Technologies of abjection: The possessive logics and performative sovereignty of drug dog operations in New South Wales,Australia

Abstract

This article considers the alarming escalation in the use of strip-searching on the part of the New South Wales police over the past decade and its connection with street-level drug policing including drug dog operations. These strategies mobilise a technology of detection which draws police ever more intently into the orbit of the sexual and sexual violation and in ever-closer proximity to the genital, the vaginal and the anal cavities of those it forcibly produces as suspects. I am especially interested in the symbolic, spectacular, gendered and performative dimensions of these ‘devices of sexual saturation’; their opportunistic deployment to patrol minoritarian populations (Aboriginal people, young people/minors, sexual and racial minorities) and cast aspersions on their self-sovereign capacities. Framed by the law as technologies of drug detection, these operations are better conceptualised as technologies of abjection devoted to the production of violable subjects as part of brutal ongoing efforts to shore up the authority of self-asserted, stolen sovereignty. A narcofeminist lens brings these gendered dimensions of drug policing into better view. Here, the ‘possessive logics’ that Aileen Moreton-Robinson implicates in the performativity of patriarchal white sovereignty on the part of the ‘postcolonising’ Australian state find their pretext and source of legitimation in the rhetoric of drugs and the fantasised sovereign subject it maintains as a requirement for the general functioning of the law: the ‘master of her intentions and desires’, in Derrida’s words. This mobilisation of technologies of abjection under the guise of drug enforcement is part of a longer story about the racialisation of sexuality and the sexualisation of race as biopolitical trajectories that naturalise and maintain settler-colonialism and its worlds. Countering their violence entails forging new solidarities among minoritarian constituencies that articulate, affirm and reactivate the non-sovereign potentials/performatives that inhere in our mutual vulnerability and relationally-constituted capacity for endurance.

Introduction

Alongside the crucial work of giving voice to the diverse lives and experiences of women and gender-diverse people who use drugs, narcofeminism has been conceived as a ‘site of feminist resistance to patriarchal orders and modes of rationality’ that is concerned with ‘wresting interpretations of drug use away from the patriarchal, masculinist discourses of criminal and security narratives and the pathologizing discourses of medicine’ (Chang, this volume). In my contribution to this special issue, I follow Chang’s lead to argue for the critical significance of feminist and queer theories for making sense of current practices of drug policing. But rather than centring the experiences of any particular subject of narcofeminism, I will draw on queer, feminist and Indigenous feminist scholarship to explore how drug policing is bound up in the production of ‘sovereign’ subjects within settler-colonial discourses of nation in Australia. By exploring how ‘the figure of the addict is mobilised as a tool of governance in [my] region’ (Dennis et al., ‘Narcofeminism and its multiples’, this volume) I hope to contribute to narcofeminist analyses and critiques of the production of ‘compounded effects of gendered injustice, drug prohibition, racism and Otherism’ through mechanisms that provide ‘little recourse to voice that injustice’ (Chang, this volume). Indeed, one of the most pernicious affordances of drug prohibition, as I will argue, is the way it licenses and arms state agencies (the police) with the force to reassert social hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race and class in a manner that bypasses the rights accorded to minority identity, by virtue of the universalising construction of drug offences.

In the first section of this article I discuss how sexual humiliation has come to operate as the most prominent feature of drug policing in New South Wales (NSW) in connection with the use of sniffer dogs for street-level drug policing. In the second section I link the production of drug detection dogs to histories of colonisation and militarism, arguing that the 2001 translocation of detection dogs from border zones to street-level drug policing in NSW transposes the national, racial and biopolitical mentalities of border logics into the interior space of the nation as a way of adjudicating the sovereign status of suspect populations. In the third section, I explore the gendered ways in which strip-searching on the basis of suspected drug possession reproduces or performs what Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) terms the ‘possessive logics’ of ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’. I situate the sniffer-dog regime as a technology of abjection that draws on sexualising, racialising and dehumanising logics to produce certain populations as abject in order to shore up settler-colonial determinations of (individual and national) sovereignty. In the final section, I reflect on the possibility of conceptualising forms of resistance that protest the kinds of forcible dispossession the drug policing regime enacts without revalorising possessive individualism. If the sniffer-dog regime re-enacts the possessive orders of patriarchal white sovereignty in ways that bypass the rights accorded to minority identity, what forms of solidarity might be called for in resistance? That sexual humiliation has emerged as the most prominent feature of drug policing in this jurisdiction underlines the critical need for narcofeminist analyses of prohibitionist logics and practices. Further work on the possibilities of non-sovereign agency might help to counter more effectively the possessive logics and performative sovereignty of these operations.

