Description
This paper looks at the weaponisation of ‘flat affect’ as a medium through which punishment can be enacted upon bodies, generally, and female bodies specifically. Taking the case of Shamima Begum, I argue that her stoicism – whether a personality trait, a strategic decision, or the result of severe trauma – was operationalised by the mass media as a tool to condemn her further for her affiliation to ISIS. Crucially, the paper contends that her affective dispositions, or better said, the lack of, deviated from the idealised feminine (stereo)type of the emotional and expressive mother, specifically. From this, I conceptualise that the ultimate punishment enacted on her, stripping her of her British citizenship, can be positioned as reactionary politics to her flat affect, far more than her terrorist crimes which, beyond affiliation to the Islamic State, have never been named by the UK state. Thus, this paper raises important questions surrounding how, at its most extreme interpretation, affective dispositions that are codified as deviant to the female body rendered Begum stateless, and, thus, became a vehicle through which international law can be broken.
