No handkerchief and no ID. Joys and tragedies of identity papers

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Published 14-10-2024
Estela Schindel

Abstract

The text explores some moments and modes of dis-identification, that is, the separation between a living body and the papers that subject it to a State. While in the popular culture of the 1960s in Latin America the lack of documentation could be experienced as a utopian mode of freedom, the dictatorships of the Southern Cone shortly afterwards inverted the meaning of this de-registration by producing, with the disappeared, an extreme form of abandonment to sovereign power in the absolute denial of name and identification and the production of bare life. The voluntary un-documentation of those who migrate to Europe turns the destruction of the passport into a de-territorialising cunning, but these strategies are powerless in the face of the restructuring of the sovereign bond between the individual and the State that biometric technologies are bringing about. There the very definition of the human is put into question, together with the status of the information generated by our bodies. Finally, the administrative death and re-birth experienced by those who choose to change their gender poses another emancipatory possibility: one that is contained in the estrangement from what Paul B. Preciado calls the ‘political prosthesis’, the identification paper.

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Keywords

identification, citizenship, borders, migration

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Single Topic Issues