Keywords

1 Gendered and Non-human Martyrdom

Olga Camacho was 7 years old when in 1938 she was raped and murdered in Tijuana by a 24-year-old soldier, Juan “Soldado”. Today, Soldado is worshipped in both Mexico and the United States as a martyr and the patron saint of undocumented migrants. The girl’s murder has been almost entirely erased from memory as Soldado became a symbol of military injustice and a valuable spiritual asset when migrating to the neighbouring, more prosperous country. The martyrdom of a young child, a female, is obliterated (and therefore also her agony and cruel death) in the face of hegemonic paradigms related to patriarchal and nationalistic values. A critical reflection on the foundations of martyrdom seems therefore required.

This chapter has a threefold dimension: the use of a theory of embodied and engendered martyrdom; the discussion of racialised heteronormative relationships and their institutionalised role in the process of nation-building; the intersectional debate which additionally includes the animal question. To this end, I will focus on “Martyrdom” by Joyce Carol Oates, a brutal allegory of marriage where the cruel husband, Mr. X, abuses his younger, pretty wife, Babygirl, by neglecting, beating, prostituting and, in the end, raping her with a live rat, He. The rat and the woman become martyrs, with their utter suffering polyphonically described by them. I will suggest that a biopolitical approach to gendered violence and to the instrumentalisation of animal bodies reveals systemic violence which is exerted over subaltern subjectivities. Neither the woman’s nor the rat’s grief seems worthy of recognition and therefore the healing potential of mourning is put at risk.1 The theoretical structure sustaining and inspiring my reflections emerges from recent debates on vulnerability and its relation to resistance (Butler 2016). In this particular instance, a political exploration of the entanglements generated in the relationship between patriarchal violence and vulnerability will be taken into consideration. Judith Butler disenthralls vulnerability from the disabling realm of passivity of the traditional gendered binarism. This chapter will rethink vulnerability in relation to agency and, therefore, to resistance and discuss whether political deconstruction can be organised by those oppressed by binary codes: feminine versus masculine and non-human animal versus human.

2 Precarious Bodies: Rats and Women

“To which Other do I respond ethically?”, asks Judith Butler in Precarious Lives (2004, 140). In “Martyrdom”, published in 1994 in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, Joyce Carol Oates suggests that women and non-human animals are the Others who demand such a response. Moreover, I argue, this response must take into consideration their embodied subjectivities and, in this case, their embodied subjectivities as martyrs. Michaela DeSousey et al. proffer a model of embodied martyrdom whereby the martyr is a socially contested space and a cultural object. They argue that the “body itself is a tool that serves as a marker of nationalism, religiosity, and cultural traditions that reflect deeper claims about social worlds” (DeSousey 2008, 100). Their model is undoubtedly anthropocentric and presupposes agency, so it has limitations with respect to this discussion, but their understandings of the martyr and her/his body as producers of meaning and identity which frame sacrifice and death are productive. The authors admit that martyrdom might, in fact, not always be willed, but it must be perceived as such and in Oates’s short story the wife accepts the violence inherent in her marriage. Another point made by DeSousey et al. is that of the martyr’s reputational use and, therefore, of the ensuing creation of a public persona which in times of ideological and political unrest, stands for what is deemed right. The martyr is a composite of an abstract concept and a material object (though sometimes the absence of the body can be productive too, such in the case with Che Guevara). The decisions regarding representation and reputation thus create a narrative and memorialise the sacrifice which acquires discursive and affective value as well. This chapter will also address the core problem of the plea of the voiceless and unrecognised martyr whose sacrifice is ideologically positioned in terms of human animal and gender relations.

