The stakes of the body: power and subversion in Roman shanties

Abstract

This article builds on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Bosnian Roma families living in the Roman peripheries. The discussion gravitates around two different but connected circumstances: an eviction of an informal settlement occurred in 2007 and a children birthday party celebrated in an authorized camp in 2023. The article explores changes and continuities in the governance of the Roma in Rome and highlights the use of heterogeneous biopolitical technologies that trap the Roma in a blend of inclusion and exclusion, intervention and non-intervention, care, repression and neglect. It also explores multiple and diversified forms of Roma resistance, insubordination, and subversion, produced in grey spaces of urban (in)formality and (il)legality. The body is used as the lens to read the political workings of the bureaucratic State and those of racialised actors it relegates to the margins and to reflect on how power and subversion meet, clash, but also ambiguously blur into one another.