Anti-terrorism as a Governing Device and Social Control Mechanism: Political Dissidence and Sexual Politics in a Permanent State of Exception in the Italian Context

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the political use of violence and specifically on notions, narratives and discourses that construct and defining “terrorism” in contemporary neoliberal capitalist societies. The author looks at the new dynamics of control and repression that are at stake in the current historical and socio-political context, characterized by the interaction of different forms of power – disciplinary, necropolitical and biopolitical – which act to construct new definitions, representations and countermeasures about concepts such as “threat”, “enemy” and “terrorism”. This concerns securitarian and repressive state technologies in the Italian political framework, situated in the broader European context, in relation to social and political movements. The thesis will explore how securitarian narratives and emergencial rhetoric, connected to an increased militarization of territories, act as devices for the criminalization of social movements and political struggles and how these narratives always build up larger spaces for the legitimation of the exercise of state control and oppression within a growing invisible structural systemic violence – “terror” – acted upon bodies along the lines of class, gender, race and ethnicity. Throughout the case study the author analyses queer and transfeminist movements (Atlantide) and focuses specifically on the ways they have been affected by a hegemonic narrative of securitization and on how queer subjectivities become stigmatized and marginalized.