Tournament: CEDA | Round: 5 | Opponent: OU BC | Judge: Kozak, Christopher
Trigger Warning: Sexual Violence, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
These are my pieces, but not my whole.
I am more than this flesh and blood.
My skin does not portray who/what lies beneath.
My smile does not really show how I feel
and my eyes do not allow you to see my depth.
I am no longer an object of someone else’s will,
but a prisoner to my own body.
My body does not feel like it belongs to me.
For so long it was not given a say
and was forcibly maneuvered by another.
Even my mind seems to be dictated
by my own body's sensations.
A simple touch of my arm can trigger a memory.
My hand hesitates to make contact
with even ones I love.
All of these pieces while built together, feel disjointed.
My lips long for a long compassionate kiss,
but my hand will freely push it away.
My arms cry out to be wrapped in another’s,
but my body quickly tightens
responding to a perceived attack.
My body while flaunted is self-conscious
of how it will be judged.
It is a vessel of unknown.
Each touch is a switch
that triggers a new or old memory.
A personal home theater of years past,
many showing reruns that had long been forgotten
or simply waiting for the right time.
My home movies are nightmares
that give understanding to my body's reactions.
Unlike nightmares, I can not wake up
and say it was just a dream.
I have tried to rationalize
with both my mind and body, but it yields to the past.
They are a great puzzle
that I am slowly piecing together.
The picture of who I am
becomes clearer with each piece,
and like most children’s toys, the result is often
not as spectacular as you had hoped.
Can I see who I am becoming
without finishing the puzzle?
The pieces have slowly come together
to create a gruesome picture of who I was.
The pieces cannot be reconfigured
to change the ultimate image;
my picture of my past will always be the same.
The only difference now lies
in how I choose to view it in the future. (1)
  *1(Young, Heather http://www.verahouse.org/domestic-violence-sexual-assault/survivors/survivors-poetry)

I feel alone, in this community, on my team, surrounded by friends and family. I came here seeking agency, seeking love, competition, friendship, and solidarity. With less than 6 round left in my debate career… I feel unfulfilled.

See, an 18-year-old girl doesn’t ask for the responsibility and pain thrown on her shoulders as it was with mine. I walk the halls of each tournament with a shadow lingering behind waiting to tear me to pieces, to eat me alive, to consume my subjectivity, worth, and self-worth.

It’s sickening how the legal system (dis)embodies a survivors hopes.

It’s revolting that each word, at even a whisper, risks re-inscribing the cycle that took my debate career, my sanity, and my innocence away.

I suppose…

The debate community is in a process of constant contestation, revolution, and re-evaluation. Our advocacy’s and plan texts are works of art desired to expel meaning and authentic engagement with each faucet of social and political praxis.

What is left then is the indescribable reality of those who suffer inside this community. Womyn walk into this activity and come face to face with a form of sexist politics that not only dictates how their voices and bodies are articulated in the debate space, but also how their fellow debaters will come to treat them. 

The body is no longer a shell and rather becomes a symbol for objectification. Judges become known for “voting for the girl with the biggest tits in the room” And young debaters feel pressured to look to the bottom of the bottle of the end of the hit for acceptance.

“Being –one of the boys-“ is a desire that becomes engrained.
I feel like becoming a participant and spectator becomes inevitable
 xThose Who learn of squads quibbling over whether or not I am an authentic victim- or a slut after a good mans life.

Who’s strike list grew each tournament because on of my fellow students or coaches were subjected to sexual assault, and I refuse to have aggressors in the back of my debates 

Who’s own young female debaters are more likely to quit than make it past their freshman year because this community fosters objectification, sexism, and violence.

When the experiences of sexual violence and the other forms of oppression that make it possible are denied and repressed, it leads to a double exclusion – both from the social space of debate and in psychic space. This leads to the internalization of oppression and the devaluation of the lives of the oppressed.
Oliver 04 Kelly. W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression. Pg 87-9

Although countercultures and resistance are possible, within mainstream culture the affects of oppression—
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sustained theoretical analysis of alternative accounts of depression, shame, and sublimation.

