The Terror Apparatus

One of the most troubling images of Haitian history and culture is that of endemic violence, in particular, sexual violence. It is impossible to understand the development of the political economy of trauma in Haiti without relating it to this long-standing image and its historical evolution. During the 1991–94 coup years, the de facto regime employed sexual and gendered violence to repress the pro-democracy movement. Rape, including gang rape, and even forced incest were among the forms of torture used strategically to damage and control not only individuals but also families and larger communities.

Analyzing the many forms of violence perpetrated in societies that have undergone political conflict is a complex task. In places such as Haiti where the state apparatus attacks its own citizens, it can be difficult to distinguish between political and criminal motives for abuses. State-sponsored violence that is directed at a nation's own civilians also challenges theories that have assumed separation between the political and domestic spheres and between public and private actions since John Locke's Second Treatise on civil government (Pateman 1988). Such assumptions also underlie the perceived divide between human rights and criminal violations.

Contemporary discourses about rape must be analyzed in the context of discussions about gender and race and culture, history, and power. Rape has been an especially "thorny" problem in Western political discourses because of debates over whether the act is about sex, power, or violence (or some combination of the three) (Bell 1991). Additional questions concern whether rape is an interpersonal crime or should be considered the product of historical, global structural inequalities between the sexes. In the 1970s women anthropologists evaluated why "women are treated, culturally and socially, as inferior, in virtually all societies in the world" (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974: v) and whether disparities in status between men and women were the product of biological "nature" or cultural "nurture." To refute interpretations of the phenomenon of sexual violence as inevitable, universal, or of biological origin, some anthropologists have posited the controversial view that societies are either "rape-prone" or relatively "rape-free" (e.g., Sanday 1981), thereby suggesting that acts of sexual violence are products of "nurture," or learned behavior. Such approaches still tended to neglect the political, economic, and historical roots of different forms of violence and were based on questionable data. Feminist social theorists have also depicted the sexual violence that men perpetrate against women as a global, historical strategy by which women have been subjugated as an entire class by means of fear of violation (e.g., Brownmiller 1975). According to these views, sexual and gender violence is a means by which the power of the state and its institutions reinforce male domination (MacKinnon 1989). Other theorists of rape have written about the way that sexual coercion of women was racialized and institutionalized in colonial slavery (Davis 1981; Hartman 1997), embedded in military cultures (Enloe 1993), endemic in contemporary civil ethnic and nationalist conflict (Das 1995; Stiglmayer 1994), and an omnipresent component of international wars (Brownmiller 1975).

Discourses about politically motivated sexual violence are challenging not only because of these debates about public versus private; nature versus culture; sexuality, gender, and race; and power and violence. This type of sexual violence also blurs the distinctions between state and individual sovereignty. These classifications have been crucial to pursuits of justice as each evokes domains of law that have traditionally been separate: international human rights law and domestic civil and criminal law (Copelon 1994; Seifert 1994). But in nations such as Haiti where it has been difficult to prosecute rape because of a so-called culture of impunity and the social stigma attached to rape, its systematic use as a weapon of terror has become the subject of heated international political debate.

During the period of unconstitutional rule, narratives proliferated both within and outside Haiti that challenged the truth of reports of human rights abuses, especially reports of politically motivated rape. Combined with the prevailing negative stereotypes about Haitian history and culture and the general resistance of sexual and gender violence to unambiguous categorization, these contested accounts were circulated by governmental and nongovernmental actors to justify or rationalize their political choices. On the one hand, denying abuses of Haitian human rights argued against military and humanitarian intervention to uphold Haiti's democracy; on the other, recognition of human rights abuses in Haiti justified intervention. As I discuss below, these positioned rhetorics reflected conflicts over the meaning of sovereignty for the embodied individual, for the state, and for the populations whose sovereignty the state is theoretically obligated to protect and preserve.

Arguments about whether to recognize sexual and gender violence as human rights abuses are examples of the historical "biopolitics" of intervention (Foucault 1990 [1978]). In The History of Sexuality, Foucault suggested that a shift had occurred between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries regarding conceptions of the body and the practices such conceptions produced. Foucault describes a change from a politics of alliance—the regulation of persons based on notions of blood, kinship, and reproduction in units like the family—to a focus on "sexuality." Sexuality is a construct that incorporates the regulation and production of knowledge about the social and lived body in relation to the economy (Foucault 1990 [1978]: 106–7). In societies of sexuality, power manifests through the categorization, surveillance, and control of bodies to engender productive, disciplined populations—what Foucault (145–46; 1979: 207–8) calls biopolitics. Both modes of regulation, the biopolitics of alliance and of sexuality, concern the law (what is held to be permissible or forbidden). Each mode reflects concerns about political and economic production and reproduction at different levels of society and is relevant to this ongoing analysis.

Foucault's schema has been criticized for its lack of attention to subjective experience, individual agency, and gender, as well as its historical emphasis on the European context (Hartsock 1990; Stoler 1995). Nonetheless, his broad formulation of the relationships between power, body, and...