The sexual games of the body politic: fantasy and state violence in Northern Ireland.
This article analyzes the practice of strip searching women political prisoners in Northern Ireland as a violent technology of control aimed at breaking the political identity of prisoners. Focusing on a controversial case of a mass strip search carried out in 1992, the article examines the phantasmatic investements pervading this seemingly rational technology of control. Using a psychoanalytic notion of fantasy against the backdrop of a Foucaultian theory of power, this article argues that strip searches constitute a gendered form of political domination driven by, and performed within, a phantasmatic scenario of sexual violence. In this scenario both the political and gender identities of prisoners are re-inscribed with the power of a state acting as a male body politic. The article argues that the phantasmatic support of rational technologies of control betrays the contingent and shifting character of domination as well as its ambiguous effects.
University of Texas-Austin, USA.
B
B
Aretxaga
D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D003068:Coercion; D005260:Female; D006076:Government; D006801:Humans; D009660:Northern Ireland; D011057:Politics; D011329:Prisoners / Q000523:psychology*; D011678:Punishment / Q000523:psychology*; D011902:Rape / Q000523:psychology; D017406:Sexual Harassment / Q000523:psychology*; D012919:Social Behavior; D012930:Social Dominance; D014754:Violence / Q000523:psychology*