MESA Banner
Dismemberment and Extraction in the Arab Gulf in Buthaynah al-Isa's Khara'it al-tih
Abstract
Disenfranchised bodies contest normative processes of subject formation in global capitalism. They produce sociopolitical imaginaries that challenge capitalism’s utilitarian view of embodiment. In this paper, I examine the sociopolitical discourses generated by such disenfranchised bodies that are suffering the effects of oppression, mutilation, commodification, or structural violence. In the novel Khar??i? al-t?h (Maps of Loss) (2015), the Kuwaiti author Buthaynah al-??s? sheds light on the exploitative realities of organ trafficking and sexual violence in the Arab Gulf through a narrative about a seven-year old Kuwaiti child, who is abducted by an international organ trafficking network, while his parents are performing hajj in Mecca. In my reading of the novel, I explore how the economic structures of both the Arab Gulf states and the global black market view the human body as a site of extraction. I contend that extraction, in the form of the psychic and physical dismemberment of children, is a form of disenfranchisement. It simultaneously exposes processes of subject formation propagated by a global capitalist order, and the way such dismembered bodies deviate from the biopolitical regulation of state capitalism. In other words, children’s dismemberment diverges from the capitalist view of the subject as a unitary, self-contained, hence extractable whole. I argue that the commodification of human flesh generates an epistemic knowledge that cannot be fully subsumed under the extractive expectations of the capitalist order. Due to their marginalized position, dismembered bodies communicate, move, and convey their experiences in a manner that cannot be fully comprehended or extracted by capitalism. I examine the dismemberment of children’s bodies in the novel in conversation with Athena Athansiou and Judith Bulter’s iteration of dispossession, Sharon Marcus’ rape script, Gibson-Graham’s Marxian analysis of the capitalist body, and Saidiya Hartman’s theorizations of subjection to investigate how dismemberment generates social and political imaginaries that destabilize extractive economies of the body.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Arabian Peninsula
Sub Area
Gulf Studies