonies really stood out to me. Yanira, who chose to only disclose her first name reported that she received a violent pap smear and ultrasound, which left her unable to sit for over a week. What stuck with me was her closing statement: “We are humans, we are women, we have feelings just because we are detained doesn’t mean we should be treated like animals.”

Yanira’s assertion that she was a woman and not an animal, was an attempt to draw the narrow boundaries around her womanhood that shared a haunting reckoning with enslaved women’s experiences on the slave ship. The state-sanctioned violence against her body attempted to render her as something other than human, pushing her into the zone of liminality of both human and animal, a subhuman space. I want to explore what happens to gender in sites of enclosure. Or rather, in what ways does enclosure disrupt, or maybe even upend gender difference? I offer no definitive answer or conclusion, but rather I want to trace a genealogy of how slavery and its reproductive afterlife requires a particular kind of raced and gendered violence that works to deny the captive and the criminal womanhood, and consequently humanity. 

Charting a confluence between Yanira’s experience in the ICE detention centre and racialized slavery and its reproductive afterlife we might see how Yanira’s claim to womanhood tells us more about the condition of gender in captivity. In many ways the hold of the detention center, just like the hold of the ship, becomes a site of enclosure where gender enters into a state of suspension. Through scenes of violence Yanira, and other women like her, gendered identities come into question as they are denied the supposed safeties and protections that accompany womanhood, more pointedly white womanhood. Put differently, it is in these very acts of deeply gendered violence—unmediated sexual assault through gynecological examinations —where their womanhood comes into question. As Yanira sees it, we might argue, it is through these acts of racialized sexual violence, sanctioned, and supported by the state, these women are denied gender privilege which is working to effectively to lodge her outside of the category of both woman and human. Mirroring, what Hortense Spillers argued about the condition of gender for women aboard the hold of the slave ship put simply, the violence enacted against the captive’s women’s bodies is so great that it forces gender difference to evaporate.[1]

What their testimonies show us, is how gendered violence on raced bodies, have the power to ungender the human. The violence we see in ICE detention centers, was first practiced and perfected on the bodies of enslaved black women in the hold. As the issue of reproductive rights again takes center stage, we need to look back at the history of slavery how the categorization of abortion as a women’s issue, not only erases differently gendered reproductive bodies, it in fact, does very little to name the violence being done to raced and incarcerated women. 

Halle-Mackenize Ashby 

[1] Hortense Spilles, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”, Diacritics, Summer, 1987, Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The "American" Connection (Summer, 1987), pp. 64-81