Thread by @PatBlanchfield

for long time now I've been unable to stop thinking about the GOP Convention in '16, and how central the speech by Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, the US diplomat killed in Benghazi was to that. but this entire twisted week in particular feels haunted by it. 1/x

It's incredibly difficult to watch, even three years later. "For all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of the cynicism the tragedy in Benghazi has wrought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton. I blame HC personally for the death of my son" 2/x

the sheer rawness of her pain, the spectacle of her rage and grief, the way it functioned as a kind of center of gravity and coherence, for the crowd's affects, authorizing and amplifying and magnifying and reinforcing their cries of Lock Her Up! and Hillary for Prison! 3/x

the way that then flowed into Trump's appearance at the RNC, his self-presentation as s/o who would vindicate her loss, redeem the nation, and allow the crowd to satisfy its own pain/rage/malice/grief. into his extensive invocations of "American victims" of "immigrant crime" 4/x

the campaign would be defined by the ventriloquizing of the dead, above all dead children, and dead adults endowed rhetorically w/ posthumous, childlike innocence. American suffering would authorize American vengeance, American cruelty, and American carnage. it did and it has 5/x

we heard echoes of all this as Trump led his ethnic cleansing call and response this week (Send her back!) and people like this told reporters how it tapped and captured their own affects 6/x

theatlantic.com/politics/archi…

all this, of course, has deeply gendered dimensions. I wrote my dissertation about the rhetoric and politics of parental child loss, the way that discourse can be way for people to at once proffer ideas of universality and human connection but also to dehumanize and abject 6/x

the question is always: whose grief is understood to fit the paradigm of sympathy? whose loss is understood to be the most singular? which futures are the most tragic when lost? which models of family continuity and lineage are prioritized and centered, which ones are erased? 7/x

put simply: whose voices are heard? which ones would be drowned out, chanted over, silenced? well, almost ghoulishly on the nose, that year Trump announced that ICE would launch a program called Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE). 8/x

but even beyond that - look at efflorescence of RW figures under Trump whose entire function and purpose comes down to gatekeeping whose stories pain matter, whose lives are grieveable, whose losses must be centered, honored, and seen as ultimate and paradigmatic 9/x

the deference and sympathy such people demand, the emotional investments they cultivate and channel, are the intangible correlates to the material reproduction of a very specific gendered and racialized social order. they wield taboos and civility-talk as traps to this end. 10/x

as w/ Smith's speech, the rawness of their pain, the difficulty of reading or witnessing it, can be excruciating. acknowledge it, honor it if you must, but never forget that it is also being deployed to achieve the political goals of shunting the suffering of others offstage 11/x

On that note: Meghan McCain has an Op-Ed in the New York Times today. And that's all I'm going to say about it. 12/12