ABSTRACT
Past inmates of the maximum-security Oak Ridge facility are suing the province of Ontario and two doctors for $25 million in damages. I consider the prisoners’ trauma and “torture that resembled the experimentation Nazis performed on Jews” (Perkel, 2019) alongside the violence inflicted upon animals in PTSD research laboratories. I draw on Wadiwel’s (2017) discussion of “black sites,” and his use of Agamben’s notion of a “zone of legal exception”: “The ‘black site’ as a concept offers “an imaginary for a space of social, political and juridical exception that hides extensive and intense violence against those who are captured within this zone of confinement” (Wadiwel, p. 391). While perhaps appearing unrelated, Oak Ridge and the PTSD-focused animal laboratory represent two profoundly co-constituted “black sites.” To understand the co-joined logics of these sites, I also rely on Claire Jean Kim’s (2015) “taxonomies of power”, which illuminate hierarchies within groups produced as “subhuman, not human, less than human” (p. 283) by the settler colonial imagination. Those labeled “psychopaths” at Oak Ridge, and the rodents of PTSD research, are among the most “animalized,” cast into invisibility and believed to have no dignity to violate.