Violable subjects: Policing drug possession in New South Wales

My starting point is the notion of the sovereign individual, so central to liberal discourses of individual rights as well as the authority of nation-states, and the sense in which contemporary discourses of drug use and addiction produce the drug user as ‘virtually the opposite of the rational, autonomous individual’ prioritised in these discourses (Keane, 2003, p. 230). As Helen Keane explains, the ‘regulatory ideal of autonomy’ is frequently used to justify the use of coercive practices against drug users on the basis of their purported failure to meet the criteria of rational, autonomous persons (Keane, 2003; see also Rasmussen, 2011). In ‘The rhetoric of drugs’, Derrida demonstrates just how deeply this antagonism is lodged in liberal conceptions of the body politic when he entertains the logic of a ‘deliberately repressive’ position on drugs:

. . . ‘we recognise,’ such a one might say, ‘that this concept of drugs is an instituted norm. Its origin and its history are obscure. Such a norm does not follow analytically from any scientific concept of natural toxicity, nor, despite all our best efforts to establish it in this sense, will it ever do so. Nonetheless . . . we believe that our society, our culture, our conventions require this prohibition. Let us rigorously enforce it. We have at stake here the health, security, productivity, and the orderly functioning of these very institutions . . . [B]y prohibiting drugs we assure the integrity and responsibility of the legal subject, of the citizens, etc. There can be no law without the conscious, vigilant, and normal subject, master of her intentions and desires. (1993, p. 3, original emphasis)

This passage does a remarkable job of capturing the imperviousness of prohibitionist logic to ‘evidence-based’ debate. Despite the fact that the concept of ‘drugs’ references a range of substances that act quite differently on brains and bodies; that the classification of some substances as legal and others as illegal has more to do with historical circumstance and cultural judgements than scientific determinations of harm or danger (Musto, 1999); indeed, despite the incoherence, inconsistencies, logical fallacies and contradictions embedded in the very category of illicit drugs, the logic of prohibition is typically upheld on the basis of what is felt to be a more fundamental investment in the figure of the sovereign or autonomous subject, as ‘master of her intentions and desires’. So fundamental is this investment taken to be for the general functioning of the law in modern liberal conceptions of the body politic that it is unswayed by any reasoning – empirical or otherwise – that would reveal the idiosyncrasies and totalisations embedded in drugs as a concept (‘can one ever condemn or prohibit without also somehow confusing?’ [Derrida, 1993, p. 9]). If this helps account for the frustrations that critics of prohibition who take sustenance in the promise of ‘evidence-based’ reasoning consistently run up against, it also supplies some insight into the symbolic, performative and political utility of spectacles of drug policing. Where the orderly functioning of society is premised on the responsible self-governance of autonomous subjects, drug policing produces zones of suspicion traversed by suspects whose capacity for self-sovereignty is dramatically put in question.

In Sydney and the wider state of New South Wales, Australia, this drama has taken on distinctly sexual overtones. Or at least, sexual humiliation has emerged as the mechanism through which the duty to observe state determinations of sovereignty is promulgated. This much can be surmised from Grewcock and Sentas’s (2019) investigation of the escalating rates of strip-searching undertaken by NSW police. On the basis of the very limited data made publicly available, these criminologists make the following, alarming observations: There has been a 20-fold increase in police use of strip-searches ‘in the field’ (outside of custodial or immigration settings ) in the past decade (with over 5000 strip-searches conducted in 2018); ¹ almost half of these strip-searches are of people aged 25 or under (with some as young as 11); about a quarter of recent strip-searches are of women; a disproportionate number of strip-searches are carried out on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (no other data on the race or ethnicity of those subjected to strip-searches are collected); ² and police suspicion that a person possesses prohibited drugs accounts for over 90% of strip searches. ³ The authors conclude ‘the strip search regime is primarily being used for the enforcement of the summary offence of drug possession’ (Grewcock & Sentas, 2021, p. 197), rather than the ‘serious and urgent’ circumstances that would make use of this power warranted under NSW legislation. Meanwhile, most strip-searches yield nothing of evidential value: between 2016 and 2019 only a quarter of strip-searches undertaken on the basis of suspected drug possession resulted in criminal charges for that offence (Grewcock & Sentas, 2019, p. 29).

One reason given for the exponential increase in police strip-searches is the expanded use of drug detection dogs over the past two decades to patrol recreational venues and events, music festivals, dance parties, city streets, and the public transport network (Grewcock & Sentas, 2021; Lancaster et al., 2017; Race, 2014). This practice has been controversial since its inception, its adverse health effects well documented, with a substantial body of evidence demonstrating that it increases rather than decreases drug-related harms, provoking panic consumption, preloading and other dangers (see Malins, 2019; and see Grigg et al., 2022 for an overview). At least three deaths at Australian music festivals have been linked directly to drug dog policing. In 2019 a Coronial Inquest into the matter gathered evidence from over 50 medical and public health experts and recommended a complete overhaul of the model of policing at music festivals on this basis, including the cessation of drug dog policing entirely (Grahame, 2019). The NSW government has ignored almost all of these recommendations, while the NSW Police Commissioner doubled down in his response. As though rehearsing Derrida’s caricature of the repressive decree, he insisted ‘a little bit of fear’ aids law enforcement, warning that any weakening of police powers including strip-searches could lead to a ‘generation of kids that have no respect for authority’ (Snow, 2019).

