Affect, Repetition, and Eroticized State Violence in El Salvador's Prisons

Abstract

This article examines images taken inside El Salvador’s prisons and released in April 2020, just as the then-new president, Nayib Bukele, was making drastic changes to Salvadoran social policy and further concentrating power in the presidency and military. It investigates the social qualities of these staged images, of nude prisoners forced into large blocks, and what affective resonances the Bukele administration is exploiting and producing through them. The author argues that these images focalize the trauma and anxiety of years of dispersed violence in El Salvador and grant their audiences conditional access to the death making they perform while also threatening them with inclusion. The article proposes that attendant affective responses and media circulation constitute a form of infrastructure essential to rationalizing the expanding carceral project in El Salvador, which has seen its prison population more than double, and to the eroticization of that project’s structural and personal violence, of which these images are an extreme and informative example. It proposes these images are in dialogue with other archives of sexualized carceral violence and a history of the representation of El Salvador through death, while also indicative of new techniques of image production and circulation in settings of confinement in the twenty-first century. Using theories of hierarchies of the flesh and being from Black studies, as well as the critical geography work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the author argues that, within the space of the images, disease, chaos, and criminalized land and body converge.