@article{ref1,
title="The sexual games of the body politic: fantasy and state violence in Northern Ireland",
journal="Culture, medicine, and psychiatry",
year="2001",
author="Aretxaga, B.",
volume="25",
number="1",
pages="1-27",
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.<p /><p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0165-005X",
doi="",
url="http://dx.doi.org/"
}