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Cultura Documentos
I consider two cases of legal abandonment in Vancouver—of murdered sex workers and live-in
caregivers on temporary work visas—in light of Agamben’s claim that the generalized suspension
of the law has become a dominant paradigm of government. I bring to Agamben’s theory a
concern to specify both the gendering and racialisation of these processes, and the many
geographies that are integral to legal abandonment and the reduction of categories of people to
‘bare life’. The case studies also allow me to explore two limit-concepts that Agamben offers as a
means to re-envision political community: the refugee who refuses assimilation in the nation-
state, and the human so degraded as to exist beyond conventional humanist ethics of respect,
dignity and responsibility.
homes. This was an exciting time to start this research because, after
years of lobbying, activists were finally beginning to exact some sig-
nificant legislative reforms. In 1995 in British Columbia, for instance,
the Employment Standards Act was amended so that live-in domestic
workers were covered by minimum hourly wage and overtime regula-
tions from which they previously had been excluded. However, almost
a decade after these legislative reforms, local activists think that the
situation of live-in domestic workers in Vancouver has worsened. The
state has neglected to enforce the new regulations, and many live-in
caregivers are working longer hours under even more exploitative
conditions. The Director of the Philippine Women Centre argues
that it is now harder to organize domestic workers than it was in
1995, precisely because domestic workers work longer hours than they
did before the new labour regulations were put in place. A decade
ago, domestic workers used to gather together at the Philippine
Women Centre on weekends; now, desperate phone calls come into
the Centre on an individual, emergency basis. In the Director’s words,
every phone call is ‘‘as if they’re calling 911.’’2
The reference to ‘911’ is ironic because this is the telephone number
that is used in Canada to connect a caller to emergency state services.
Yet it is precisely the inadequacy of state regulation that leads live-in
domestic workers to place emergency calls to the Philippine Women
Centre. I want to pursue this issue of absences and lapses in state
policing and regulation in particular spaces of the city. Rather than
viewing such lapses as aberrations from normal practice, I want to ask
how such irregularities become the norm for certain people in certain
places. This raises, in the context of everyday life in Vancouver, a
paradox that Foucault identified for the modern biopolitical state. The
paradox is that there is a positive relation between the state’s assurances
of life (eg, protecting the rights and freedoms of citizens, as well as the
health of the nation), and the state’s right to kill: ‘‘the more you kill [and]
. . . let die, the more you will live’’ (quoted in Stoler 1995:84). The
relation between the production of citizenship and the state’s sovereignty
over life is therefore not incidental but productive and fundamental.
I pursue this paradox by means of Giorgio Agamben’s theorizing of the
state of exception. I bring to Agamben’s theory a concern to specify the
gendering and racialisation of these processes. As a feminist frustrated by
both the everyday violence exacted on certain categories of women and
the seeming inability to reform the Live-in Caregiver Program, I turn to
Agamben’s theory for fresh ideas about political strategy.
matter, ‘‘an exposure of natural life to the force of the law in aban-
donment . . . . the irreparable exposure of life to death in the sovereign
ban’’ (Mills, 2004:46). In Agamben’s account of modern
democracy, it is the unstable blurring of biological and political life
(which takes form as the sovereign citizen) that creates the conditions
of modern biopower, in which the state administers the health of the
national body through and in the name of the health of individual
bodies.
Given the gendered nature of the public/private divide, so amply
explored within feminist scholarship (Landes 1998; Marston 1990;
Pateman 1988), it is inconceivable that these processes work in a
uniform way for men and women.8 As Rooney notes, ‘‘it is only in
living memory’’ that the domestic and family has been ‘‘genuinely
subject to the rule of law’’ (2002, 141). Recasting private domestic
issues such as childcare and domestic assault as public ones remains
an area of intense political contest. Feminists have long explored the
paradox that women’s issues are often depoliticized by being enclaved
within the private sphere, while women are simultaneously less able
than men to maintain the stability of the distinction between private
and public (eg, they are more vulnerable to having their ‘private’
selves made into a spectacle through publicity (Fraser 1992)).