The accuracy of dog indications for the purposes of street-level drug policing has been challenged repeatedly since its introduction, with a slew of studies finding that less than one quarter of searches instigated on the basis of dog indications typically turn up drugs, while the detection of ‘supply’ offences (the ostensible target of the legislation) through this method remains negligible (Agnew-Pauly & Hughes, 2019; Grewcock & Sentas, 2021; NSW Ombudsman, 2006). But far from embarrassing NSW police into winding down their use of drug detection dogs, as has been reported in other countries (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary [HMIC], 2016), ⁴ these failures are perversely implicated in the consolidation and institutionalisation of unlawful strip-searching in this jurisdiction. Analysing the increasing proportion of strip-searches relative to general personal searches following drug dog indications, Grewcock and Sentas surmise, ‘if a dog gives a positive indication, police will conduct a personal search, followed by a strip search if nothing is found. . . . Conversely, there have been examples of the police using the unreliability of dogs as part of the rationale for conducting a strip search when, despite no clear indication from the dog, the police still believe, reasonably or not, that a person may be in possession of illicit drugs’ (2019, pp. 29–30). By this point it becomes clear that the evidential value of such indications is immaterial; police will cite the reliability or the unreliability of drug dog indications to justify the stripping and inspection of whomever the police–dog assemblage sets in its targets. Drug detection becomes a pretext for the forcible production of violable subjects, who find themselves singled out publicly and personally exposed to the intrusive probing of sovereign authority. ⁵

A further explanation for the increasing predilection for searching and stripping members of the public on the part of NSW police is that the presence of drug dogs at recreational events leads people to conceal their drugs in bodily cavities to avoid being caught. Those who have been strip-searched in these settings report being asked to lift their breasts or genitals, bend over, spread their buttocks, squat and cough while partially or completely naked. Peta Malins reflects, ‘transporting drugs in vaginal and anal cavities . . . mediates shifts in embodied self-perception: transforming, in potentially both positive and negative ways, a person’s sense of what it is their body can do’ (2019, p. 70). This would be no less true of police officers and their perceptions of what their bodies can do without compunction. Reminiscent of the ‘devices of sexual saturation’ that Foucault depicts as part of the 19th-century surveillance of children’s sexuality, this hide-and-seek game of detection and secretion, concealment and capture draws police ever closer into the orbit of the sexual, the genital, the anal, and the vaginal – in ‘perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’, as it were (1976, p. 45). It also makes police more culpable in the public imagination, since the insinuation of state-sanctioned sexual assault and sexual violation seems to disturb the sensitivities of bourgeois liberal publics much more effectively than prior critiques of these policing strategies which emphasised the need to protect the civil liberties and embodied health of drug users. A sample of local news headlines from the last three years can be taken as indicative both of what is going on and the intensities it provokes in public discourses of liberal morality: ‘“I felt completely helpless”: Woman’s strip search revives trauma of sexual assault’; ‘“Nice and slow”: woman battles tears describing police strip-search to inquest’; ‘“Why is this happening?”: Boys told to touch genitals in festival searches’; ‘“Bend over, open up”: People strip-searched at Splendour in the Grass’; ‘“She grabbed my bra”: NSW woman says being strip-searched at 15 had a traumatic effect’; ‘NSW police strip-searched 96 children in past year, some as young as 11’; ‘Strip-search trauma similar to sexual assaults, Inquest told’– but also: ‘NSW police minister defends strip-searching of children, saying parents would be happy’. ⁶

Claire Rasmussen has discussed how drug use materialises as a threat to the autonomy, purity and integrity of societies constituted on the principle/fantasy of autonomous self-governance (Rasmussen, 2011). On this political equation, drug use spells failed (or endangered, or immature, or excessive) self-sovereignty. In a paradoxical turn, coercive power justifies itself here on the basis of protecting the autonomy of endangered or vulnerable selves (‘parents would be happy’) – the very principle that is commonly invoked to critique and challenge the use of coercive power. It would be a mistake however to suppose these searches are an uncomfortable but necessary component in a legitimate investigative apparatus, or that the charge of sexualisation pertains only to its subjective impacts. On many documented occasions, strip-searches are clearly deployed to intimidate, punish, ridicule and humiliate those they target in gratuitous displays of police authority and power. In a pattern that is far from uncommon (and not the worst account in this corpus), a woman describes being strip-searched at a Sydney music festival in 2017:

[She] was walking into one of the events with her ticket in her hand when a police officer tapped her shoulder, telling her she had been indicated by a sniffer dog. ‘They made me walk through the crowd and everyone was staring at me,’ . . . The woman was taken to a female officer who said, ‘Tell me where the drugs are . . . the dogs are never wrong, so tell me where the drugs are’. ‘I was like “I don’t have any drugs”,’ ‘She was like, “why do you look so nervous, what are you hiding?” I said, “Nothing, I’ve never been in a situation like this before”.’ ‘I had to take my top off and my bra, and I covered my boobs and she told me to put my hands up, and she told me to tell her where the drugs were. She said, “If you don’t tell me where the drugs are I’m going to make this nice and slow”. She made me take my shorts off, and my underwear, and she made me squat and cough, and squat and cough, and squat and cough, and I had to turn around and squat and cough.’ (Thompson, 2019, original emphasis).

