ABSTRACT
This essay seeks to develop an analysis of the body and institutions that produce the sense and non-sense of bodies in a particular context, by way of a study of the institution of policing and its relation to genital intimacy between men. My study has two points of departure. The first is a map of central London attached to a memorandum produced by Sir John Nott-Bower, K.C.V.O, Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis (Nott-Bower 1954) submitted to the Wolfenden Committee (Wolfenden 1957), a government departmental committee commissioned to investigate the law and practice relating to homosexual offences and prostitution in England, Wales and Scotland. The second point of departure is a rare documented example of police practices. The document is a Metropolitan police report of a surveillance operation that deployed plain clothes officers in public lavatories, now preserved in the Public Records Office, London. I want to use both to reflect upon the interface between an institution of the administration of justice, the police, and the body. In undertaking this objective I also want to use these two documents to think the law otherwise. Rather than law as rule and reason, statute and case law, in this essay I want to examine law as a cartographic technology that produces the ordered/disordered body of law as a spatial order, and law as a set of practices of the body that are central to the administration of law rather than peripheral to its operation.