The story starts with the description of both bodies arriving into the world, bodies which seem to have somehow always been connected and which will finally meet in martyrdom as the rat forcibly re-enters a birth canal, this time, a human one:

A sleek tiny baby he was, palpitating with life and appetite and he emerged out of his mother’s birth canal, and perfectly formed: twenty miniature toes intact, and the near microscopic nails already sharp; pink-whorled tiny ears; the tiny nose quivering, already vigilant against danger. […]. And the miniature teeth set in those jaws – needle sharp, and perfectly formed. (More of these teeth, soon.) And the quizzical curve of the tail, pink hairless, thin as a mere thread. (Oates 1994, 284)

At first, the readers might think this passage describes the birth of a human baby: the pinkness, the sweetness and the approach which is usually reserved for humans (counting fingers and toes, the perfection of body elements). But as they read through, it becomes obvious that the sweet perfection refers to body parts which are not typically human: twenty toes (not fingers and toes), the jaws and the tail. The rat’s birth follows Babygirl’s:

What a beautiful baby she was, Babygirl her loving parents called her […] fated to be smothered with love, devoured with love, an American Babygirl placed with reverend fingers in her incubator. Peri-winkle blue eyes, fair silk-soft blond hair, perfect rosebud lips, tiny pug nose, uniform smoothness of the Caucasian skin. (Oates 1994, 284. Italics in the text)

Their parallel lives seem both similar and unique. He is born into a world of danger and fear; she (italics in the text) into a world of utter love and protection (consider the incubator mentioned above or the fact that Babygirl is nursed with milk of women from “the ghetto neighborhoods”, “mother’s milk for pay”). Yet the white princess’s world is clearly one that is already built on the ideas of commodification, in this case, the racialised commodification of human milk. Notice as well that her perfection is described in terms of animality (a pug’s nose). More importantly yet, her demise is already announced: this “love” will devour her (thus making the connection to the rat’s sharp teeth) and kill her (smother her). To take Judith Butler’s argument, both these bodies share a condition of vulnerability which precedes any act of resistance (2016, 12). Can the female human body and the non-human animal body “overcome that vulnerability through acts of resistance” (Butler 2016, 12)? As we shall see, acts of resistance are dim in “Martyrdom”, no less because non-resistance is inherent in the concept of martyrdom. Furthermore, although the act of bestiality is unwilled, the actors are nonetheless guilty of biblical deviation which, as expounded in Leviticus, is an act so vile and immoral that it must be punished by death of both the human and the animal.

Their parallel lives continue to be described side-by-side, sometimes with stark contrast and at other times with similarity. Over time, He has to share his space with thousands of other blood-related rats with whom he finds solace: “he sensed himself multiplied endlessly in the world” (Oates 1994, 286); but he also feels constant anxiety because of the competition for food: “all were ravenous with hunger, the squeak! squeak! squeak! of hunger multiplied beyond accounting” (Oates 1994, 286. Italics in the text). By contrast, Babygirl is not concerned with being fed and she grows up as an only child, still in this incubator, a metaphor for an excessively sheltered, individualised existence. She is now described as having “a rosy female beauty, small pointed breasts, curving hips, dimpled belly and buttocks and crisp cinnamon-colored pubic hair, lovely thick-eye lashed eyes with no pupil” (Oates 1994, 286), and then she starts to menstruate. Her parents disapprove, with Babygirl having lost her baby loveliness; she betrays her name and her parents’ expectations, being fully aware that womanhood cannot be repressed: “what’s to be done?”, asks her father (Oates 1994, 286). What the woman and the non-human animal share is their inability to mobilise in order to create a platform of political expression, a space of politics (Butler 2016, 13–14). Babygirl lives in a metaphorical incubator, a family and social space which does not allow for mobilisation. He is ontologically irrelevant because of the sheer number of his species and what it represents in human imagination and history. Resistance emerges from “a space of appearance”, that is, of being seen, acknowledged and neither the rat nor Babygirl are (Butler 2016, 14). A similar argument is made regarding freedom and mobilisation; freedom can be “exercised only if there is enough support for the exercise of freedom” and mobility depends on the existence of an operative structure (Butler 2016, 14). Again, that is not the case with either He or Babygirl. Like Butler suggests, bodies are not strictly individualised matter and depend, in fact, on a network of support which makes them “not entirely distinct from one another” insofar as “the body, despite its clear boundaries, or perhaps by virtue of those very boundaries, is defined by the relations that make its own life and action possible” (Butler 2016, 16). I believe the concept of dependency plays a key role in “Martyrdom” as it makes the non-human animal/human animal connection on the grounds of vulnerability and establishes that connection—the shared vulnerable condition associated with martyrs—as one deriving from the absence of a political space:

