Abstract
What is the relationship between sexual behaviour normalization, political manipulation of gendered violence, territorial governance applied by extraordinary force and detention of immigrants in Identification and Expulsion Centres (CIEs)? What mechanisms of surveillance, coercive education and repression are at play in these contemporary cases and how are they connected to other mechanisms displayed in other historical periods and still effective today?
Anna Simone deals with these issues in her latest book, I corpi del reato. Sessualità e sicurezza nella società del rischio [Bodies of crime. Sexuality and security in the risk society], where she uses Foucaultian philosophical concepts in order to deconstruct the ‘order of discourse’ and bring to light the effects of power and law on those bodies that do not respond to the rules of power and law. These are unruly bodies in comparison with the taken-for-granted normative, but at the same time bodies whose behaviours are not punishable by law; abnormal bodies in relation to principles that establish a range of exclusions on the basis of binaries: normal–abnormal, harmless–dangerous, decent–unseemly, regular–irregular.
The identification of subjectivities that are deemed to be in need of normalization is not on the basis of objective conditions. Instead, as in the four Luhmann categories mentioned by Simone, selectivity, communication, decision and prevention, it is power that identifies as dangerous certain situations and raises alarms about them, thus justifying repression and restriction of people’s freedom.
With reference to Italy, Simone identifies the following consequences of these processes:
. . . the process of selecting risks has led to managing only criminal and deviance issues, neglecting the others; the process of communicating risks determined social alarms about affairs previously considered normal and physiological in relation to any social transformation context; the process of political and legal decision led to an escalation of practices badged as securization; in the end the prevention of risks ideology has sharpened the new social control mechanisms. (translated from p. 11)
Political power and law serve to make categories and subjects emerge as common objects of citizens’ anxieties ‘until these new subjectivities are transformed into bodies of the crime. Bodies to govern and to manage through new stigmatizing and discriminating social control mechanisms’ (p. 13).
The first chapter of the book deals with the normative power of heterosexuality – considered as the major exclusion principle and model for a reduction of deviance. Heterosexuality works, Simone argues, as a ‘testing ground’ for other mechanisms of exclusion, but also for power that shifts from being repressive to producing subjectivities to be disciplined, on the basis of a social rule system that creates exclusion.
One of the contributions that Anna Simone makes to this area is to present Foucault’s reflections on Herculine Alexina Abel Barbin – born hermaphrodite, declared woman, then man, who committed suicide ‘because she could not stand the moral violence of medical diagnosis and laws that wanted to impose her/him a “real sex” and a “real identity”, regardless of the uniqueness of her/his life and body’ (p. 22). The question that arises is how free was she/he to get her/his desire attended to when having one gender identity and a normalized sexuality are the only possibilities officially sanctioned. In that example, as in others, the construction of identities is reduced to preconceived roles within normalized relations, defined by absence and defect and so ‘a priori in need of regulation and particular protections’ (p. 33). Yet, the law can only offer paternalistic norms, which confirm that the principle of exclusion is not open to question. Anna Simone proposes to solve this impasse through the formulation ‘neither same, nor different, but exceeding’ (p. 36), to keep in mind that being recognized by law doesn’t shape or hold identities, but is an instrument, part of a bigger path that leads beyond the limit imposed by norms.
In the second chapter, Anna Simone analyses the relations between sexual violence, authority and evolution of criminal law, particularly between ‘the construction of moral panics and political manipulation of women’s bodies used as an instrument to justify current security policies’ (p. 37). She points out how, until recently, victims of sexual abuses were commonly treated as if they were as responsible as the aggressors, because they were guilty of immoral behaviour that triggered the sexual violence. Yet, as Simone underlines, acts of gender violence are committed mostly by parents, relatives and colleagues. The evidence for this is well known, but it is ignored in favour of portraying as criminal ‘immigrant men in relation to rapes’ and ‘to manipulate women’s bodies to justify repressive politics’ (p. 47).
Anna Simone recognizes that a governance model is emerging, based on emergency legislative and administrative acts (ordinanze amministrative in Italian) and on urgency to legitimize repressive actions and extraordinary powers in response to emergency, real or assumed. These punitive actions work without addressing real problems or finding solutions, but they target particular groups of people, turning them into social enemies who can be blamed for social problems. This consists of a scapegoat mechanism that saves all other social actors from feeling responsible for what happens.
This leads us to the theme of the third chapter and to the analysis of the multiplication of administrative ordinances, targeted against people in specific social categories, particularly immigrants. These regulatory devices are not used as temporary and extraordinary measures, but as ways to regulate ‘behaviours that cannot be categorized as crimes’: ‘The bodies of prostitutes, car windscreen cleaners, jugglers, suspected pushers, youth, citizens, street hawkers, become objects to bring under control through various prohibitions established by local authorities’ (p. 57).
These decisions are purported to express citizens’ needs, but are taken without any form of public consultation, serving as edicts that repress people and forbid them to do various things.
Simone is right when she says they have become ‘a method to manage urban risks, an instrument of local governance’ (p. 58) allowing exclusion/marginalization based on prejudices about behaviours considered indecorous, disturbing and dangerous, but that are not illegal.
Consequently one gets used to the idea that ‘social problems caused by specific difficulties may be solved through authoritarian decisions and there is an inability to create a collective conscience about possible responses to people in need’ (p. 69).
In this context, the most effective solution dealt with in the last chapter is to make problems, immigrant bodies in this case, disappear by restraining them in extra-territorial spaces called Centri di identificazione ed espulsione (Identification and Expulsion Centres or CIEs), where rights are suspended in a sort of limbo until expulsion, receiving humanitarian leave to remain or political asylum. This is a real detention that Anna Simone compares with other ‘total institutions’, such as prisons, noting that while refugee camps can be subject to inspection and are temporary in the face of emergencies, ‘the CIEs make normal and regular the emergency, creating a systemic, stable and efficient geography of clandestine administrative detention’ (p. 81).
In all the cases described above an ideology of risk is present, legitimizing repressive solutions that gradually reduce people’s rights and taking advantage of a permanent state of alarm. They do not manage to address the social issues raised by new political subjects and from those who are not reducible to universal models.
It is fitting to end with Simone’s succinct analysis of the impact of these solutions. ‘Inside and outside these relations we can see the double movement of law, that on the one hand exceeds itself transforming subjects’ rights in instruments of penal and security intervention, thus reducing people’s freedom; on the other hand it is exceeded by those same bodies, proving to be unable to address surveillance of new subjectivities who live in complex contemporary societies’ (p. 10).