The idea that observing the law is a sign of weakness while power serves property underlies women’s romances. In the erotic vocabularies of intimacy, caring, love and desire, women’s romances make the aggression, carnage and atrocities of capitalism seem normal and even dangerously desirable. They naturalize the class violence of global capital as acts of duty, compassion and, above all, love.
Now what does any of this have to do Abu Ghraib? I will argue here that Abu Ghraib is an extension of, not an exception to, the distorted fantasies in romances and an effect of capital’s aggression against “the other” concealed by these fantasies. Neither accidental nor an exception, the tortures and atrocities at Abu Ghraib are part of the structures of imperialism and militarism that are integral to capitalism.
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Class violence is also justified through such cultural products as women’s romances, normalizing this violence and making it part of the affective structures of the everyday. Through fantasies of love, these romances produce a form of cultural common sense that reconciles readers to the anxieties, isolation, fragmentation and estrangement produced by the violence of daily exploitation. Women’s romances, to put it differently, are cultural crisis managers for capital.
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Marx criticizes religion as an “inverted world consciousness” (“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,” Collected Works, v. 3, 175). While it is, he says, “an expression of real suffering,” it only offers an “illusory happiness.” Thus, he argues, “The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions” (175-76).
Women’s romances are both articulations of the cultural imaginary of capital that normalizes the “condition which requires illusions,” and a complex illusory expression of women’s genuine need to overcome the alienation, self-estrangement and hardship capital produces.
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Romances show intimately how narratives of love under capitalism are actually narratives of property and its protection by violence — whether in the name of the law or renegade justice. The erotics of property is perhaps most explicit in Elizabeth Lowell’s many novels, in which the struggle for ownership of the prized possession fuses the sensuous desires of body and precious objects (gold, diamonds, rubies, pearls….) with global economics: for example, the crisis of the free market in China. (Tell Me No Lies, 1986, reissued: 1992, 1996, 2001; Jade Island, 1998, 1999) and the new Russia (Amber Beach, 1997, 1998), as well as the international diamond trade (The Diamond Tiger, 1992, reissued 1999, and as Death is Forever, 2004)
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By inverting the everyday class-violence of capital into the compassionate acts of dedicated heroes, who protect their loved ones by wreaking violence and inflicting retributive justice on the enemies of freedom and property, romances expand the cultural tolerance for violence and aggression.
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Romances develop a pedagogy of violence that teaches readers lessons they take into daily life, where they make judgments about war and peace, terrorism, democracy and the uses of force. It normalizes violence as the only way to “get things done” for the protection of self and civilization.
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Women’s romances eroticize and normalize this inverted fantasy — rampant in popular culture and thus part of the common sense of the troops — in which the enemy is the embodiment of perversity and cruelty, and whom therefore the soldier-hero has every right to torture in order to get the job done, which is caring for America and Americans. Abu Ghraib is thus an extension of, not an exception to, the distorted fantasies in romances and an effect of capital’s aggressions concealed by these fantasies.
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Violence in women’s romances is eroticized and made acceptable as part of an ethics of intimacy. Representations of cruelty, assault, and carnage all occur in close proximity to representations of sensuousness and sexuality. In Linda Howard’s Mr. Perfect, the heroine is nearly strangled to death. But in the narrative the therapy for her damaged throat is said to be hot sex.
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