Miriam Ticktin

Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control: Where French Feminist and Anti‐immigrant Rhetoric Meet

W hen I first arrived in the Paris region in 1999 to do research on the struggle by undocumented immigrants (les sans papiers) for basic human rights, discussions of violence against women were remarkably absent from the public arena. Nongovernmental organizations and researchers had begun to broach the topic, but with little public visibility. However, this changed in late 2000, with a media explosion on the issue of les tournantes, or the gang rapes committed in the banlieues of Paris. Such tournantes involve boys “taking turns” with their friends’ girlfriends, both parties usually being of Maghrebian or North African origin. A film called La Squale (2000) first told the story of such collective rapes— predominantly anal or oral assaults, to preserve the girls’ virginity. This attention to violence against girls of North African origin in the banlieues mushroomed to fill public space—for instance, the number of newspaper articles about gang rapes increased tenfold from 2000 to 2001 (Mucchielli 2005). Additionally, a testimony by Samira Bellil, Dans l’enfer des tour-

POLICING AND HUMANITARIANISM IN FRANCE: IMMIGRATION AND THE TURN TO LAW AS STATE OF EXCEPTION

Taking the issue of immigration in France as the entry point to a discussion of law and order, this essay examines what this focus on law and order masks: the manner in which law, in certain critical realms, operates according to the logic of exception, rather than as a regime of normative justice based on general rules and rights. Joining the renewed debate on Carl Schmitts political theories while rejecting his larger political project, I suggest that the significance of this point is not primarily legal, but political. I locate my argument in the context of changing notions of both sovereignty and political power, suggesting that the situation in France constitutes just one instance of a larger struggle over sovereign power by national and transnational institutions. I focus on two specific and complementary spaces of what I have called ‘juridical indeterminacy’, each of which illustrates the enactment of this differently configured rule of law. These are policing and humanitarianism. In particular, I examine the policing of prostitutes, the phenomenon of detention centres, the Refugee Appeals Commission, and a humanitarian clause for undocumented immigrants who are gravely ill, to suggest that policing and humanitarianism represent two sides of the same coin – two essential elements of a moral economy in which law as a regime of systematic justice is not central, and where a democratic political realm has been displaced in favour of a regime of sovereign exceptions. Ultimately, this essay suggests that this logic of exceptionalism creates and privileges non-rights-bearing, apolitical, non-agentive victims. The underlying goal therefore is to point instead to the need for a more radical political project, one that sees a degree of legal regularity and predictability necessary to achieve the autonomous political action of a democratic society.

How Biology Travels: A Humanitarian Trip

This article explores how ‘biology’ — in the sense that bodies are increasingly understood in biological terms, from the molecular to the species level — is becoming more central in the recognition of political worth, and I argue that humanitarians are key players in producing this reality. I focus on the role biology plays in the politics of immigration. Combining ethnographic research with undocumented immigrants in Paris and asylum claimants in the US, I examine how biology has become a central tool in the ability to travel. How did pathology (i.e. illness) or violations of anatomy (i.e. torture, sexual violence) become the ‘best’ ways to get papers as an undocumented immigrant — better than selling one’s labor power? I suggest that biological evidence — of illness, of torture, of immunity levels — are used as key measurements of suffering, which justifies humanitarian exceptions, in this case, for papers. My argument is that there is a dual regime of truth at work, where the multiple ontologies of biology get reduced to one epistemology of biology as ‘fixed’ when it concerns immigrants and refugees, due to the role of humanitarianism in the politics of immigration. This is explored in the context of profound inequalities between those in the global North and South, asking how the hope offered by biological evidence takes on different meanings and consequences depending on one’s position in the global matrix of wealth and poverty, race and gender.

Medical Humanitarianism in and Beyond France: Breaking Down or Patrolling Borders?

In 1998, France officially instituted a humanitarian clause in the law, granting legal permits to those in France with pathologies of life-threatening consequence, if they were declared unable to receive proper treatment in their home countries. This ‘illness clause’ was put in place to permit undocumented immigrants to receive treatment in France.1 The logic behind this was humanitarian; the French state felt it could not deport people if such a deportation had consequences of exceptional gravity, such as their death. It was the lobbying of medical humanitarian groups such as Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) or ‘Doctors Without Borders’ and Medecins du Monde (MDM) or ‘Doctors of the World’ that helped institute the illness clause as law in France.2