By theorizing the human body as a certain kind of dependency on infrastructure, understood complexly as environment, social relations, and networks of support and sustenance by which the human itself proves not to be divided from the animal or from the technical world, we foreground the ways in which we are vulnerable to decimated or disappearing infrastructures, economic supports, and predictable and well-compensated labor. (Butler 2016, 21. Italics in the original)

He and Babygirl grow and so their martyrdom begins. He feels immortal, exhilarated by the adrenaline of hunting and the taste of flesh in his mouth. He, or one of the many Hes, is then suddenly caught in a horrible mousetrap. What is the equivalent for Babygirl? Under the pretence of a party, her parents transform her into a human doll/the perfect woman. Since one is not born a woman, but becomes one, in a dehumanising, sacrificial process, she is starved, force-fed, excised and bodily modified:

First came the ritual bath, then the anointing of the flesh, the shaving and plucking of certain undesirable hairs, the curling and crimping of certain desirable hairs, she fasted for forty-eight hours, she was made to gorge herself for forty-eight hours, they scrubbed her tender flesh with a wire brush, they rubbed pungent herbs into the wounds, the little clitoris was sliced off and tossed to the clucking hens in the yard, the now shaven labia were sewed shut, the gushing blood was collected in a golden chalice, her buckteeth were forcibly straightened with pliers, her big hooked nose was broken by a quick skilled blow from a palm of a hand, the cartilage grew back into more desirable contours. (Oates 1994, 287. Italics added)

Beauty is pain and it seems irrelevant that Babygirl can hardly breathe. This section of a longer sentence aims to reflect the ongoing, never-ending process of becoming a woman, a social identity established by one’s desirability and commitment to martyrdom (like Babygirl herself, the readers hardly have the time to breathe while reading the sentence). As a medium-sized woman she is now too fat (around 71 cm around the waist), and her once cute pug baby nose means she now looks dog-faced. Her health suffers from the metamorphosis as well. Hidden in the sentence and in the violence of this radical metaphor for becoming a woman is more violence, the type of violence that begins at home. Her nose was broken not by a surgeon, but by a blow from the palm of a hand; sexual pleasure denied by clitorial excision.

The readers may wonder why there was no sign of complaint on Babygirl’s part and the fact that the text reads as if she had no reaction at all is quite unsettling. This is, however, due to the existence of a moral code of resilience which, as Sarah Bracke argues, makes the individual feel that there is an “appropriate” reaction, a form of “resilient manners” (2016, 62). There is, in fact, a gendered form of resilience which is undoubtedly at work in situations of domestic abuse, where the female subject is expected to have flexibility, to be able to bend without breaking, and, following the shocking moment, to bounce back into shape, perhaps even stronger than she was before (Bracke 2016, 65–68). Bracke conceptualises this as postfeminist resilience (2016, 65).

Babygirl’s parents guard her well; she is branded with an identifying tattoo so that “she could neither be lost or mislaid, nor could the cunt run away, and lose herself in America” (Oates 1994, 288). The language referring to Babygirl has changed into a form of verbal abuse and reduced to her genitalia. But Babygirl’s genitalia is of the highest pedigree: she is a virgin, clean of venereal diseases (Oates 1994, 288). He, on the other hand, is persecuted and hated as a carrier of deadly diseases. Nevertheless, Babygirl must beware as danger lurks around every corner. Her socialising with men is described as a cattle auction and though Babygirl is highly prized, she is still referred to as cow (Oates 1994, 290–291). That is her place in the system.

