5. Borders and Bodies in Twenty-First-Century Biopolitical Societies: The Migrant’s Body as Carrier of the Border

See, also Rose and Novas (2005). For a review of Rose’s major work The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, see Lekka (2013a).

For Van der Ploeg, this has led to the emergence of a new ontology of the body: “[t]hrough these partly connecting and overlapping technological practices, then, a new body ontology is emerging, that redefines bodies in terms of, or even as, information” (2003: 64).

In Foucault’s words: “The body is the surface of the inscription of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of the dissociation of Me (to which it tries to impart the chimera of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (2000: 375–376).

As Mary Douglas underlines, “[m]iasma is an instrument of total rejection. The mere physical presence of the unwanted Other is dangerous. Their use of the same space and times and their breathing the common air is a menace to the rest of the community” (1994: 114–115). A quite characteristic example of the medicalisation of “Otherness” was the hunger strike of 300 migrants in Greece, on 25 January 2011. Demanding the recognition of their status as political refugees, 300 migrants decided to go on hunger strike to fight against their inhumane living conditions. The occupation of the building of the Law School, at the University of Athens, by migrants and activists supporting their fight, raised a storm of reactions within Greek society. It is indicative that most reactions did not focus on migrants’ demands, but on the supposed “risks” that their “infectious” bodies were posing to public health. In other words, the debate was articulated primarily in biomedical terms; the Greek society seemed to face a public health crisis, whereas Andreas Loverdos, Minister of Health, introduced then the term “hygienic bomb” into the public debate to describe the migrants’ resisting bodies.

An indicative example is the article “Which are the refugees’ diseases”, published in the online edition of Kathimerini, one of the most reputable Greek newspapers, on 28 February 2016 (Mpouloutza 2016).

At this point, let us keep in mind that “[t]o set a norm (normer), to normalize, is to impose a requirement on an existence, a given whose variety, disparity, with regard to the requirement, present themselves as a hostile, even more than unknown, indeterminant. It is, in effect, a polemical concept […]” (Canguilhem 1991: 239; emphasis added).

On the concept of “risk”, see Beck (2007); Luhmann (1993); Lupton (1999).

To this direction, quite indicative is the common attitude towards migrants in camps, hotspots and detention centres, in reference to migrants’ eating habits, personal hygiene and behaviour deemed as “risky” and “dangerous”. As it is asserted by Scott-Smith in his interesting study on the supplementary feeding programme in a camp in South Sudan, “[t]here was little space to acknowledge that people’s existing behaviour may make sense where they come from, or that there might be something to learn from local beliefs. What was left was a clear sense of correct and incorrect action, bound up with a discourse of civilized and uncivilized conduct” (2014: 31).

Besides, “[t]he very notion of ‘management’ is characterized by its apolitical and technocratic nature, and its popularity (to the detriment of other notions such as ‘the politics of migration’) is in itself a way of depoliticizing migration” (Geiger and Pécoud 2010: 11).

See, http://​www2.​technologyreview​.​com/​tr10/​?​year=​2001.

It is characteristic that, for Pugliese, “[b]iometrics, in one form or another, has been deployed in human societies for millennia” (2010: 26). See, also Ajana (2013); Lyon (2008).

On EURODAC and the introduction of biometrics, see also Van der Ploeg (1999); Ceyhan (2008); Ajana (2013).

Extremely interesting is the recent report on age assessment published by the Council of Europe (2017).

In any case, there is still a clear distinction between the legitimisation and security offered by the trusted traveller biometrics and the constant surveillance and control implied by the migrant biometrics: “Whereas the trusted traveller biometrics tend to emphasize membership of (or inclusion in) a group based on pre-screening checks such as citizenship and past travel patterns, what I will call immigrant biometrics are based on ongoing surveillance and checks on patterns of behaviour. While for the trusted traveller the biometric submission is usually the end of the matter, the passport to ‘borders lite’ (if not to a borderless world), the risky traveller’s biometric submission is only the beginning of a world of perennial dataveillance where the border looms large” (Amoore 2006: 343; emphasis in the original).

It is indicative that the loss of citizenship is called “denaturalization”, that is, inter alia, becoming “unnatural”: “[c]itizenship has become the nature of being human. Being outside the realm of citizenship means being outside nature” (Khosravi 2010: 122; emphasis in the original).

In the camps’ slang, the “Muselmann” was the detainee, who had given up any hope and literally given up himself/herself, living on the threshold between life and death (Agamben 1999).

In Greece, the events that took place in April 2012 were rather characteristic. A few days before the national elections of May 2012, police proceeded to mass adductions of prostitutes. Twelve women, initially presented by politicians and journalists as “migrants” and “illegal prostitutes”, were medically examined without their consent and found seropositive to HIV virus. This had as a result their arrest, their debasement through the publication of their photos in the media and their imprisonment for more than eight months, even though they were eventually acquitted. The main issue was the “danger” to public health that their “miasmatic” bodies were posing, whereas the Minister of Health Andreas Loverdos was once again speaking of “hygienic bombs”, ordering the expansion of medical control under the pretext of the security of the “Greek family”.

In May 2016, systematic vaccinations began in Idomeni and other camps all over Greece. These vaccinations followed the reactions of a significant part of the Greek society against refugees’ children who were going to attend Greek schools. Many Greek parents were claiming that refugees’ children were carrying diseases that were going to infect Greek children, demanding the immediate vaccination of refugees’ children.

Alfred Hoche (1865–1943) was professor of psychiatry and director of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Freiburg, and Karl Binding (1841–1920) was law professor at the University of Leipzig. In their book Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, they were openly in favour of the extermination of all lives deemed as “unworthy of life”, legitimising, in this way, “euthanasia”. Their ideas culminated in the sterilisation programme during the period 1933–1939, where more than 400,000 mentally and physically ill persons were subjected to compulsory sterilisation, and the “euthanasia programme”, known as “Aktion T4”, during the period 1939–1945, where more than 100,000 mental patients, along with other groups of mentally and physically ill individuals, were killed by Nazi doctors in gas chambers, through poison injections and through forced food deprivation. See, Burleigh (1991); Lekka (2013b).