Abu Ghraib is just the most visible result of this exclusion – the denial of the ability to express these affects is the denial of responsibility for our impulses, creating the conditions for rape and racist violence while allowing for those who commit these acts to deny responsibility for their actions and impulses.
Oliver 09 Kelly. W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. “Bodies against the law: Abu Ghraib and the war on terror” Cont Philos Rev (2009) 42:63–80 Pg 72-3

Going back to Abu Ghraib, some commentators said that this sort of sexual violence
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a struggle for civilization’’ against ‘‘radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.’’

The poetic expression of the affirmative is one of sublimation. This allows for us to create meaning out of the experiences of violence and oppression through the expression of the affects that have been repressed through oppression. It is this expression that allows for us to see our lives as meaningful and to understand ourselves as agents capable of resistance.
Oliver 04 Kelly. W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression. Pg 173-5

What is at stake in both political struggles and revolts of imagination is renewing a
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sense of stability and unity in the subject, if always only temporarily.

The illusion of total understanding and autonomy necessitates the violent destruction of otherness. Only by accounting for the unconscious and otherness, that which is always beyond our understanding, allows for us to constantly question the social order and create ethical relationships. This radical ethics forces us to take responsibility for that which we can never know, can never control, and thus opens up the space for true ethical relations.
Oliver 04 Kelly. W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression. Pg xxii-xxiv

In the end, I argue that ethics—or, making politics ethical—
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mean. And through endless interpretation, our lives become meaning full.16

Tournament: UMKC | Round: 1 | Opponent: ASU HR | Judge: Ryan Cheek
“To the Senate and the House of Representatives:
The existing state of the relations between the United States and Mexico renders it proper that I should bring the subject to the consideration of Congress. In my message at the commencement of your present session, the state of these relations, the causes which led to the suspension of diplomatic intercourse between the two countries in March, 1845, and the long-continued and unredressed wrongs and injuries committed by the Mexican Government on citizens of the United States in their persons and property were briefly set forth.”
These were the words of James Polk on May 11, 1846.  The contemporary excesses of war powers began when the United States annexed Texas to expand the institution of slavery, an institution it wouldn’t allow to be suffocated out of existence after the importation of slaves was made illegal in 1807. Polk had set his sights on Mexican territories in the Southwest.
Polk sent United States soldiers into Mexican territory to “send a strong message,” a sacrifice of young United States citizens, bait for Mexican troops attempting to defend their homeland. The deaths of the soldiers provided Polk the justification needed to go to war with Mexico.
On May 11, 1846, President James Polk reported to Congress that Mexico had invaded U.S. territory and that American blood had been shed on what he referred to as “American soil.”  It didn’t take much for it to become American soil.  All an Anglo had to do was lay eyes on it.  Two days later Congress declared war.
Though Polk’s act of deploying troops was not constitutionally justified, congress’ affirmation of Polk’s plea made the war one of the few that have been seen as a legitimate use of war powers.  This historical recontextualization precedes a focus on legitimate and illegitimate war powers, because it is necessary to reconstellate those powers in order to understand the ongoing effects of colonial expansion and US imperialism. The continual militarization of the border, which renders the Latin@ subjects expendable, proves this colonial power persists today.  Any discussion of war powers that doesn’t begin here is ill equipped to discuss the actual ramifications of the powers in question.  

Marquez 12 John D. Assistant Professor of African American and Latino/a Studies at Northwestern University. “Latinos as the “Living Dead”:¶ Raciality, expendability,¶ and border militarization” Latino Studies Vol. 10, 4, 473–498 Pg 480-2

A critical reading … of¶ sustained subjugation.

The epistemic justification of the Mexican American war persists in the assumption of neutrality in debate, policy discourse, and threat construction. Every position is exchangeable; we can switch sides on issues of policy or critical theory without ever questioning the role that these ideas play in our lives. However, this neutrality is just an illusion – all thought is fundamentally grounded in and structured by the location from which one thinks. This illusion is far from benign; it is fundamental to the constitution of the modern and colonial world, justifying the subordination of non-Western epistemologies in order to justify violence and oppression by the West.
Mignolo 11 Walter. William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University.  The Darker Side of Western Modernity Pg 79-81

Schmitt's analytical narrative … located, to be universal.