In the meantime, He is changed by the brutal life his species is forced to live. His body is covered in wounds from fighting for his life and for food; out of despair and “an agony of appetite”, he even resorts to cannibalism (Oates 1994, 291). Like Babygirl’s body, his body is also sick: maggots eat him away and he is gangrenous (Oates 1994, 291). However, his degradation is not divorced from his racialised body. In contrast with Babygirl’s white American beauty, even in the access to food, it matters how dark He is in the rat world:

[I]t’s one of Nature’s quiddities, when BROWN and BLACK species occupy a single premise, BROWN (being larger and more aggressive) inhabit the lower levels while BLACK (shyer, more philosophical) are relegated to the upper levels where food foraging is more difficult. (Oates 1994, 291–292. Capitals in the original text)

One day, He, or one of the many Hes, is eaten alive by a cat who kills for pleasure. The scene is described graphically, but He lives on through his species; “And the horror of it washed over me suddenly: I cannot die, I am multiplied to infinity”, He realises later (Oates 1994, 296. Italics in the text). In stark contrast with Babygirl, who is put forward in terms of the uniqueness discursively constructed through human exceptionalism, He is many Hes, He is his species. Oates, however, disavows the species dichotomy by providing a gendered dimension. Babygirl meets Mr X, an apparently devoted, deeply in love suitor. The previous experience of violence which Babygirl is submitted to initially sneaks into the text quite discreetly, but once she gets married, it is full-blown. The brutality of her married life is a female legacy like her wedding dress which had been previously worn by her mother, her grandmother and great-grandmother. During the wedding itself, Mr X’s wolfish traits are already manifest: “blood-red carnation in his lapel, chips of dry ice in his eyes, wide fixed grinning-white dentures, how gracefully the couple dips and bends” (Oates 1994, 293). He is the predator and she is the prey, the rat: “This is the happiest day of my life he whispers into Babygirls’s pink-whorled ear” (Oates 1994, 294. Italics added).

Babygirl’s next step on the path of martyrdom is marked by yet another scene of animal abuse. This time it describes the horrors of animal experimentation including starvation, and extreme physical exertion, being singed with burning needles and penetrated in the “tender anus” (Oates 1994, 294). Of course, it ends with He’s death, again to the scientists’ great satisfaction. Only a couple of months into Babygirl’s marriage, Mr. X grows tired of her and his penis fails him (Oates 1994, 295). She has become too human for his taste and he does not appreciate the biological processes involved, their smells, and indeed the more natural behavioural characteristic of shared intimate life. Looking at Mr. X with her “cow-eyes”, Babygirl is at a loss (Oates 1994, 295). Disgusted by Babygirl, he strikes her with the backside of his hand (echoing what she had undergone in her parents’ house) and calls her a bitch. This is the moment when violence comes out of hiding, not ashamed of itself. Being called a “cow” again also reinforces the non-human animal common entanglement. In “American Bestiality: Sex, Animals and the Construction of Subjectivity”, Colleen Glenney Boggs identifies the creation of representational subjectivity as the element underlying human exceptionalism. Animality is beyond representational subjectivity, which legally and socially justifies animal abuse, but, as some humans are animalised as well by virtue of being victimised by the oppressive forces of homophobia, sexism and racism, they also become nonsubjects and beyond social recognition. Animalising humans is, therefore, a mechanism to relegate someone to the position of nonsubjectivity (2010, 99). Similarly, in Precarious Lives, Judith Butler emphasises the link between humanisation, dehumanisation and representation:

[T]hose who gain representation, especially self-representation, have a better chance of being humanized, and those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human, regarded as less than human, or indeed, not regarded at all. We have a paradox before us because […] the face is not exclusively a human face, and yet it is a condition of humanization.

