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 acontroversial case of a mass strip search carried out in 1992, thearticle examines the phantasmatic investements pervading this seeminglyrational technology of control. Using a psychoanalytic notion of fantasyagainst the backdrop of a Foucaultian theory of power, this articleargues that strip searches constitute a gendered form of politicaldomination driven by, and performed within, a phantasmatic scenario ofsexual violence. In this scenario both the political and genderidentities of prisoners are re-inscribed with the power of a stateacting as a male body politic. The article argues that the phantasmaticsupport of rational technologies of control betrays the contingent andshifting character of domination as well as its ambiguous effects.