Critical Analysis Of Bare Life By Roxanne Doty

This critical response explores author Roxanne Doty’s article, Bare life: border-crossing deaths and spaces of moral alibi. Specifically, it focuses on the section, Biopower and bare life in the US - Mexico borderlands. Accordingly, this analysis considers key questions and concepts as they mutually relate to the materials we cover in our module for week six about citizenship, migration and human rights. To be sure, Doty provides compelling support in her examination of migrant border-crossing deaths in the vicinity of the United Stated and Mexico border, stemming from components of the United States border patrol policy of ‘prevention through deterrence’ (Doty, 2011, p.599). Doty exceptionally explains this inhumane political strategy with

the idea that migrants are seen useful from a labor perspective, yet they experience deprivation of their rights as humans and are thus reduced to Georgio Agamben’s hypothesis of “bare life” (2011, p.600). “Third World migrants have, at various times, been both wanted and unwanted - wanted for their labor but unwanted as human beings. In a word, they are perfect candidates for being reduced to bare life” (2011, p.600). Additionally, Doty emphasizes the importance of Focault’s writing’s on biopolitics, with regards to the border-crossing issue at an international level. That is to say, Focault’s conception of humans as “capital”, and the dehumanizing of migrants as a means to diminish their worth as “people” are apropos for her arguments, which she clearly lays out in her introduction (2011, p.600). Indeed, Doty’s article invokes recollection of our reading assignments from week two, where we studied punitive justice, law and social change.
To begin, Doty and exceptional job of clearly stating the thesis or her article in her introduction by laying out the organization of her exploration through identifying the three areas which she intends to focus on.

Hence, in the first portion of Doty’s article, she offers further support of her arguments by relating the phenomena of biopolitics and biopower through referencing racially motivated legislation such as Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Safeguard, Operation Rio Grande, the Secure Border Initiative and California’s proposition 187 (2011, p. 604). Specifically, she includes a poignant statement, “The unauthorized migrant becomes socially undesirable, and ultimately one who can be killed without consequence” (2011, p.607). Similarly, in the Vice News film, Storming Spain’s Razor-Wire Fence: Europe or Die, we witness this sentiment from the doctor who is captured on film stating, “they don’t deserve it”, when asking the film crew why they were providing water and food to the injured migrants who were beaten after crossing the border (DIRECTOR, YEAR, 11:08). Furthermore, this writer has witnessed the harsh treatment of migrants first hand, on a trip to the Dominican Republic in 2006, where the horrific treatment of the Haitians by the Dominicans is upsetting. Many of these Haitian migrants were severely disabled women who held babies in their arms as they begged for money on the streets of San Felipe de Puerto Plata, after fleeing areas of poverty stricken and corrupt Haiti. To say I was saddened to see the treatment of these migrants is an understatement, it was deeply disturbing. I witnessed them being kicked and spat on as Dominican’s walked by them. Thus, witnessing this inhumane treatment compelled me to ask one of the locals why this happens, which they explained that the Dominicans feel the migrants are unworthy and view them as “less than dogs” because they bring crime and disease to the Dominican

Republic.