To use Butler’s terminology, Mr. X is not aware of Babygirl’s or He’s precariousness which allows him and his friends to commit brutal acts deriving from a speciesist and sexist premise. The woman and the rat cannot represent themselves; as their faces are unrecognised, so is their suffering. The conditions of violence are, therefore, created and their lives seem ungrievable.

In the instance of being likened to a bovine, nonsubjectivity emerges from linguistic vulnerability. Language, and not strictly utterances, precedes us and, therefore, we are acted upon even before we act. Though when Butler elaborates on this issue, she uses the case of gender assignment, it is nonetheless also useful here as it connects to the broader theme of gender performativity. Gender norms and ideals exist prior to us, and in that sense our vulnerability precedes and shapes us. Hence, a woman is a cow, as at the “auction”, not only because she is commodified as the non-human body that produces milk, but also because she declines some men’s attention. A woman who rejects men is less than human. A body, as Butler puts it, is “less an entity than a relation” and that relation can be of support or lack of it (Butler 2016, 19). In this context, where is the free will? Since performativity exists in the intersection of acting and being acted upon, a truly individual, free performativity cannot happen:

We are called names and find ourselves living in a world of categories and descriptions way before we start to sort them critically and endeavor to change or make them our own. In this way we are, quite in spite of ourselves, vulnerable to, and affected by, discourses we never chose. (Butler 2016, 24)

What about He? His next scene refers to the human fear of rodent reproduction. Himself a victim of his sexual urges, of his “delirium of appetite”, He and many other thousands like him are cruelly poisoned (Oates 1994, 296–297). How will He live on this time? His body and the piles of other rat corpses are mindlessly crushed and grinded to make fertiliser. As to Babygirl, Mr X. now brings “business associates” (Oates 1994, 297) home and submits his wife to molestation in a specially created fetishistic and sadistic environment. She begs for mercy, but he keeps her a prisoner with promises of a suburban life to come. However, she is no different than He in the lab, being fed reluctantly on occasion by her “keeper” (Oates 1994, 297). Her martyrdom takes the form of multiple rapes by strangers as her cruel husband watches with sadistic pleasure:

Mr. X grew systematically crueller, hardly a gentleman anymore, forcing upon his wife as she lay trussed and helpless in their marriage bed a man with fingernails filed razor-sharp who lacerated her tender flesh, a man with a glittering scaly skin, a man with a turkey’s wattles, a man with an ear partly missing, a man with a stark-bald head and cadaverous smile, a man with infecting draining sores like exotic tattoos stippling his body, and poor Babygirl was whipped for disobedience, Babygirl was burnt with cigars, Babygirl was slapped, kicked, pummeled, near-suffocated and near-strangled and near-drowned, she screamed into her saliva-soaked gag, she thrashed, convulsed, bled in sticky skeins most distasteful for Mr. X who then punished her additionally, as a husband will do, by withholding his affection (Oates 1994, 298. Italics added)

Following Eve Segwick, Butler emphasises how speech acts can felicitously encompass undercover queer deviations of desire:

[O]ne could take a marriage vow, and this act could then establish a public recognition of marriage which then allows, or opens up, a zone of possible sexuality that takes place quite under the radar, taking advantage precisely of its unrecognizability. The marriage vow provides public cover for forms of sexual life that remain unrecognized, and happily so. In such cases, marriage organizes sexuality as we might expect, in conjugal and monogamous forms, but it also produces another zone of sexuality defined precisely for its lack of overt recognition in the public sphere. (2016, 17)

By the same token, the speech act referring to the marriage vow can open up to a zone of sexuality which is not so happily lived and, in fact, is characterised by violence and even molestation, but which remains unaccounted for because it exists in this zone of unrecognisability.

