The Frontiers of Detention: Gender and Ethnicity in the Supervision of Foreigners Awaiting Expulsion
2016
Based on immersive research in a French detention center, this article examines the manner in which categories of alterity are used and produced in the confinement of foreigners awaiting expulsion. Gender and ethnic frontiers play a key role in the organization of work, inter-professional relations and the manner in which detained foreigners are treated. Indeed, the general operation of the detention center observes a gendered and ethnicized division of labor that, via appeal to a set of naturalized characteristics, determines the tasks assigned the private agents who supply the Center’s staff. Lacking job security, the latter are themselves immigrants and are partly treated in the same manner as the detainees. Moreover, the internal hierarchies of the police, which include a number of women and minority police officers, are predicated on stigmatizing representations of the imprisoned foreigners, representations reinforced by the agents’ working conditions. While detention is promoted as an administrative confinement mechanism, its everyday mode of operation produces and reproduces the conflation of detained persons with delinquents.
Keywords:
- Correction
- Cite
- Save
- Machine Reading By IdeaReader
0
References
0
Citations
NaN
KQI