Polk and his cronies could look at a map and decide that the Rio Grande was a good enough stopping point.  To them, the hill country of Bexar, Texas was nothing but errant wasteland to be assimilated into nationalist goals of expansion, land acquisition, and agricultural institutionalization, all of which could be rested on the backs of slaves.  But he had to justify his thought.  Indians weren’t using the land properly, African Americans were better off with masters, the Mexicans couldn’t rule any longer after the velvet glove had failed.  This enabled a war against any other marked as uncivilized, culminating in the naturalization of rape and genocide.  
Maldonado-Torres 07 Nelson. Professor at UC Berkeley. “ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING¶ Contributions to the development of a¶ concept” Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2 3 March/May 2007, Pg 246-248

Misanthropic skepticism doubts.,.a paradigm of war.38

We cannot separate the domestic and foreign expressions of violence, particularly when discussing an area that has no clear division other than an imposed and illegal one. We must begin our discussion here because the colonial expansion that created hierarchies are the foundation of US violence abroad.
Taylor 12 Lucy. Lecturer in Latin American Studies in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. “Decolonizing International Relations:¶ Perspectives from Latin America” International Studies Review (2012) 14, 386–400 Pg 391-4

My decolonial approach … essential¶ parallel goals.

We must think and act from where we are. The colonialism which made the construction of the border possible affects our daily lives in San Antonio, from the missions which dot the landscape to the constant flow of immigrants who are exploited within the city. In investigating this history of colonial violence, we can resist this violence in our own times.
With that in mind, we affirm border thinking to undermine the epistemology which justifies the abuses of war powers in the first place.
Border thinking radically shifts the foundation of knowledge by delinking from the supposed neutrality of the West and recognizing the role that geo-politics and coloniality play in the way that thought and actions are structured. This shift opens up the possibility of different ways of thinking and being which can undermine the epistemological and political domination by the West and work towards the liberation of the oppressed.
Mignolo 05 Walter. William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University. The Idea of Latin America. Pg 137-41

The radical move … hierarchize and exclude.

The role of the ballot is to embrace an ethics of opacity. Our ethics affirms that value and dignity of those who have been violently excluded from the hegemony of Western epistemology and interrupts the will to transparency that makes the genocidal violence of coloniality possible.
Walker 11 Corey D.B. Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. ““How Does It Feel to be a Problem?”: (Local) Knowledge,¶ Human Interests, and The Ethics of Opacity” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2) Pg 108-110

The ethics of opacity … an ethics of opacity?

Tournament: UCO | Round: 5 | Opponent: MoState PR | Judge: Allsup

UNLV Aff

The contemporary excesses of war powers began when the United States annexed Texas to expand the institution of slavery, an institution it wouldn’t allow to be suffocated out of existence after the importation of slaves was made illegal in 1807. Polk sent United States soldiers into contested Mexican territory along the Texas/Mexico border to justify the expansion of the US, providing more territory for slave owners in the name of manifest destiny. The Mexican/American war provided an early precedent for contemporary executive control over war powers.

Pinhiero 2011 (John, associate professor of history at Aquinas College. He is the author of "Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War" (2007). "Hostilities" and War Powers: Let’s Choose the Constitution, http://historynewsservice.org/2011/06/hostilities-and-war-powers-lets-choose-the-constitution/-http://historynewsservice.org/2011/06/hostilities-and-war-powers-lets-choose-the-constitution/)

In fact, the slide to which Congressman Nadler referred has been going on for
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and then request a Congressional declaration afterward would set too dangerous a precedent.

Our historical contextualization of war powers is necessary to understand the ongoing effects of colonial expansion and US imperialism. The continual militarization of the border, which renders the Latin@ subjects expendable, proves this colonial power persists today.  Any discussion of war powers that doesn’t begin here is ill equipped to discuss the actual ramifications of the powers in question.

