The Corporal Repertoire of Prison Protest in Spain and Latin America: The Political Language of Self-Mutilation by Common Prisoners

Abstract

By means of case studies and historical information regarding penitentiary institutions in Spain and Latin America, the author offers an interpretative view of protest in prisons. Taking into consideration the concept of prisonisation, this paper discusses the body treated as a typological category. In a manner of speaking, this perspective enables the author to establish differences in the nature of the arsenal of collective actions employed by and thus to put forward his own conceptual definition as bioprotest. There is a subtle asymmetry in the bodily-harm aspect of prisoner protest, which needs to be examined in light of the dominant cultural frameworks. On the one hand, we have political and ideological prisoners, whose non-violent corporal arsenal (hunger strikes, in particular) is often a sufficient to make themselves heard. On the other, we have common prisoners, who are often unable to break free of the cultural stigma of criminality which clings to them, and therefore feel compelled to add a more sacrificial (corporal) aspect to their actions - mainly by way of self-mutilation.