and so it is. Like Freud’s Totem and Taboo, we have an ape man living in groups dominated by an all powerful father who kept all women for his own exclusive sexual use and abuse. Unlimited, buffet style access to incestuous enjoyment 7/24, religious obligation not withstanding. It is the psychic reality of normal paternal authority propagating, even blooming like a hot house flower in the dark underground of unconscious fantasies. Freud once remarked that perverts realize only what hysterics fantasize about.
The Shafia case lends itself too predictably to cultural relativism, a gender gap of moral differences, but the familial architectural arrangement may be extreme, but lends itself to a almost universal leverage of male patriarchy to which Western culture is complicit through a variety of mechanisms requiring it to pitch a Shafia into the pyre as sacrifice from time to time to keep up appearances. Ostensibly, the Shafias were a “normal” family, well dressed, affluent, yet the interior workings revealed an underground of total domination, a utopian private paradise for male expression of its own sense of self-worth and also torch bearers for an ideological-libidinal fantasy.
Craig Thompson. Read More:http://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/10/can-the-subaltern-draw-the-spectre-of-orientalism-in-craig-thompsons-habibi/
Like the Josef Fritzl case in Austria, there was an ideological familial justification of protecting children from the outside world and killing them was the ultimate protective attitude that made him imprison them first, and perhaps sexually violate them.
…Three members of an Afghanistan-born Montreal family were defiant Sunday in the face of life in prison and harsh condemnation for the murders of three daughters and a co-wife apparently motivated by what the judge called their “twisted concept of honour.”
A jury took 15 hours to find Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, each guilty of four counts of first-degree murder in a so-called mass honour killing that has captivated Canadians from coast to coast, and touched off post-911 criticism of Muslim culture….
---The Rat Game by Kathy Krajko "...Your first two weeks in a new place of work. The resident narcissist comes up to you, and though he ranks no higher than you, he gives you a job evaluation without ever having seen your work. He tells you that you have a lot on the ball. That's your treat. Instead of asking him who he thinks he is to be judging your job performance, you are flattered and want more of what he's selling. You'll get nothing but treats like that for awhile, and then suddenly one day you'll get a painful shock instead. When you greet him, he will give you nothing but the stink-eye and look away, refusing to speak to you. After your shock wears off, you will suffer wondering what terrible thing he thinks you did. You will try to make him give you treats again. But he will always be unpredictable. He will be able to get mad at ANYTHING or to praise you for ANYTHING. It's totally arbitrary, because he can make anything good sound bad and vice versa. He can judge you as "too this" or "too that" at his whim. But you will keep pushing that button till it kills you..." Read More:http://wonforum.blogspot.com/2011/02/intermittent-reinforcement.html image:http://www.appsychology.com/Book/Behavior/operant_conditioning.htm
…The three immediately pronounced the verdicts as unjust, but the judge was unmoved, cutting right to the core of the cultural cloud that hung over this case.
“It is difficult to conceive of a more heinous, more despicable, more honourless crime,” Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger said.
“The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honour…that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”
The trial heard evidence over many weeks about the bizarre divide in the Shafia family, in which the patriarch struck fear in the hearts of some of his children, though often being away on business Hamed acted as the surrogate disciplinarian. The three murdered daughters thumbed their noses at the family rules. The children they did not kill were the ones ratting out their sisters to their parents for bad behaviour, court heard….
---“I get results when I take control. It is instant death when you hand over "control" to a woman. My secret is to give women "intermittent reinforcement." This actually is a psychological phenomenon commonly documented in experiments involving rats. The goal of the experiment is to have the rat press a lever as many times as possible. The rat is given a pellet of food after it presses a lever. If the rat gets a pellet every time, it soon gets satiated and stops pressing the lever. If, on the other hand, the rat does not receive a pellet every time the lever is pressed, but receives a pellet intermittently, the rat will increase the frequency with whi
t presses the lever. The analogy is fairly obvious: how do we get women to "press our lever" as many times as possible? Easy, give her attention intermittently and unpredictably. Don’t give her a pellet too often. Take control of when she receives one. Don’t be at her beck and call.”--- Read More:http://wonforum.blogs image:http://mulattodiaries.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/tenniel630124a.jpg
…It was notions of honour, directly tied to women’s sexuality and general control over their behaviour, that led the Shafias to kill, court heard, in an effort to cleanse them of the shame they perceived their daughters to have brought upon them.Read More:http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/01/29/shafia-trial-verdict-honour-killing-guilty_n_1228859.html
Read More:http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/03/paper_trails_honor_killings_a.php
Salutin: It makes me wonder if the “unitary” approach of fiction or drama might not be a better way to examine cases like this than the compartmentalizing bent of experts and pundits. I recently saw David Cronenberg’s film on Freud and Jung, A Dangerous Method. It deals with the primitive impulses that permeated relations even among those towering, sophisticated intellects: rage, envy, lust. (Was sex involved in the Shafia case? Think of his astounding statement that “every night I used to think of myself as a cuckold,” about his daughter. Analyze that.)…
---Among the regulars was Kingston resident Barb Jagger, 52, who for a couple of weeks shared a cell with Ms. Yahya in the segregation block of Quinte Detention Centre, west of Kingston. She recalls her cellmate as quiet, pleasant and evidently deeply religious. She would pray five times a day, Ms. Jagger said, and often read the Koran. Ms. Yahya denied murdering anybody, Ms. Jagger said. “She looked me in the eyes, she had tears streaming down her face, and she said to me: 'Barb, I didn't bring seven children into this world just to kill them.'" --- Read More:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/judge-condemns-sick-notion-of-honour/article2318731/page2/
…They had an acute sense of the violent forces lurking just beneath the surface, not only in their patients but in themselves. Pretending this chaos and risk is generally absent and only out of control among a few extreme and foreign “others” is delusional and dangerous. We’re all in similar boats and we all have things to learn, not just teach, from harrowing cases like this one. Read More:http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1125604–learning-from-the-shafia-catastrophea
Jean Leon Gerome.---The Screens Male writers such as Norman Mailer, D.H Lawrence and Henry Miller each regarded women as an annoying minority problem, which (with a little help from violence) could be easily kept under control. Genet, on the other hand, regarded woman’s anger at her ancient subordination as the potential root of drastic social change. In The Screens, the women are the revolution. The play opens with a European colonialist lording it over an Arab male, who in turn takes it out on his woman “who, if she is lucky, takes it out on her daughter-in-law” “In the first scene, Said is on his way to marry “the ugliest woman in the next town and all the towns around”, fuming that he is stuck with her: In the scale of capital and marriage values, his own poverty is presumed to match her ugliness. It’s hard to tell if her face is a real or imagined catastrophe, since Leila the bride wears a black bag throughout the entire performance, stark evidence of her nonentity, enslavement, and exclusion from human experience. Said’s mother, a traditional Arab woman, tags behind him carrying a valise of gewgaw wedding presents. A devout male supremacist, she is persuaded her son will “be less of a man” if he were to condescend to come to her aid in public. Leila is Said’s salvation as well as his fate; her very odium epitomizes the Arab’s colonial situation. Scorning her with fierce ardour, Said becomes a dangerously disgruntled colonial. --- Read More:http://radicalhub.com/2012/01/30/sexual-politics-part-iii-jean-genet/
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