ABSTRACT
In Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (2013) critique contemporary society as predicated on a form of neoliberal crisis management which controls subjects based on economic and political premises, as well as moralistic ones. To disrupt this organizational structure, contextualized via universities, philosophical approaches, social movements (and other layers), Butler and Athanasiou propose dispossession as a way to critique recognition and the sovereign subject. Looking through different mass media such as television, internet, and newspapers, we can see many different examples of how this form of neoliberal crisis management is controlling and affecting subjects across the world. If we reflect upon the “flaring” migrant crisis in the Mediterranean (so described by the New York Times 1 ), during which twenty migrants a day are killed while trying to cross from their country of origin to various points in Europe, 2 we can see a clear example of neoliberal world ordering marked by managerial practices controlling human bodies across frontiers. The number of women and children involved in the migration drama in the Mediterranean is rising gradually, at the same time that the urgency of war, violence, and poverty in their origin countries is growing. This ongoing and intensifying crisis of human migration places women’s bodies in the center of the whirlpool: they are the object of trafficking, of harassment during migration, and sometimes of sexual slavery imposed by those who are smuggling them. The migrant crisis also leads to an ecological crisis, since this migration directly contributes to an erosion of coastlines and significant environmental deterioration. 3 On this occasion, the fact that a third of the world’s population is migrating across one specific area and destroying habitat there is not a strong enough reason to implement regulatory mechanisms. The addition and overlapping of various types of crisis around our environment provokes what Butler and 2Athanasiou (2013) have defined as the acclimatization of a population to insecurity and precarization related to vulnerability, anxiety, and illness.
