Works-in-Progress - Pathologies of Mourning: The Violence of the Human and the Division of the Grievable

We will be discussing a draft paper by Dr. Zoë Wool, titled "Pathologies of Mourning: The Violence of the Human and the Division of the Grievable." This is a chapter from Dr. Wool's current book manuscript titled, The Significance of Others: Intimacy, Disability, and the Violences of US Warmaking. The  discussant for Dr. Wool's paper will be Nay El Rahi.

Abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic work with disabled US veterans, US military manuals, and a broader archive of US discourse on Arab grief (in which Palestine serves as a kind of meta-signifier), this chapter examines grief as a site of both exclusion and normativity in the context of US post-9/11 warmaking in Iraq. Beyond the exclusion of “ungreivable” lives from recognition, I trace how grief operates as a normative domain which privileges particular affective alignments and genres of gender, kinship, and intimacy while pathologizing others. While strong theories of grief (including in anthropology) frame grief as a universal human condition capable of transcending such exclusions, this chapter argues that, in practice, grief has often functioned to reproduce thresholds of intimacy anchored in the white-coded nuclear family, shaping whose grief is legible, whose is suspect, and who is excluded from the category of the human.