Brown (2004) underlines the fact that it is not simply the case that
women have had troubled access to the public sphere. Rather,
women’s formal equality within the public sphere has been entirely
dependent on their subordination within the home. Comparing the
political incorporation of women and Jews in 18th and 19th century
Europe, she concludes that, while
racialization [may first appear as] a more powerfully determining
discourse than sexualization in establishing limits to nation-state
incorporation, . . . sexualization functions as a more relentlessly sub-
ordinating discourse and is therefore precisely what permits
women’s enfranchisement as political equals without the risk of
substantive equality—and more importantly, without a risk of a
challenge to the masculinist, heterosexual, and Christian norms at
the heart of the putative universality of the state (23).
Bare life and legal abandonment are not equivalent to the private
sphere, but the wealth of feminist theorizing on the way that the
private-public divide works within modern democracy has to be
brought to bear on processes of legal abandonment. Both the produc-
tion of the home as a gendered private space, and women’s especial
difficulty in maintaining the border between private and public, are
key resources for the legal abandonment of women. The point here is
not only that many of those who are placed in the position of bare life
are women. It is also that both admission to citizenship and rendering
names, both of you give me your names. Cause if you’re going to act
smart you’re going to come with us’. I say ‘no I rather not come with
you, but I’d rather report you to your supervisor’. And yet they still
intimidated me because they didn’t think I would. My daughter went
over there and says, ‘what’s the problem here’ . . . and then pretty
soon, because they had made a mistake, they tried to cover up to her
(quoted in England, 2004:308).
England traces what she calls a ‘‘trope of visibility/invisibility’’, of the
women’s feelings that they are both hyper-visible and invisible, both
inside and outside the gaze of the state. Their inclusion within the law
as sex workers is simultaneously an act of exclusion.
In the case of the missing women, police and civic officials were
slow to accept that they were not simply transient. In response to
public requests for a concerted police investigation, the mayor, Philip
Owen, reportedly stated, ‘‘We are not running a location service’’ (de
Vries 2003:217), and first suggested that any reward that might be
offered be framed as a $5,000 incentive for women to ‘‘call home’’ (de
Vries 2003:221). These comments can be understood to reflect some
unfounded geographical assumptions about the inherent mobility of
drug addicts12 and sex workers, based on speculation that they may
have entered a treatment program, or may be seeking to distance
themselves from their stigmatized lives as prostitutes, in another
location under another identity.13 Lisa Sanchez’s (2004) contends
that the sex worker is ‘‘a subject who is always already out of place
. . . an eternal outsider who cannot be displaced [because she has no
place], a figure of eternal motion, elusive and ghost-like, both illegal
and impossible.’’ One part of this illusive mobility is a suspicion that
prostitutes lead double lives. Wright (2004) traces how police in
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico have justified their failure to stop the flow of
murders of hundreds of women by casting doubt on their morality.
Family and friends are often asked, ‘‘Are you sure that she didn’t lead
a double life?’’ (377). Similarly (but in reverse), in Vancouver the
suspicion of their return to respectable life justified police inaction.
Another geographical way of making sense of the police argument
about transience is to note that at least 39 of the missing women were
aboriginal, and to trace the colonial geography that their aboriginality
implies. There has been a long history in Canada of assuming that
aboriginals and cities are mutually exclusive. It is often assumed that
aboriginals in cities are merely transient, en route to their legislated
‘camp’, which is the Indian reserve (Peters 1996:1998)14. In other
words, the presumption of transience made sense because of other
geographical assumptions. All of these spatialities undergird legal
abandonment.
aside some little old lady getting on the bus. When you sit at the
table, you don’t see that there’s so much food, so you take propor-
tionately. No. You make sure you get yours first. So there’s none of
that, you see, which fits in more with a Canadian society. And there’s
a lot of learning that a lot of Filipino people have to do. (Interview
with Nanny Agent H, June 1994).
