TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2001//
TI  - The sexual games of the body politic: fantasy and state violence in Northern Ireland
JO  - Culture, medicine, and psychiatry
A1  - Aretxaga, B.
SP  - 1
EP  - 27
VL  - 25
IS  - 1
N2  - 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>
LA  - en
SN  - 0165-005X
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/
ID  - ref1
ER  -