GGRC02H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter week 9: Extreme Measures, Homicide, Sociality
RUTH WILSON GILMORE: FATAL COUPLINGS OF POWER AND DIFFERENCE
- her work is focused on social theory, political economy, labour, and social movements
-Her new project is called: Political Geographies of Recognition in the Age of the
Human Sacrifice tries to show a geographical genealogy of radicalism of women by
state and state-sanctioned racist terror
- There is a capitalist racist state
States are territorial resolutions of crisis capitalist states displace and contain
highly differentiated moments of class struggle in many ways
oEg. Tax struggle
oClass conflict comes from many different sites of production (or
reproduction)
oState’s mediation is both constitutive of and constituted by extra-state
relations
- Racism is singular b/c its practitioners exploit and renew fatal power-difference
couplings
oFatalities (application of violence; the cause of premature deaths) produces
political power
-Non-fatal power-difference couplings: mutuality
-Racism is a practice of abstraction: displacement of difference into hierarchies that
organize relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories
functions as a limiting force that pushes disproportionate costs of participaiting in an
increasingly monetized and profit-driven world onto those who (b/c political distance)
can’t access them
-Thus: racis, produces a hierarchy of human and inhuman persons that form the
category of “human being”
- Abstraction produces all kinds of fetishes (states/races/normative views) a
geographical imperative lies at the heart of every struggle for social justice: justice is
always spatial
- Golden Gulag; prisons are geographical solutions to social and economic crises,
politically organized by a racial state that is itself in crisis
Where have we been?
- Geographers used 3 main frameworks to study race in the 20th century: environmental
determinism, areal differentiation, and social construction
oAll share 2 assumptions: (1) social formations are structured in a dominance
within and across scales; (2) race is in some way determinate of socio-spatial
location
Where should we go?
-Race is contradictory but overdetermined as well the recognition that power and
structure are mutually dependent requires that we understand dynamic distributions of
power throughout a structure
- Structrues change under conditions of power re-distribution (eg. During time sof crisis)
For example?
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Ruth wilson gilmore: fatal couplings of power and difference her work is focused on social theory, political economy, labour, and social movements. Her new project is called: political geographies of recognition in the age of the. Human sacrifice tries to show a geographical genealogy of radicalism of women by state and state-sanctioned racist terror. States are territorial resolutions of crisis capitalist states displace and contain highly differentiated moments of class struggle in many ways: eg. Tax struggle: class conflict comes from many different sites of production (or reproduction, state"s mediation is both constitutive of and constituted by extra-state relations. Racism is singular b/c its practitioners exploit and renew fatal power-difference couplings: fatalities (application of violence; the cause of premature deaths) produces political power. Thus: racis, produces a hierarchy of human and inhuman persons that form the category of human being .
