‘The Body Carries the Border’ – A Somatechnical Approach to Borderscape Violence

In bio-/necropolitical accounts, the border penetrates and insists on, that is, transforms, the bodies of people on the move, marking the constitutive violence of sovereignty-based hospitality or hostility. What is largely conceptually neglected in such accounts, however, is the subversive and risky activity of people on the move who themselves are insisting on the border by outsmarting and transgressing it. Extensions of bio-/necropolitics focusing on the debilitating aspects of state violence show how the border extends beyond a liminal status that reproduces binaries – such as exclusion/inclusion, (non-)citizenship, and (il-)legality) – thereby enabling a recentring of people on the move as agents. This paper seeks to (re-)formulate the idea of a ‘border-as-assemblage’ by offering a somatechnical reading of border transgression. The body on the move forms part of this assemblage as it challenges and reproduces the border across different technoscapes. In particular, I focus on the scene of the forensic examination room where people on the move must prove their deservingness by exposing their bodies to a medicalising-moralising gaze. This scene forms the entrance point to a consideration of the somatechnical entanglements giving shape to the assemblage of the migrant body. I reflect also on how somatechnics could be mobilised to think the body as a potential site of struggle against this (physically and epistemically) violent objectification and, in so doing, offer new perspectives on border resistance through refusal and as claim to opacity.