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Perverse Intimacies and Suffering Subjects: The Walls of a Counterinsurgency War in Turkey
Abstract
One of the most common tactics to repress an armed insurgency which uses non-linear and dynamic urban space as a medium of war is to destroy walls that not only envelop public squares, courtyards, and streets, but also those separating private homes, as well as the domestic spaces within them. This piece concentrates on the walls that were broken down, sprayed with graffiti and re-erected in virtual form by Turkish counterinsurgents during the latest counterinsurgency war in urban Kurdistan (2015-2017). Approaching walls as phantasmatic artifacts to be decoded to critique counterinsurgency, this ethnographic and archival research moves from the scorched walls of a Kurdish town to pictures of graffiti-covered walls to the virtual walls of a YouTube music video. Reading these three sets of phantasmatic walls against one another, it argues that nationalist suffering subjects who feel grief and grievance about the war of their own creation are inextricable from militarist pervert subjects who intrude into intimate worlds of the Other to further their suffering. As two inseparable effects of counterinsurgency, this piece contends that the infliction of intimate injury and the production of nationalist suffering subjectivity keep expanding violence to new territories without end.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None