Citation

Aretxaga B. Cult. Med. Psychiatry 2001; 25(1): 1-27.

Affiliation

University of Texas-Austin, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2001, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

11270664

Abstract

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.

Language: en