Entre trânsitos e cárceres: os processos de (des)fazer a fronteira hispano-marroquina numa experiência prisional no Centro Penitenciário feminino de Tetuão.

Abstract

The confining position of the waters of the Mediterranean Sea - one of Europe s thresholds - makes the border between Spain and Morocco into not only a geopolitical location, but also a territory that - on a daily basis - produces relationships, demarcations, fractures, and porosities between spaces, subjects, and modes of being. Border management operations constitute a set of governmental operations that aim to both maintain differences and to regulate bodies through diverse exercises of power. This study aims to contemplate different processes of making and unmaking the Spanish-Moroccan border through an examination of the personal trajectory of Rita, the study s primary interlocutor. Rita is a Spanish woman accused of international drug trafficking and currently imprisoned at the female Penitentiary Center in Tétouan, Morocco, a province that is immediately adjacent to the Spanish autonomous city of Ceuta. By considering the prison as an extension of the Spanish-Moroccan border in and of itself, I aim to weave a diagram of circulations, agents, and crossings among the multiple methods of punishment and the axes of differentiation that compose and alter the border s specter constantly.