Here, sexual vulnerability functions as the source of humiliation in a process in which police simultaneously eroticise their own coercive licence.

Discussing the obstinacy of police attachments to this practice in the face of extensive public criticism, Grewcock and Sentas argue, ‘the desired crime-deterrent effect of fear (the extra-judicial punishment) becomes the institutionally endorsed reason for the exercise of power’ (2021, p. 196). But this is a generous analysis. The police are scarcely concerned with drug crime or its deterrence, as I shall argue; the point of these operations is their brutal and prolific display of sovereign decisionality and sexual power (biopower) through the deliberate humiliation of those it produces as suspects. As things stand, any resident or visitor to the state of New South Wales who wishes to catch a train, get a tattoo, attend a music festival, dance party, nightclub or drinking premises – or even walk down a street in some precincts – should prepare themselves for the real possibility of encountering a drug dog operation in which they may be stopped and searched by police without a warrant. If the police dog makes an indication (and recalling their failure rate, this remains a possibility whether or not one is carrying drugs) and nothing is found in the course of a pat-down search, there is a distinct possibility that police will order a strip-search and ask you to proceed to a secluded area (if such is made available) for this purpose. If guided by the Standard Operating Procedure, the officer will likely be using a Body Worn Camera to film this search – something that has alarmed and exacerbated the humiliation of many of those subjected to this procedure, but is deemed necessary for the purposes of police oversight and accountability. This footage is routinely destroyed by police six months after the search takes place (Grewcock & Sentas, 2019). Indeed, legal rights advocates who have sought to access such footage report that police are generally extremely reluctant to relinquish this material for bona fide purposes (McGowan, 2019a) – a circumstance that substantially diminishes its evidentiary value and leaves lingering questions about what purpose the standard practice of filming the enforced stripping of members of the public is actually fit for. ⁷

Dogs of invasion

The use of dogs as part of military and security operations has a long history that stretches back to antiquity. The Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Persians and Roman Empire deployed attack dogs as part of armoured assaults against their enemies and used them as sentries. But the weaponisation of dogs’ scenting abilities for the purposes of war and law enforcement is a modern development (Braverman, 2013). Benjamin Franklin reportedly recommended the use of dogs by the US Army for man-tracking purposes, to search for marauders who were killing colonists and burning settlements near Boston (Braverman, 2013, p. 134). While the use of dog tracking as part of criminal investigations was once considered repugnant within the metropolises of Victorian Britain, the practice was enthusiastically adopted in colonial South Africa in the early 20th century, where Dobermans were used in racialised formations to investigate livestock theft and elicit confessions from suspects. ‘[T]he dogs had not even been trained to track Europeans’ (Blum, 2017, p. 632). ‘As a result, dogs came to symbolize European colonialism itself, in both African struggles for independence and postcolonial literature’ (p. 635), while for the colonists, ‘dog breeding and training to track – like colonialism itself – symbolized Britons’ ability to tame, master and harness nature’ (p. 638). The effectiveness of tracking dogs for securing the terrain of colonial projects in South Africa put them in high demand throughout the British Empire. ‘Wishing to establish their own canine units, between 1918 and 1939 police forces in Southern Rhodesia, Kenya, Palestine, India, Burma, New Zealand and Australia requested that the South Africa Police provide them with dogs and handlers’ (Blum, 2017, p. 642). But few of these police forces were able to maintain their own dog units at this time, ⁸ due to the prohibitive costs and the demanding dog/handler training regime pioneered in South Africa, which was also notable for admitting only white members of colonial police forces.

The first organised efforts to develop dogs as detection agents within Europe took place in Nazi Germany where dogs were used to track British servicemen who had parachuted into Germany to collect intelligence – a method soon adopted by the British Army to locate Japanese Army personnel hiding out in the Pacific islands. Most American police dogs today are descendants of the border patrol dogs used in Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War (Braverman, 2013). From the 1950s, organised efforts to breed and train dogs to detect illegal substances were launched in the UK, USA and Australia, primarily to detect contraband, narcotics and explosives as part of customs and military operations and criminal investigations. While the olfactory capacities of dogs have since been harnessed in many different contexts to detect a wide range of items – from cadavers to missing persons, mould to bedbugs, forensic evidence for criminal investigations, traces of invasive and endangered species, and even medical conditions such as cancer and Covid-19 – their systematic use on the part of Australian authorities to detect contraband by screening people moving through public spaces was largely confined to quarantine, customs and border control spaces until 2001 (Lancaster at al., 2017). This tallies with the historical and cultural production of drugs as insidious foreign agents that threaten the integrity of national borders (Derrida, 1993; Musto, 1999; Rasmussen, 2011), where borders function as liminal spaces whose porosity provokes bureaucratic performances of sovereignty and ‘protective’ (but frequently humiliating) adjudications of qualified identity (Parsley, 2003; Villegas, 2015). In this respect, the 2001 translocation of detection dog operations from border zones to street-level drug policing can be thought to transpose the national, racial and biopolitical mentalities animating border logics into the interior space of the nation as a way of testing and disqualifying claims on moral citizenship (Race, 2009). Drug dog operations may play a part in satisfying the perpetual need of Australian states to produce and expose ‘foreigners within’ that Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2004) have identified as an onto-pathological feature of white Australian subjectivity that stems in turn from its failure to recognise the ongoing violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples that is a constitutive feature of the Australian settler-colonial nation-state’s unwarranted claims on sovereignty.