As to the further steps on the path of martyrdom, He’s hunger is again emphasised. He is so hungry that he chews on his own body, but then something happens. He is caught and sold to Mr. X who has specific plans for him. The rat will now stand in for his penis and, in fact, Mr. X even hides He in his pants and only unzips them to release the rodent once he gets to Babygirl’s bed. The stage is then set for a perverse performance of love-making and a reverse birth scene. Babygirl is gagged and He netted in the bed with her. The “pair” is terrified, but Mr. X and his associates are ready to enjoy the show (Oates 1994, 300). He is in a panic as Mr. X forces him into Babygirl’s vagina, as she is lying on the bed spread-eagled. Naturally, he claws her badly and hurts her with his teeth. The image is horrifying and mirrors Babygirl’s previous abuse: “snout-first, and then head-first, then his shoulders, his sleek muscular length, why there – in there – so he choked, nearly suffocated, used his teeth to tear a way free for himself” (Oates 1994, 300. Italics in the text). Mr. X. trembles with excitement and his friends are the happy spectators to the gory martyrdom:

[They] watched in awe pushed him [He] farther, and then farther – into the blood-hot pulsing toughly elastic tunnel between poor Babygirl’s fatty thighs – and still farther until only the sleek-furry end of his rump and his trailing hind legs and, of course, the eight-inch pink tail were visible. His panicked gnawing of the fleshy walls that so tightly confined him released small geysers of blood that nearly drowned him, and the involuntary spasms of clenching of poor Babygirl’s pelvic muscles nearly crushed him, thus how the struggle would have ended, if both he and Babygirl had not lost consciousness at the same instant, is problematic. (Oates 1994, 301. Italics in the text)

It is as if they were making love and had both reached their climax at the same time, but instead, it is an agon, a contest, coming to an end. Both lose. Perversely, Jeanne d’Arc is mentioned who, burning at the flames, called Jesus’s name in ecstasy. Babygirl neither experiences ecstasy nor does she die, but she accepts her martyrdom for a higher cause, her marriage. The culmination of Oates’s short story, the point where both the rat’s and the woman’s stories/bodies finally converge, is, therefore, materialised through bestiality subverting a birth scene. This subversion represents the reenactment of a pre-subjectivity moment and of a Semiotic existence when the individual still had not been formed. It is a moment of abjection.

Unlike the open, irregular, mutable grotesque body of the Bakhtinian universe, connecting to the world through fluids and orifices, for Julia Kristeva (1982) those transactions generate abjection. The individual’s primordial contact with the world is experienced in/through their mother’s body, an experience of Semiotic plenitude where frontiers have not been erected. Kristeva argues that abjection serves the purpose of providing the violent transition to the Symbolic Order. Before the beginning, there is separation from the mother’s body (Kristeva 1982, 12). The process of abjection is primarily a process of rejection, discard or rejection of that which threatens the constitution of the individual. Abjection marks the frontiers between the individual, the world and those in it. The response to abjection is repulse in the face of that which is not part of the individual: food, excrement, urine, vomit, sperm, menstrual blood and ultimately the cadaver. Abjection reminds the need to be always vigilant before elements that constitute a menace to identity or that disturb the Order and access to the mother’s body becomes prohibited. Abjecting is necessarily ambiguous as determining what is internal or external is never definitive and the extension to which the Other is part of the individual will remain unclear. Any slippage is potentially dehumanising. Having an animal involved in the reenactment of human birth activates the fears of the indistinguishability between the human and the non-human.

In this respect, Glenney Boggs has also pointed out that bestiality is a construction which is gendered and sexual (2010, 100), in itself a “mode of embodied animality, that is, of human interaction with the animal body and an animalization of human bodies” (Glenney Boggs 2010, 101). This ontological and material indeterminacy situates the bodies of the female human and the male rodent clearly in the realm of abjection. Though she argues that in the bestial encounter human exceptionalism allows for conceptualising animality as “a position of nonsubjectivity and of socially sanctioned abjection”, it is assumed that the entities are in an unequal position in a hierarchy of biopower (Glenney Boggs 2010, 99). In the fictional text at hand, however, the gendered construction of human nonsubjectivity does not confirm that. Both are non-recognisable and marginal to the mechanisms of white patriarchal violence working through/in them. They are accumulatively subalternised as they are made to cross the boundaries of species, race and sex.