Marquez 12 ~John D. Assistant Professor of African American and Latino/a Studies at Northwestern University. "Latinos as the "Living Dead":¶ Raciality, expendability,¶ and border militarization" Latino Studies Vol. 10, 4, 473–498 Pg 480-2~

A critical reading of borderlands history suggests that there are overlapping¶ dimensions between logic
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scene of nature/deficiency/illegality, deserving of¶ sustained subjugation.

The epistemic justification of the Mexican American war persists in the assumption of neutrality in debate. Every position is exchangeable; we can switch sides without ever questioning the role that these ideas play in our lives. However, this neutrality is just an illusion fundamental to the constitution of the modern and colonial world, justifying the subordination of non-Western epistemologies in order to justify violence and oppression by the West.

Mignolo 11 ~Walter. William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University.  The Darker Side of Western Modernity Pg 79-81~

Schmitt’s analytical narrative of global linear thinking and international¶ law has several important consequences
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geo-historical and¶ bio-graphically located, to be universal.

The colonialism inherent in the construction of the border marks bodies and naturalizes rape and genocide in the name of security for Western, white males.

Maldonado-Torres 07 ~Nelson. Professor at UC Berkeley. "ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING¶ Contributions to the development of a¶ concept" Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 2 3 March/May 2007, Pg 246-248~

Misanthropic skepticism doubts in a way the most obvious. Statements like¶ ’you
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emerging modernity¶ comes to be shaped by a paradigm of war.38

This naturalization of war is evident in the militarization of the border. Before 9/11, the expendability of racialized populations was linked to terrorism, justifying the creation of the war on terror. This state of exception justifies the manufacturing of emergencies and state policies that abandon immigrant populations into deserts, leaving them to die.

Marquez 12 ~John D. Assistant Professor of African American and Latino/a Studies at Northwestern University. "Latinos as the "Living Dead":¶ Raciality, expendability,¶ and border militarization" Latino Studies Vol. 10, 4, 473–498 Pg 483-5~

Clinton’s speech and challenge took place nearly a decade before the "9–11
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already a presupposed outcome of border¶ militarization that state agents were discussing.

We cannot separate the domestic and foreign expressions of violence, particularly when discussing an area that has no clear division other than an imposed and illegal one. We must begin our discussion here because the colonial expansion that created hierarchies are the foundation of US violence abroad.

Taylor 12 ~Lucy. Lecturer in Latin American Studies in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. "Decolonizing International Relations:¶ Perspectives from Latin America" International Studies Review (2012) 14, 386–400 Pg 391-4~

My decolonial approach involves revealing the operation of coloniality ? modernity,¶ and this leads
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decolonizing both the USA and IR are complementary and essential¶ parallel goals.

We must think and act from where we are. The colonialism which made the construction of the border possible affects our daily lives in San Antonio, from the missions which dot the landscape to the constant flow of immigrants who are exploited within the city. In investigating this history of colonial violence, we can resist this violence in our own times.

Thus, we affirm border thinking to undermine the epistemology which justifies the abuses of war powers in the first place.

Border thinking radically shifts the foundation of knowledge by delinking from the supposed neutrality of the West and recognizing the role that geo-politics and coloniality play in the way that thought and actions are structured. This shift opens up the possibility of different ways of thinking and being which can undermine the epistemological and political domination by the West and work towards the liberation of the oppressed.

Mignolo 05 ~Walter. William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University. The Idea of Latin America. Pg 137-41~

The radical move made by Anzaldúa (as well as by Indigenous¶ and Afro
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politics belongs to the paradigm that uses identities to¶ hierarchize and exclude.

The role of the ballot is to affirm ethical scholarship. Ethical relations to the other are only possible through a responsibility to the subaltern, which necessitates listening and following the lead of the damned in our scholarship and practices. Therefore, the positionality of the damne must be the priority of our ethics, politics and epistemology in order to resist colonial power.

Maldonado-Torres 08 ~Nelson. Professor at UC Berkeley. Against War. Pg 238-4~

Cartesianism introduces a highly abstract conception of subjectivity that renders embodiment unimportant or problematic for
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material and cultural levels but also vis-a-vis epistemic levels.