Just recently I viewed the movie “the girl with the dragon tattoo”. Though I had never read the book, rave reviews had me really excited to see the film. Ill do my best not to spoil anything for those who still plan on seeing it or those who have not read the book, however there were a few things that definitely stuck out to me.

For one thing, I took notice of how the main character was viewed and treated as a result of her appearance. I would love to say I was shocked, but it is very representative of what goes on everyday in our society. The main character seemed to be a rebel from her piercings and tattoos down to the way that she chose to dress.  Because of this, certain people with whom she worked closely with doubted her ability to complete intricate tasks successfully, though she would prove throughout the movie that she was clearly the best for the job.

At times, the movie reminded me of a class discussion that we had towards the beginning of the semester when we talked about embodiment and how mental abilities are separate yet go hand in hand with what is embodied in physical form. The main character in the movie, who was a warden of the state, was deemed incompetent and as a result was not in charge of everyday things like her own finances for example. It was interesting to me how certain authorities that she had to report to, acted as this so called “mental incompetence” viewed her body.  I think this often times happens during this day and age which leads to serious things such as violence as well as sexual assault.

Two or so years ago in the process of having my political mind entirely changed forever by reading Giorgio Agamben’s brilliant Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, I came across a lively section on the archetypal wolf-man, or werewolf. Agamben’s thesis in the book is essentially that, since Enlightenment thought and the construction of statehood as a rational institution subject to a code of normative ethics, sovereign state power has been based upon the principle of “exception.” The individual subject is theorized in Enlightenment political literature as being the result of the imposition of a political structure upon a natural “bare life.” Agamben counters this top-down theory by proposing that “nature” or “bare life” only becomes intelligible through the apparatus of sovereignty. The “natural” that lingers outside of the polity or municipality is always already formulated within state terms. The “state of exception”, popularized in World War II era by political scientist Carl Schmitt, is the concept of an emergency structure put in place, outside and beyond the written law, in particular situations (a recent example would be George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s suspension of international human rights laws, through torture and unjust imprisonment, in the name of defending “freedom” in wartime.) Agamben’s theory postulates, however, that state sovereignty is always already a state of exception: “rights,” as the bedrock of law, are always constructed by and “enforced” by the same powers that are supposedly equally subject to them. Thus state power is always already “outside” rights and the law. The rights that are based in “nature” and the natural sovereignty of the individual are codified by state power. The state is thus a liminal between-space, with nature and the political not as two poles but as between and within each other.

Agamben illustrates this theory with the archetype of the werewolf. The werewolf acts as a symbol of state sovereignty as the threshold between bios and nomos, between nature and the political. “It is a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life of the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither.” The werewolf embodies the concept of liminality upon which state sovereignty is founded. Pretty cool, right? I realize I spent more time explaining Agamben’s central thesis than on the werewolf paradox, but it’s something to consider when thinking about the ways in which (fictional and nonfictional bodies) are simultaneously “natural” and continent/political. 

As a child, people often asked me or my parents where we were from. Was I Iranian? Jewish? French? In eighth grade a boy told me I had “negroid” eyes, and for most of my adolescence I was mocked for having a “ghetto booty.” Last summer while in a thrift store near D.C. a complete stranger, a white middle aged man, approached me and asked in deliberately slow English if I was from Honduras. A former boyfriend once commented on the fact that I was not “pale” when naked in winter. I live in a mixed neighborhood with many Central American immigrants, and have been addressed in Spanish on a few occasions.

To most people, I assume that I appear white. I have brown hair, black/brown eyes, and an “olive” complexion. I consider myself to be on the pale side of this “olive”, paler than most of my father’s family at least.

I am of North African/Tunisian, Sicilian, and “Black” Irish decent. None of these categories have been deemed pure “white” by historically racist notions of U.S. “whiteness.” I am not a WASP. I have often wondered if I had blonde hair and blue eyes if people would ask where I’m from on a monthly basis. I gets worse in the summer as I do tan very quickly. But, if I was clearly white, of no curious or “exotic” background, would strangers feel as comfortable violating my personal space? It’s as if my height, skintone, and eye color are an accent – one to be met with “Where are you from?” My cousin, who like most of the women in my family, has very curly hair, was called a “mulatto” all through high school. We have all learned to laugh this off. We eat ravioli, my grandmother travels to Sicily frequently, we know where we are from. And yet, of all the assumptions strangers have made regarding my or my family’s ethnicity, Arab is never one of them. If we all wore headscarves perhaps our “origins” would be more apparent, more clearly marked. After 9/11 some of my friends would joke about my father getting pulled over due to racial profiling, and I would laugh with them.

So after years of being hailed as less white than my white friends I decided that I am not. I am not entirely white. A few years ago when the U.S. census came to my apartment, I had to check off my ethnicity. While “Other” seemed the best choice for me other than “White”, I noticed that there was no “Arab” choice. “African American/Black” was available, but many North Africans are not black. Most are Arab or Berber. Although Arabs constitute a large number of the world’s population, covering North africa and Western Asia, as a people or race they are simply invisible in the United states. So unwanted as to not be counted. I checked every single box and handed it back to the census worker.