Life of Carceral Labour: Between Authoritarian and Liberal Law

Abstract This paper seeks to question the strict separation between liberal and authoritarian legality by revealing the fictions and contradictions of liberal law necessary to maintain its order and the authoritarian practices involved in sustaining it. Bringing forth stories of carceral labour of women prisoners in an Indian prison who bear witness to authoritarian logics of punishment and animating spaces of legal ambiguity occupied by this labour, I draw out this dialectical relationship between liberal law and its authoritarian practices. I also demonstrate how carceral labour serves to construct labour and its subject outside prison as “free” (notwithstanding its actual conditions and relations of coercion), sustaining a seductive dichotomy between “free” and “unfree” labour. Both materially and psychically, the liberal rule of law asks us to deposit “unfreedoms” in prison and its practices so that the fantasy of the free liberal subject with rights and citizenship is sustained.