Abstract

The article reflects on the practices of scarification and bodily self-mutilation enacted by incarcerated people. It is drawn from ethnographic research conducted in three predominantly male prisons in northern Italy between 2017 and 2019. Going beyond prison’s culturalist or pathologizing readings of prisons, the article accounts for the complex meanings that characterize the practices of self-mutilation in jail. Acting as a tactical tool for subtracting, manipulating, or reversing governmental mechanisms in one’s favor, self-scarification actively transforms prison distress by making it manageable in different ways. On the one hand, it is an attempt to cope with prison suffering by making it more immediately present and manageable. On the other, it acts as a prisoner’s way of «forcing» institutional attention by tactically modifying institutional mechanisms in her/his favour. Scarification thus becomes a practice of intimate resistance to prison, making possible a process of counter-subjectivation that emerges from the reappropriation of one’s own body and emotions