This primitivism also operates in media representations that are
meant to be critical of it. Take, for example, an in-depth article that
appeared in 2001 in the major national newspaper, The Globe and
Mail (Figure 2; Saunders 2001). The article advocates for domestic
workers in Los Angeles by comparing the deplorable wages and
conditions of domestic workers with the expenses that affluent house-
holds willingly pay for the care of their dogs. The comparison should
be made between children and dogs on the one hand, and domestic
workers and the various groomers, dog walkers, etc. who are hired to
care for dogs on the other. But both the text and visuals work
differently. Because the dog caregivers are absent from the visuals,
we pair the domestic worker with the dog, a reading that is prompted
by the title, ‘‘You wouldn’t wish it on a dog’’. This reading is particu-
larly problematic in Canada, where the majority of foreign domestic
workers are Filipino, and one means of primitivising Filipinos is
precisely through their reputation as ‘dogeaters’.
There is a second characteristic of their geography that sticks to
Filipinas so as to turn their indentured servitude in Canada into a
kind of rescue mission: this is the assumption of utter destitution of
life in the Philippines. Again, various nanny agents whom I have
interviewed in Vancouver voiced this assumption. Explaining why
established labour standards of minimum wage and overtime provi-
sions cannot be applied to domestic work, one nanny agent reasoned:
‘‘[this] would not work at all. There’s not the money there [within the
household budgets of prospective Canadian employers]. It will just
cut down on the amount of immigration from the Philippines tremen-
dously, because that [the Live-in Caregiver Program] is the foot in the
door for many immigrants . . . You know, things are not good back in
the Philippines. . . . They would be doomed to a life there’’ (Interview
with Nanny Agent H, June 1994).
Domestic workers are certainly coming to Canada for the opportu-
nity to immigrate and for economic opportunities, but destitution is
not an accurate representation of many of their circumstances given
the program requirements that they have linguistic competence in one
of the two national languages and two years of post-secondary educa-
tion. Rhacel Parrenas (2005) has argued that it is in fact the middle
classes in the Philippines who are most prone to do overseas contract
work. They do this in order to maintain their middle class standing in
Acknowledgements
I thank Nick Blomley, Derek Gregory, and Joel Wainwright for their
close readings of earlier drafts of this manuscript, and Heidi Nast for
her comments as referee. I have benefited hugely from thoughtful and
probing responses to presentations given at U.B.C., Tokyo Keizai
University, the University of Minnesota and University of Toronto.
Thanks very much to Noel Castree and Melissa Wright for their
editorial assistance, and for the opportunity to bring this paper to
completion as the Antipode Lecture at the 2005 annual meetings of
the Association of American Geographers. I thank Maggie de Vries
for permission to reprint her sister’s poem.
Endnotes
1
Twelve of these assaults took place in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, and the
rest in Southeast Asia. The accused, Donald Bakker, is the first Canadian to be
charged under Canada’s new ‘‘sex tourism law’’, which makes it possible to prosecute
Canadians for sexual abuse of children outside of Canada.
2
This comment was made in casual conversation with Cecilia Diocson in July 2003.
3
To modern ears the name is deceptive. Homo sacer was a position conferred by
ancient Roman law upon those who could not be ritually sacrificed (because they were
outside divine law and their deaths thus had no value to the gods), but could be killed
(or let die) with impunity (because they had been excluded from juridical law).
4
Bhabha (2004) chronicles more recent attacks on birthright citizenship in the United
States, Canada and Ireland.
5
Brown (2003) is cautioning for more rigour in conceptualizations of neo-liberalism,
arguing that neo-liberalism draws on a very specific and especially brutal variant of
economic liberalism. Unlike earlier variants of political liberalism, neo-liberalism
collapses moral and political rationalities into the economic. She argues that citizen-
ship has been reduced to an entrepreneurial responsibility for well-being, and the
consequences of such freedom and responsibility are both individualized and
moralized.
6
This simplifies Agamben’s argument because he is claiming that every individual
now contains an unstable mix of bare life and political subjecthood, given that entry
into citizenship is via bare life. ‘‘Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or
a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being’’
(Agamben 1998:140). However, it is also clear that he believes that some lives are
barer than others, and it is this distinction that I am pursuing here. As Peter
Fitzpatrick (2001) notes, Agamben offers two modes of conceiving bare life: one
totalizing, and another that comes in varied instantiations.
