Citation

Rivera-Fuentes C, Birke L. Womens Stud. Int. Forum 2001; 24(6): 653-668.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2001, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/S0277-5395(01)00209-6

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In this article, we reflect upon how bodies are experienced under torture. We centre this around Consuelo's personal experience, as a feminist lesbian and political activist tortured under the Chilean military government. We also draw on the training both of us received in science, which influenced our perceptions of how bodies work. Her story prompted a conversation about the gap between biomedical descriptions of bodies and the ways in which we experience our bodies and the apparent inarticulacy of pain. This conversation is both the methodology and the form of this article. We explore issues of violence and how that is built into the history of biomedicine and how this, in turn, feeds into political abuses of human rights. Another strand is power and control--built into the way scientists think about the body; yet control is deeply challenged when the body becomes uncontrollable to one/self during torture. We also talk about silence--silence both as something imposed on a prisoner and also as resistance. Biomedicine resurfaces here, too, when we speak of medical practices which silence us, as well as of the literal presence of doctors in the torture room. One purpose of this article, then, is to break that silence.