Family Debilitation: Migrant Child Detention and the Aesthetic Regime of Neoliberal Authoritarianism

This paper proposes the term “family debilitation” to point to the ways that institutionalized child abuse operates to perversely generate biopolitical authority, a strategy of negative biopolitics that is integral to the aesthetic regimes of settler colonialism and neoliberal authoritarianism. The paper attends to two scenes of child detention in the US: Scene 1 US/Mexico Border 2017 concerns migrant children caught up in the bordering regimes of Donald Trump’s America; Scene 2 Pennsylvania 1879 concerns indigenous children caught up in the disciplinary regimes of “civilizing” education. As we attend to the connections between these scenes an argument emerges that situates racialized child detention and abuse within the aesthetic technologies biopolitical sovereignty. The “problem” to which these practices serve as a kind of technical answer is not any kind of problem with migrant and indigenous families themselves but rather is a problem of government—specifically the legitimacy deficit that exists where biopolitical states openly participate in dispossession and the destruction of life.