Zizek writes fiction on murdered Indigenous women in Canada
Slavoj Zizek wrote a comment piece in the Guardian earlier this month which included a passage on murdered Indigenous women in Canada. The description is fiction. It’s an odd and unseemly fabrication that should be retracted. Here’s the offending paragraph:
Then there are the serial rapes and murders of indigenous women in western Canada, close to reservations around Vancouver, belying Canada’s claim to be a model, tolerant welfare state: a group of white men abduct, rape and kill a woman, and then deposit the mutilated body just within the reservation territory, which puts it legally under the jurisdiction of the tribal police who are totally unprepared to deal with such cases. In these examples, the social dislocation due to fast industrialisation and modernisation provoked a brutal reaction from males who experience this development as a threat.
What’s wrong here? Let’s start with the slightly pedantic: in Canada we have “reserves.” It’s the U.S. where they have “reservations.”
More serious problems include the fact that “tribal police” are a rarity in this part of North America, and there is absolutely no limit on the jurisdiction of Canadian police forces for investigating serious crimes like murder. (I mean there is no such ‘Sheriff Rosco, he’s headed for the county line!’ type of situation where murderers in Canada can make a dash for a reserve in order to evade the law.) So the idea that a killer or group of killers could dump bodies on “reservation territory” to avoid investigation and prosecution is laughable. Zizek’s assertion that the “tribal police” failed to solve these crimes because of their own inadequacy is a bizarre invention. His fantasy image of a hapless Indigenous police force is also highly problematic. A resurgent grassroots movement has led to growing awareness that what’s actually needed to stem the tide of violence is more Indigenous sovereignty, not less.
The tragic failure of policing in many of the missing and murdered women’s cases had nothing to do with a failure of “tribal police” or any other make believe Indigenous investigators. The failure was, in fact — to borrow one of Zizek’s most overused expressions — precisely the opposite! In reality the RCMP (and other police agencies of the colonial state) did far too little, acted too slowly or not at all, or failed to coordinate investigations. The most notorious example here is the case of the Pickton serial murders, which took place in Port Coquitlam (a suburb, not a “reservation,” near Vancouver). Police were slow to take the multiple reports of missing women seriously enough, and an inquiry later found that the Vancouver Police and RCMP fell far short in terms of communication and sharing of information. (The current federal government adds insult to this historic injury by stubbornly refusing to heed the increasingly popular and widespread call to hold an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women.)
Finally, Zizek’s use of the word “mutilation” feels gratuitous, a bit of macabre exaggeration heaped onto fabrication.
Murders of Indigenous women in Canada are all too real. It’s a high profile and emotionally charged political issue. That’s partly why Zizek’s fabrications/inventions are so obvious to anyone reading his article in Canada. It’s also why Zizek’s fiction is so offensive.
I should note that there has been increased scrutiny on Zizek of late, with recent accusations of plagiarism and “self-plagiarism.” Some of these critiques of Zizek need to be understood as largely ideologically driven. Newsweek, for example, has a pretty clearly neo-McCarthyist agenda these days, and so it was no surprise they piled on Zizek’s latest “self-plagiarism” slip-up in the New York Times. My critique is nothing to do with Zizek’s politics (that would require another, longer piece), but suffice to say that when a high profile self-identified leftist or anti-capitalist gets sloppy like this — or just flat out starts making shit up! — it creates openings for those who seek to discredit the left.
Political ideology aside, as an editor I’m pretty appalled. Even superstar academics have to be subjected to fact checks and basic editorial standards. A retraction is overdue. I sent emails to several editors at the Guardian, and I’m still waiting for a response from their Readers’ editor. The Guardian can do better than this. They need to retract and correct.
Zizek, for his part, needs to at the very least slow down, or get better research assistants. Because based on the recent rash of incidents, Zizek’s starting to look less like the “Elvis Presley of cultural theory” and more like its Milli Vanilli.
