Settler colonial control (of bodies at the border): Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese, ‘“You have to pay with your body”: Sexual violence, border violence and the settler state’, in Suvendrini Perera, Joseph Pugliese (eds), Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence, Routledge, 2022
Abstract: Our concern in this essay is to disclose the mobilisation of sexual violence as a specifically embodied modality of the regime of settler colonialism. Our argument is that the border is a site where these forms of violence are concentrated and licensed, both at the legislative level and at the level of expansive discretionary powers which enable multiple forms of non-accountable force and violence to be directed against gendered nonwhite and racialized bodies that are cast as threats to national security. We signal a number of the axes along which the treatment of illegalized arrivals not only functions to reproduce ongoing forms of settler colonial violence but also ramifies and mutates into new formations: specifically, practices that reinscribe patterns of racialized punishment directed at enslaved and colonized Indigenous peoples. The technologies and practices of both slavery and continuing Indigenous dispossession, we argue, stage their historical returns in certain current practices of immigration detention.
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