7
Another boundary defined a threshold between civilized life and a state of
(uncivilized) nature. I bracket this at the moment but this clearly becomes important
to an analysis of the racialisation of legal abandonment and in particular the ways that
discourses of primitivism naturalise legal abandonment. In the case of racialised
women, the state of nature returns and is enfolded into the geographies of private
and public in especially problematic ways.
8
Lisa Sanchez (2004) takes a stronger stance and argues that homo sacer is gendered
as masculine. She writes that ‘‘the expulsion of homo sacer is the displacement of one
who was already imagined to be inside—he is a useful enigma—an included exclu-
sion’’. In her view, certain excluded women—she writes in particular about sex work-
ers—dwell in an entirely different conceptual and legal space than homo sacer. They
are, she argues, utterly excluded, with no possibility of return. I want to take a
somewhat different tact, and argue that contemporary homo sacer is a much more
complicated figure in practice than imagined by Agamben, and to pursue what a
gendered analysis of homo sacer might look like.
9
Consider US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s remark in 1900: ‘‘a native [Filipino]
family feeds; it does not breakfast or dine, it feeds’’ (quoted in Doty 1996:39).
10
I thank Joel Wainwright for this phrasing, and for sharpening my thinking on this
point.
11
Consider an email that one of my undergraduate students sent me as I began
writing this paper. He was participating in a theatre workshop—ironically, one
entitled: Practicing Democracy—that was being held in the Downtown Eastside. He
writes:
Today was even more intense, one of the defining moments being the extreme
use of force in the arrest of a young woman right outside the rehearsal hall. The
group was on a smoke break while a couple of policemen were making what
appeared to be a routine arrest across the road, until suddenly the young woman
was taken down to the pavement and put into a choke hold. As she started
screaming and yelling, a bunch of us ran over just in time to see one of the
officers smack the girl in the back of the head. There must have been about
fifteen of us who went over, to see what could be done. The scene was pretty
crazy . . . but it was amazing how fast the young woman calmed down once she
realized that there was a huge crowd of witnesses. The police seemed a little
taken aback as well and suddenly everything was strictly by the book. One in our
group is a first aid attendant and was able to convince the police to let him make
sure the young woman (who couldn’t have been more than sixteen) was physi-
cally okay, as she was spitting up blood and vomiting. We were also able to get
the badge numbers of the policemen and called the young woman’s lawyer,
telling him that several of us had witnessed the affair. Anyway, just another
day in the downtown eastside, I guess . . . (email communication, February 2,
2004).
The role of middle class observers as witnesses who rehabilitate the rights of those
who have been cast into bare life is an important one. But this understanding also
reinforces the idea that the Downtown Eastside is truly exceptional.
12
de Vries (2003:189) argues that this displays a misunderstanding of the geographies
of survival sex work and drug addiction insofar as ‘‘as women get older and become
addicted to drugs, they become less transient, to the point where they are more or less
rooted in one spot.’’
13
These speculations found some slight support in 1999 when four of the missing
women were located: two dead and two alive (de Vries 2003:189).
14
Indeed, this assumption has been formalized in Canadian laws that have made
access to aboriginal rights contingent on residence on a First Nation’s reserve. Yet
more than 50% of First Nation’s people in Canada now live in urban areas, and Peters
(1998) has argued that the city is especially important to First Nation’s women and to
their efforts to create a space for themselves beyond patriarchal relations on reserves.
There is however a persistent inability on the part of non-aboriginal Canadians to
imagine First Nations’ peoples permanently settled within the space of the city, and a
tendency to assume a continuing link between aboriginality and the space of the
reserve. As an index of this, in the province of Manitoba the 1996 census found that
35% of the province’s natives live in cities, but about 90 percent of government
funding is aimed at reserves (Smith 2004). A recent federal decision not to appeal a
court decision about government discrimination against off-reserve natives in relation
to a specific training program has been taken by some Native advocates as a decision
that will ‘‘completely change the way that Ottawa deals with urban communities,’’
whilst ‘‘[e]xperts are divided about whether the court’s decision will oblige the federal
government to directly fund urban aboriginal groups’’ (Smith 2004:A7).
