Abstract

SUTTON, Barbara. Zones of Clandestinity and “Bare Life:” Women, Body, and Abortion. Rev. Estud. Fem. [online]. 2017, vol.25, n.2, pp.889-902. ISSN 1806-9584.  https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9584.2017v25n2p889.

In this essay, I examine how different zones of clandestinity constitute women’s bodies in ways that are vital to the sovereign and gendered power of the State, in moments of dictatorship as well as democracy. Drawing on three different research projects, I aim to juxtapose seemingly unconnected situations: detention and disappearance,

forced abortions, and criminalized voluntary abortions. I use the work of Giorgio Agamben and Penelope Deutscher to explore ways in which women are constructed as “bare life” through the institutionalization of clandestine abortions. The zone of clandestinity that State sovereignty creates through the criminalization of abortion raises the following questions: What does the figure of clandestinity - and clandestine abortion in particular - tell us about how sovereignty is upheld in modern democracies? How is State violence implicated in producing hidden bodies (particularly women’s bodies) exposed to danger and which may be “killed” with impunity? Is the violent control of these invisible/excluded bodies a requirement to keep intact the illusion of the unified State sovereign body? Paying attention to zones of clandestinity that persist in democratic States can help to shed light not only on the precarious forms of citizenship afforded to marginalized members of the body politic, but also the violent but hidden interventions by which the sovereign State maintains its power and the gender hierarchies in which it is based.

Keywords : abortion; clandestinity; body; women; “bare life”.

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