ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes Michel Foucault's account of grotesque power to analyze the criminalization of queer people as it continues in the twenty-first century. The criminal punishment system no longer relinquishes offenders who are labeled as mentally ill; indeed, contemporary prisons are full of subjects who have been diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, and carceral institutions are widely recognized as a cause of mental illness. Prisons have sometimes categorized queer inmates as sex offenders, even making them wear special color coded sex offender uniforms, although the crimes for which they were convicted were not sex related at all. Foucault argues that just as psychiatry has ceased to function as medicine, law has ceased to function as justice. Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, law enforcement systematically functions in violation of the presumed justice, fairness or neutrality of law. Psychiatric legal testimonies are grotesque because they may be wantonly cruel, extinguishing many lives for little reason.
