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.
Aretxaga
B
B
University of Texas-Austin, USA.
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*