CEZAEVİNDE MAHKÛM BEDENİNİN DİSİPLİNER ÖRGÜTLENMESİ: BİYOPOLİTİK MEKÂN, DUYUMSAMA, KURAL VE İHLAL (1923-1953)

Abstract

This article examines the body of prisoners within the context of disciplinary practices in prisons in Early Republican Turkey spanning the years 1923 to 1953. It deals with topics such as the discourse of correction and social rehabilitation in prisons; the rites of passage, symbolic and physical intervention on bodies of inmates during confinement; the relationship among space, everyday objects and prisoners; the perception of physical, social and acoustic space; the degrees of isolation of body as a space; the transgressive, destructive and self-destructive impulses among inmates as a strategy of negotiation and survival. Concentrating on the directory of prisons of 1941 and some of the texts by the director of Imralı Prison Ibrahim Saffet Omay on the one hand, referring to the diaries and letters of the authors and poets such as Aziz Nesin, Nazım Hikmet, Necip Fazıl on the other hand, the article tries to answer questions such as how the prisoners’ body and self-perception were conditioned by the total institution during disciplinary practices, how the symbolic interaction took place among the subject / object body , power, space, other inmates and staff in prisons, how and to what degree the regulations and rules could be put into effect, how the discrepancy between legal definition and real conditions in prisons could be interpreted. Using concepts such as the discipline by Michel Foucault, space by Henri Lefebvre, symbolic interaction by Erving Goffman, acoustic space by Marshall McLuhan and symbolic meaning of skin and wound by David Le Breton as a theoretical framework, it provides a critical discourse analysis of that period on a polyphonic basis. It will be argued here that the body of prisoner was considered metaphorically as a space within the space that was physically, spatially, psychologically, socially as well as culturally constructed, reorganized, negotiated, positioned and constantly reshaped through process of symbolic interaction within total institution, penal system, power relations and a series of social actors.