In the USA, the question of whether dog sniffs are commensurable with Fourth Amendment privacy protections of persons and homes from unreasonable searches has been shown to hinge on whether police dogs’ olfactory capabilities are construed as natural or technological occurrences (Braverman, 2013). For the affirmative, the court in Fitzgerald v. Maryland (2004) insisted a dog is not a technology, ‘he or she is a dog. A dog is commonly known as man’s best friend. Across America, people consider dogs as members of their family’ (cited in Braverman, 2013, p. 112). By contrast, other courts have held that the use of a police dog is not a mere improvement on human senses but ‘a significant enhancement accomplished by a different, and far superior, sensory instrument’ (Braverman, 2013, p. 84). ⁹ For her part, Braverman queries the nature/culture binary that underwrites these determinations and situates police detection dogs as biotechnological creatures following Haraway’s work which explores the co-evolutionary and co-productive relations among humans and companion species and conceptualises ‘dogs as biotechnologies, workers, and agents of technoscientific knowledge production in the regime of lively capital’ (Haraway, 2008, p. 56; Braverman, 2013). The dual capacity of detection dogs to signify at once as familiar members of patriotic, friendly, normative, familial domestic scenes and as weaponised instruments in coordinated, militarised, territorialising efforts to protect and secure the colonial settler-nation, patrol its borders, sniff out biohazards and detect the passage of foreign contaminants is key to understanding their routinised deployment as a naturalised feature of the Australian national-symbolic order. Drug detection dogs emerge as key operatives in the exercise of what I have termed ‘exemplary power’ – a spectacular game of detection and exposure that seeks to ‘mark the bounds of legitimate consumer citizenship’ (Race, 2009, pp. 70–71).

To understand the ways in which these exercises enact the racialised, gendered and sexual order of ‘postcolonising’ moral citizenship it is necessary to consider the timing and spatiality of their tactical deployment and configuration. ¹⁰ The Drug Detection Dog Deployment Standard Operational Procedure issued by NSW Police (2016) states that ‘problem identification’ is generally ‘the catalyst for planning and execution of a drug dog operation’ (p. 6). ‘Problem identification’ relies on Local Area Command-approved ‘intelligence’ about ‘drug supply, distribution, possession or administration, and relates to areas such as a single street, a length of roadway between towns or a geographical area (such as CBD or mall) defined by specific streets and/or landmarks’ (2016, p. 6). Problem identification most often designates events such as music festivals and dance parties or specifically populated precincts or venues. The operating procedures stipulate that ‘each drug detection handler and dog be accompanied by a minimum of six (6) police officers,’ while ‘for Dance Party Operations a minimum of ten (10) Police Officers should be provided’ (2016, p. 11). Thus configured, these operations typically feature a highly conspicuous troop of uniformed police flanking the police dog and its handler. Meanwhile if ‘problem identification’ depends on local police ‘intelligence’ to demarcate a zone of suspicious activity, the activities of detection that take place within this zone are further narrowed by cues from the police dog handler. Far from a ‘technical or mechanical process that occurs without human interference . . . good detection work requires an intimate relationship between the dog and its handler, including cross-species interpretative skills’ (Braverman, 2013, p. 154). A review of dog and handler teamwork conducted by a US Court of Military Review summarises this relation as follows:

Clearly, the dog and handler function as an integral team. The dog is the sensor, and the handler is the trainer and interpreter. The handler’s performance in both roles is inseparably intertwined with the dog’s overall reliability rate. And since the net result is the product of the interaction between two living beings, both roles of the handler are highly subjective. (cited in Braverman, 2013, p. 153)

In other words, this production of zones and persons of suspicion is a coordinated outcome of the selective decisions of police ‘intelligence’, handler activity and dog responsiveness.

