Punishment, border crossings and the powers of horror

Abstract

Gothicism, typified by gruesome injury and trauma, and menacing shadowy figures, is a prominent feature of the discourses of public protection and vengeful punishment. Historically the gothic has dramatized a modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse. Today an increasingly complex series of networks and flows cross, undermine and remake the borders and boundaries of old. Important contemporary reconfigurations include the erosion of traditional distinctions between public and private spheres, between information and entertainment and between legal and extra-legal. Understanding this profusion of different kinds of border crossings requires the scholar to depart from the Eliasian equation of interdependencies with a ‘civilizing process’ associated with restraint, sympathy and tolerance. To understand the complexity of border crossings, experimentation is required with concepts that directly theorize the breaching of established spatial entities and categories, and that focus attention on the potent effects of flows, new connections and the in-between. One such concept is the notion of abjection, through which the powers of horror invoked by popular cultural representations, case law and penal practices are related to the horror of that which breaches borders. This article contributes an exploration of the visceral passions of contemporary penality in terms of Julia Kristeva’s assertion that, ‘according to the logic of separation, it is flow that is impure’.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.