If indeed Judith Butler’s matrix of the heterosexual is built upon androcentric assumptions, Glenney Boggs argues that in the trials of bestiality, the anthropocentric angle must also be considered.2 Her criticism of Butler’s re-ontologisation of species in the process of de-ontologising gender is not without ground: “The exclusion of animals from the matrix of gender relegates them to a realm of nonperformative embodiment that is hypersexualized precisely because it is denied gendered status and figured as nonrepresentational physicality” (Glenney Boggs 2010, 104–105). Considering the rat, it is not only male but also a synecdochal human phallus, totally deprived of his ontological animality, made a grotesque materialisation of phallogocentrism (“He”). And yet, it is that same phallic rat who also displays the feminine features of the vagina dentata, the teeth (Creed 1993). Mr X creates a spectacle of the repressed fear of castration by animal surrogation whilst his own penis is safely awaiting revival by perverse voyeurism. Babygirl, once untouched and falsely protected by the misogynistic cultural baggage of female virginity, has become untouchable by her “man”, suited even for animal sexual consumption. Babygirl and He are, therefore, barred from the animal and gender constructions which define them—though blurring those very definitions—and thus assume a position which Glenney Boggs, following Agamben, has termed “bare sex”, a “position of hyper-embodiment that is denied social meaning” (2010, 105).

The interspecies sexual act, where both the human and the non-human animal are abused by being forced into unwilled coitus, further complicates possible regenerative readings aligned with the carnivalesque-grotesque and overthrows the rebirth symbolism of the vagina as the mouth of the earth (Bakhtin 1984). The rat is no mole. A consideration of the theory of disgust can also shed some light on this discussion. There are many points of conflation with the Bakhtinian theory as it emphasises the corporeality and the processes of bodily encounters (eating, vomiting, having intercourse, defecating and even dying). I will focus on the matter of purity versus impurity which are regarded differently by Bakhtin and William Ian Miller. For the former, “impurity” is a material condition associated with debasement and coming down to earth; for the latter, it is not positive:

[Disgust] defends against the impure and it punishes for our failures to be pure. But not all purity rules or rituals are backed by disgust. Some are maintained by shame, guilt, a sense of duty or by mere habit. So that where there is disgust there will be pollution, but where there is purity there is the prospect of its defilement need not always engender disgust. Yet despite the fact that other passions can support purity rules, no single one seems as qualified as for the job as disgust is (Miller 1997, 107. My italics).

Bestiality stands, therefore, for a possible strategy for the construction of the (androcentric) human and such can be seen operating in the short story though, by virtue of Babygirl’s gender, a second-class human. As a woman, it is she who is accountable for the continuance of the institution which preserves the Law of the Father. A woman must make her marriage work, after all. The utter abject sexual act becomes a travesty of the sacred institution, marriage, not protected from impurity as the man is aroused (not disgusted) by bestiality and the woman is bound by the sense of duty. It is this sacrifice that clearly distinguishes the archetype of the martyr and stands apart from that of the victim which makes embodied martyrdom a necessary component in crediting the cause of anthropocentric, racialised American patriarchy.

Bestiality does not threaten the return of the Semiotic and, instead, reinforces the Symbolic through violence. Marriage survives stronger than before; broken up and severely bruised following the rape by the rat, Babygirl can only focus on the task ahead: cleaning up the mess. She finds solace in the evangelical sermons she watches on television, a pivotal part of the construction of conservative white America. Banality settles in. It is Babygirl’s birthday and her abusive husband takes her out for dinner. She is bleeding black blood, but instead she is terribly worried that he and the children might have forgotten the occasion. She is (cruelly) optimistic because she is loved enough to be remembered. It is the first time we hear that she is a mother. Like He, she also breeds and the legacy of martyrdom shall be passed on if there are any daughters. In his way, He survives too. After all, there is no restaurant without a rat. Our resilient subject “bounce[s] back” (Bracke 2016).