These details are directly implicated in the performative symbolism of drug dog operations and, in particular, their use to cast aspersions and demarcate zones of noncompliance with the demands of sovereign authority. While the threat of personal subjection to degrading, sexualised humiliation is an ever-present potential that hovers around these operations, the mere presence of a troop of uniformed police with a drug detection dog in tow makes a powerful statement about the supposed suspiciousness of those in its vicinity and their susceptibility to the heightened forensic and olfactory powers the sovereign state is prepared to wield to sniff out ‘criminals’ and insinuate non-sovereign conduct and embodiment. The medium of smell is generally imbricated, of course, in racialised and colonial histories of the politics of disgust. As Andreas Krebs writes in the Canadian context, ‘the politics of recognition . . . requires that in order to be recognised, cultural groups “must not smell”’ (2010, p. 99).

This process can be seen as the end result of an institutional response to disgust, to the threat of the abject, which began with dispossession of lands, and continued through creation of reserves far from urban centres, and resulted in the logic that fuelled the internment of Aboriginal children in residential schools: assimilation into the dominant culture . . . and abandonment of their ways of living which so marked them as revolting in the view of their colonizers. (Krebs, 2010, pp. 99–100)

Interestingly, affect psychologist Silvan Tomkins links smell with the feeling of contempt when he coins the uniquely named affect ‘dissmell’ and locates it as a common precursor to disgust. As Frank and Wilson (2020) discuss:

[C]ontempt is the affect of hierarchisation: ‘contempt strengthens the boundaries and barriers between individuals and groups and is the instrument par excellence for the preservation of hierarchical, caste and class relationships’ . . . [C]ontempt is the definitive, sneering act of a self that has cut its ties to excitement and enjoyment. (Frank & Wilson, 2020, p. 67, citing Tomkins).

These intertexts help to appreciate the obnoxious symbolics and deliberate labour of insinuation that likely motivated the unexpected appearance of a drug dog operation at the WugulOra morning ceremony at Barangaroo Reserve on the Sydney Harbour Foreshore on 26 January 2022 (Sniff Off, 2022). This date marks the declaration of Australia as a British Colony in 1788 and is officially known as Australia Day, though this name is increasingly contested and rejected and – since sovereignty was never ceded – the day is better known as Invasion Day (Nicholson, 2019). Held at dawn on this date, the WugulOra ceremony ‘celebrates the Gadigal people of the Eora nation through music, dance, language, story-telling and ceremony’. It is a solemn event that mourns the brutal and ongoing dispossession of people, land and culture perpetrated by European settlers throughout the history of settler-colonialism in Australia. Given the symbolism of this occasion and the intervention it makes into hegemonic narratives of Australian nationalism, we can be sure that whatever police ‘intelligence’ might have informed this operation had less to do with drugs and was more likely informed by belligerent desires to assert and reinstate settler-colonial determinations of (non)sovereignty.

‘This room is so white!’: Technologies of abjection

Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) draws attention to ‘the great deal of work’ it takes to maintain Australia, Canada, the United States, Hawai’i and New Zealand as white possessions. ‘The regulatory mechanisms of these nation-states are extremely busy reaffirming and reproducing this possessiveness through a process of perpetual Indigenous dispossession, ranging from the refusal of Indigenous sovereignty to overregulated piecemeal concessions’ (2015, p. xi). Moreton-Robinson conceptualises ‘patriarchal white sovereignty’ as a regime of power that derives from the illegal act of dispossession and relies on reiterated performative acts that reproduce a sense of the nation as a white possession and equip white heteromasculine subjects with a sense of belonging, ownership and entitlement (2015, p. 35). These performative acts are ‘displayed in bodily form as the police, the army and the judiciary’ (2015, p. xx) but ‘also evident in everyday cultural practices and spaces’ (p. 35). Moreton-Robinson draws vital attention to the active, ongoing process of Indigenous dispossession that siphons articulations of national belonging through the ‘white possessive logics’ of the colonising relationship. ¹¹

The relevance of Moreton-Robinson’s and other decolonial feminist scholarship for understanding the performative deployment of drug policing in contemporary Australia is manifestly evident in the disproportionate subjection of Indigenous Australians to police strip-searching. In Dubbo, a regional centre of NSW, 66% of strip searches over 2019–2020 were reportedly performed on Indigenous Australians, who are estimated to comprise 20% of this city’s population (McGowan, 2020). As Andrea Smith has demonstrated, sexual violence and intimidation is one of the basic mechanisms through which ‘a colonising group attempts to render a colonized peoples inherently rapable, their lands inherently invadable, and their resources inherently extractable’ (Smith, 2010, p. 61). The anxiety stemming from the denial of Indigenous sovereignty extends beyond the egregious targeting of Indigenous Australians and plays out in other ways as well (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 148). Indeed, the rhetoric of drugs enables and requires the development of a more expansive, purportedly impartial state pedagogy about the disciplinary conditions and prerequisites of national belonging and sovereign propriety. ‘Because dominant white Australia is unwilling to recognise its occupier status it has had to invoke a suitable “other” to play the role of legitimating its authority and to alleviate the anxiety that the occupation of stolen land produces for an ontologically disturbed subjectivity’, Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos have argued (2004, p. 33). In this context, control over national territorial borders is never enough:

The white Australian onto-pathology also calls for the construction of the perpetual foreigner-within. The foreigner who is positioned to give recognition must also remain distinguishable from the dominant white Australian. This is because the white anxiety that derives from the criminality harboured in the national imaginary needs the migrant to remain forever dependent on the dominant white Australians who grant us permission to stay on. (Nicolacopoulos & Vassilacopoulos, 2004, p. 46)

This leads to the location of certain groups as ‘white-non-white and as white-but-not-white enough’ (2004, p. 34), making national belonging dependent on the possession and accumulation of a kind of racial-national capital that is ambiguously distributed, extended, leveraged and withheld in exemplary spectacles of sovereign (dis)qualification (see also Race, 2004).

