Honour Bound: Practices of Restraint and Resistance in the Constitution of Subjectivities at Joint Task Force Guantanamo.

In August 2007, detainee lawyer Clive Stafford Smith received a letter from the US military informing him that he was being investigated and possibly charged for potentially smuggling contraband underpants to his client Shaker Aamer in Guantánamo (Verkaik, 2007). Upon closer examination, the mysterious pants were discovered to be a brand most commonly worn by US military personnel, suggesting that guards rather than lawyers had provided Aamer with the comfort of pants in contravention of regulations. Moreover, inspired by the ridiculousness of the situation, Stafford Smith and his organisation Reprieve later launched their own line of Guantánamo underpants ('Fair Trial my Arse' in Guantánamo orange), in conjunction with the lingerie store Agent Provocateur, to protest the ongoing detentions. In other words, for all the power-laden acts and efforts to fix boundaries and identities within and through Guantánamo, these boundaries are not fixed or absolute. While the detention practices at work in Guantánamo construct meanings, including identities, resistance to these processes is continually enacted, both 'inside' and 'outside' the wire. Resistance occurs in two sites, as can be seen from an analysis of the texts and representations associated with Guantánamo (the memoirs, media reports as well as the standard operating procedures). Firstly, detainees resist the practices of marking, restraining and watching them as terrorists 'inside the wire'. Detainees use every opportunity to challenge attempts to hail them into the subject position of captives without agency: through physical resistance including hunger striking, through intellectual resistance by playing tricks on their guards, by turning their own gazes back on the guards, or by connecting and communicating with others where and however they can (with other detainees and with guards). Secondly, resistance occurs through adoption of elements of these resistances 'outside' the wire - thereby also problematising this boundary - whether through satirical campaigns involving underpants, dressing as detainees, or hunger striking in solidarity. Identities may be accepted, but the blurring of boundaries between them may occur. Both these sites of resistances challenge the idea that detainees exist as 'bare life' as some have argued with regards to Guantánamo, but do support Butler's notion of 'precarious' life. Due to the excess inherent in identities, the politics of boundary creation can always be resisted and boundaries transgressed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]