The Politics of Equality

Abstract

Strategies of unmaking security depend upon the dynamics of practices and representations that redeploy and reappropriate alternative discourses, ethical considerations and subjective resistance within the security dispositif. The humanitarian approach insidiously transforms into the governmentality of risk and folds victimhood upon risk factors, bringing trafficked women to their initial status of ‘dangerous others’. If suffering is redeployed for the purposes of governmentality, the (imaginary) encounter with the other’s suffering body can become part of the management of social problems. Rather than simply related to actors and institutional positions, this reconfiguration of pity can be understood from within the dispositif of security that redefines the subjects to be governed.