Irus Braverman (University of Buffalo), “Captive: Zoometric Operations in Gaza”

Event time: 
Tuesday, October 24, 2017 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
SLB, Room 129 See map
Event description: 

Drawing on ethnographic encounters and investigative analysis, Professor Braverman relays how Gaza’s spatial confinement generally, and the Israeli incursion of summer 2014 in particular, has lent itself to a radicalized discursive interplay between the animalization of humans and the humanization of animals who live in Gaza. She shows how human animals—Israelis and Palestinians, children and terrorists—as well as nonhuman animals—snakes, zoo animals, dogs, mice, lions, insects, zebras, donkeys, chickens, and beasts—perform detailed daily rituals of humanization, dehumanization, and animalization. By defining the degrees of their relative humanity and animality, these rituals render life and death more or less worthy; she coins the term zoometrics to refer to the detailed calculations of biopolitical worthiness that occur within and along the animal-human divide. Such zoometric accounts highlight the slippages between bestialized and humanized bodies, exacerbated by these bodies’ shared conditions of extreme captivity in Gaza.