One of the most astute and disarming analyses of how these racialising logics intersect with gendered and sexual hierarchies at the scene of drug policing occurs in the film Head On (1998, dir. Kokkinos), which depicts a weekend in the life of Ari, a young queer Greek-Australian man, as he tussles with questions of sex, identity, kinship, desire and belonging. The scene takes place when Ari and his transgender friend Toula are hauled into a police station when they are caught smoking a joint in a taxi on their way to Three Faces, a queer nightclub in Melbourne. Toula and Ari quickly neck the ecstasy pills that Toula was saving in her handbag for the nightclub, but the two soon find themselves in a police cell awaiting interrogation. Reeling from the effects of the ecstasy, they giggle among themselves. ‘Fuck, this room is white!’, bursts Ari.

When the first cop – a nervous junior officer – enters the room, Toula attempts to strike up a conversation, ‘Hey, you’re Greek, aren’t you?’ But the mood takes a distinctively violent turn when the head cop, a menacing Anglo-Australian, enters the cell. When he queries Toula’s relationship with Ari, she invokes the critical potential and affective solidarity of bonds forged through queer kinship and ethnic affiliation in a brave diva flourish – ‘We’re family, sugar!’ But this line of flight is immediately shut down by the head cop: ‘Don’t sugar me, cunt. I don’t give a fuck what you are.’ The scene that ensues expertly depicts how sexual and gendered humiliation is mobilised by sovereign power to leverage hierarchies of racial-national capital and make normatively precarious citizens do its bidding. ‘I take it you’re Toula’, the head cop says to her, then turns to his deputy, taunting him, ‘hey, isn’t that your wife’s name?’ The head cop goes on to ask Toula if she was ‘working tonight’. In this moment, the deputy officer’s precarious status is performatively, intimately and ethnically implicated in the sexually abject figure of the racialised transgender sex worker. Soon enough, on a nod from his senior, the deputy cop orders the two to strip. When they get to their underwear, Toula bursts into Greek, imploring the deputy not to persist. ‘You’d better help her along’, the head cop says to his subordinate, then with a wry smirk adds, ‘seeing as she knows you’. The abject, racialised intimacy the head cop repeatedly insinuates between these ‘foreigners within’ proves too much for the deputy cop, but also for Ari, who now starts urging Toula to comply. In a sequence of excruciating violence, the deputy cop strips Toula of her underwear and, when she attempts to resist, starts bashing her. He kicks her repeatedly as she falls to the ground, screaming at her in a stream of Greek and English invectives: ‘[They should have drowned you at birth!!!] You fucking whore!! Piece of shit!! Poutàna!!! Poutàna!!! Look at you! You’re a disgrace!! Pousti!! [faggot] Piece of shit!! [etc.]’. Any sign Ari gives of wanting to resist this brutal escalation is frozen into compliance by a sharp look from the head cop, who calls the shots from a safe but instrumental distance.

The sharply observed dynamic developed in this confronting scene allows us to think with more precision about the particular role that gendered and sexual humiliation plays in the exemplary scenes of violable sovereignty and national belonging the settler-colonial state is so keen to maintain under the auspices of drug enforcement. On Judith Butler’s (1993) argument, gendered subjects are created through the continuous citation and repudiation of a ‘constitutive outside’ inhabited by unacceptably sexed and gendered selves, abject beings. Sovereign identities are ‘constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, “inside” the subject as its own founding repudiation’ (1993, p. 3). The need to repudiate the ‘threatening spectre’ of failed, unrecognisable gender – ‘that site of dreaded identification’ – launches a continually repeated, tendentially violent, interactive and iterative process – upon which the normative identity and acceptability of the subject hinges (Butler, 1993, p. 3). Though framed by the law as technologies of detection, these operations are better conceptualised as technologies of abjection, in which the threat of gendered and sexualised abjection looms large and is menacingly deployed to provoke compliance with state determinations of sovereignty. These are first and foremost postcolonising, carceral strategies whose compulsive reiteration stems from white Australian anxiety about its own constitutively uncertain claims on sovereignty. They distribute power according to a ‘white possessive logic’ whose coordinates are at once gendered and racialised, ‘sovereign’ and biopoliticising. Their aggressive-defensive performance of sovereignty is in constant need of a kind of recognition that might relieve this anxiety and legitimate its authority, thus they doggedly sniff out, construct and test ‘foreigners within’.