The intersection of the discourses of martyrdom and resilience strengthen the radical potential of the vulnerable body. In the two cases at hand, sadistic violence, known to be systemic against non-humans and women, is exposed though kept within the private sphere. As mediums of cultural tenets with emotional value, they are empowered by their own martyrdom as they become sites simultaneously of pain and resilience—the rat and the woman live on—with broader social meaning. Quite significantly, the martyr’s suffering is made public but not glorified and so their bodies become the space of speciesist and misogynistic contestation. This process of consciousness-raising is never free of pain though, and an affirmative ethical framework beyond the emotions of fear and anxiety requires work (Braidotti 2006). The transforming process involves enhancing how oppression operates so that then disidentification can take place. Pain, posits Rosi Braidotti, must be part of a process of political and ethical awakening:

The qualitative leap through pain, across the mournful landscapes of nostalgic yearning, is the gesture of active creation of affirmative ways of belonging. It is a fundamental reconfiguration of our way of being in the world, which acknowledges the pain of loss but moves further. This is the defining moment for becoming-ethical: the move across and beyond pain, loss, and negative emotions. (2006, 8)

A radical theory of martyrdom which is informed by critical ethics such as vulnerability, resilience and affirmation can help to generate a social imaginary committed to mobilising desired transformative behaviours, encouraging disidentification and persuading audiences to take action against indifference.

3 Conclusions

Resistance, understood as a social and political form of agency emanating from an understanding of vulnerability as a social and political form, can be productive. As Judith Butler argues, once vulnerability is approached as a concept which is politically charged and which leaks into agency, then binarisms can be undone. These include anthropocentric and patriarchal codes which assign action to the male human. Alternatively, a conceptual framework which constitutes the subject relationally creates the space for networks of social resistance and the creation of infrastructures of support.

However, in this short story one must ask if the conditions to mobilise vulnerability are present:

[T]he dependency of human and other creatures on infrastructural support exposes a specific vulnerability that we have when we are unsupported, when those infrastructural conditions characterizing our social, political, and economic lives start to decompose, or when we find ourselves radically unsupported under conditions of precarity or under explicit conditions of threat. (Butler 2016, 19)

When the space of public politics is absent, sometimes, “continuing to exist, to move, and to breathe are forms of resistance” (Butler 2016, 26). In a similar manner, Sarah Bracke claims that when individuals willingly become the subjects of a moral discourse that endows them with agency (2016, 62–63). It is problematic that neither He nor Babygirl have the freedom to choose. One remains, nevertheless, attached to resilience though that hopeful attachment might be cruel (Bracke 2016, 65). The form that martyrdom takes on in Joyce Carol Oates’s short story shapes the martyrs’ lives as potentially ungrievable and questions the affirmative scope of resilience. Nonetheless, a radical, inclusive, non-anthropocentric and gendered model of martyrdom which accepts the private sphere as political and ideologically relevant, as the very anti-speciesist and feminist battlefield, offers a considerably higher chance of resilience.

Notes

  1. 1.

    In 2019, Joyce Carol Oates published My Life as a Rat on the question of gender and race in the United States. However, it is not equally suited to a discussion on animals, and therefore, the novel will not be considered in this article.

  2. 2.

    Though I would agree that Butler’s discussions do not substantially address the animal question, she has demonstrated interest in including the issue in her reflections. Notably, she has maintained conversations with Sunaura Taylor on the matter as well as on the equally relevant field of disability. See Examined Life: Philosophy in the Street (2008).