15
It should be acknowledged that some media coverage was both effective and highly
praised—in fact, one journalist (Wood 1999a:1999b) received a national award for his
investigative reporting on this issue. However, the media have abandoned the missing
women in numerous ways, including some that I do not explore. Young and Pritchard
(2005), for instance, puzzle over the small number of US media violations of the
media ban in relation to the trial of the man accused of murdering the missing women
(relative to an earlier sensationalized Canadian serial murder case). They reason that
US media have evinced less interest in the current case because the victims were sex
workers and many were aboriginal, whereas the victims of the earlier serial murderer
were white and middle class.
16
It would be unfair to overextend this point, because some of the photos were
provided by family members.
17
This stands in striking contrast to the treatment in New York newspapers of those
missing after the September 11 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. ‘‘The newspaper
portraits were of a necessity uniform. As in a high school yearbook, everyone memor-
ialized was given equal space and equal treatment’’ (Miller 2003:114). There are, how-
ever, two telling differences. First, these (typically smiling) portraits were accompanied by
written anecdotes that were meant to individuate, and provide what Miller calls ‘‘a
narrative DNA’’. Second, the newspaper editors of the New York Times publicly ‘‘pon-
dered the best strategy for identifying the singularity of each life within the constraints of
the form’’ (Miller 2003:114) and lamented the fact that such profiles were but ‘‘a single
frame lifted from the unrecountable complexity of a lived life’’ (quoted in Miller).
18
The media has deployed the same tactic with respect to Donald Bakker, the
Vancouver man accused of sex torture in January 2004. He is invariably described
as a ‘‘short and balding’’ ‘‘father of a young child’’ who lives in a middle-class
neighbourhood (Vancouver Sun 2004). In other words, he could be living next door.
19
This is also a common strategy among oppositional groups in the Downtown
Eastside. In her assessment of photographic representations of women in the
Downtown Eastside, for instance, Jennifer England (2004) contrasts two photography
shows exhibited in Vancouver in 1998. She argues that one by a well-known
Vancouver photographer, Lincoln Clarkes, eroticizes women’s poverty within the
confined spaces of the back alleys of the Downtown Eastside. She contrasts this to a
collaboration between an artist and nine Downtown Eastside women, and notes in
particular the productive way that the latter exhibit ‘‘challenges an outsider’s view of
the community as a homogeneous, tightly bounded space’’ (91) by showing images of
Downtown Eastside women with their families moving in and out of this neighbour-
hood (on public transit for instance). This disrupts the stereotype that these women
are entrapped by and in fact synonymous with the space of the Downtown Eastside. A
similar comparison could be made between two important and widely aired films that
have been made about the Downtown Eastside: Through a Blue Lens, and Fix: Story of
an Addicted City. The former video—made in collaboration with Vancouver police—
plays directly with the theme of frontier (England 2004) and the latter begins,
significantly, with the trip by advocates for drug addicts outside of the Downtown
Eastside into the centre of official local political life: City Hall.
20
For instance, the changing regulation of prostitution in Vancouver over the last 30
years has forced sex workers into increasingly marginal and deserted locations in the
city (de Vries 2003).
21
An exiled Filipino revolutionary, Professor Sison exists within the state of the
exception. He was stranded while visiting Holland in 1987 when the Aquino govern-
ment cancelled his passport and thus legally abandoned him as a citizen of the
Philippines. Sison was recognized by the Dutch government as a political refugee
and is thus protected from expulsion. The Dutch government continues, however, to
refuse admission and rights of residence. Professor Sison is currently included on the
US list of ‘‘Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons’’ and on the list of
terrorists of the Council of the European Union and Commission of the European
Communities. He has made a complaint to the European Court of Justice demanding
that his name be removed and that he be paid damages.
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