Though produced and released a couple of years before the emergence of the NSW drug dog regime, Head On (1998) provides remarkable insights into how the patriarchal white sovereignty that dominates the Australian national imaginary leverages drug policing to cast a hierarchical net of national value that entails the sexualisation of race and the racialisation of sexuality, in which gendered policing and shaming are key. When asked about her construction of this scene – which does not appear in the novel Loaded (Tsiolkas, 1995), the book on which the film is based – the film’s director, Anna Kokkinos, mentions the 1994 police raid of Tasty, a queer nightclub in Melbourne, as one of her sources of inspiration (Krach, 1999). ¹² On this night, 40 Victorian police officers raided this nightclub frequented by gay men, lesbians, transgender people and their friends, detaining and strip-searching 463 patrons and staff. In subsequent investigations of this incident, those detained and strip-searched testified ‘the raid was humiliating, abusive, homophobic, threatening, frightening and that they were “treated like scum” . . . yelled [at], pushed and shoved . . . called “faggot” by a number of officers’ (Russell, 2015, p. 123). While the raid became the subject of a successful class action and was widely denounced as a symbol of police violence against LGBTIQ lives in Victoria, the official investigation conducted by Victoria’s Deputy Ombudsman found the ‘raid was discriminatory but was not, in so far as can be ascertained, based on prejudice against homosexuals’ (cited in Russell, 2015, p. 124; see Groves, 1995). The pretextual protections that the rhetoric of drug enforcement affords police against allegations of prejudice became apparent in this discourse, providing something of a legalistic template that NSW police would go on to take up and make fulsome use of in the intervening decades, as has been evident in the regular staging of drug dog operations at hallmark gay events such as the annual Sydney Mardi Gras party and gay/queer nightlife precincts in Sydney (Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby et al., 2013; Race, 2014, 2018). Indeed, strip-searching bears traces of (and reconfigures) a tactic lodged deep within the historical arsenal of NSW policing: the ‘underwear inspections’ the late Carmen Rupe, a transgender Māori sex worker and transpacific gay diva, remembers being used in 1950s/1960s Sydney to police gender non-conformity and harass drag queens, cross-dressers and transgender people (Rupe & Schembri, 2013).

While there is plenty of evidence that non-queer identified music festivals and dance events are now routinely subject to police drug dog operations in NSW – indeed these can be considered the ‘mainstay’ of the escalating numbers of strip-searches conducted in this state – the racialising, dehumanising and sexualising logics embedded in their pedagogy of self-sovereignty are readily apparent in the discourse on music festivals propagated by the right-wing media apparatus. In 2019, when the NSW Coronial Inquest into Music Festival Deaths was generating unprecedented public criticism of the policing of music festivals, an article appeared in The Australian entitled ‘Dancing with Death’ (Cornwall, 2019). The article selectively uses witness statements provided to the Inquest to depict the behaviour of festival-goers who tragically lost their lives at these events as violent, animalistic, irrational and out of control. But rather than acknowledging the considerable evidence provided to the Inquest that the heavy-handed policing of these events was materially implicated in this behaviour, provoking practices such as panicked over-consumption and giving rise to affective climates of hostility, fear and antagonism between festival-goers, security and police, the article attributes this behaviour to the physiological effects of MDMA itself and the delinquency of festival-going youth (Cornwall, 2019; cf. McGowan, 2019b; see also Grahame, 2019; Malins, 2019; Race, 2014). One of the deceased, Callum Brosnan, is described as experiencing a ‘spiral into confusion, then agony and final collapse . . . his eyes rolling back and flickering . . . he was having violent seizures and frothing at the mouth’. Alexandra Ross-King is described as ‘behaving in a way that was aggressive, really agitated’; her friend hears her ‘screaming, she was kicking out with her legs and she was really distressed’. Nathan Tran is described as being ‘off his face, he was chewing, his eyes were rolling back in his head and he was swinging his arms a lot’; he was ‘thrashing about so aggressively . . . [he] spat on one security guard who tried to give him a bottle of water, then broke free before stumbling on a group of patrons’. Young people’s behaviour while using MDMA is thus produced as unpredictable, irrational, animalistic and violent – harmful not only to the individual drug user, but presenting dangers to other festival-goers, security personnel, police and the broader community. Nathan is ‘wrestled . . . into a crucifix position’ with a security guard ‘sitting on his buttocks’. Next a police officer ‘grabbed him in a reverse headlock’. The article quotes a senior constable’s defence of the police handling of this incident, saying ‘handcuffing Nathan had been for his own “welfare” and the need to maintain public safety’. The crowd is described as becoming ‘angry and tense’ at this sequence of events, but the article turns to cite a security guard’s view that his generation ‘has an issue with authority in general’, using the discourse of socially deviant youth to delegitimise this response (Cornwall, 2019).

Here we can see how the discourse of sovereignty mobilised in the rhetoric of drugs produces the ‘threatening spectres’ it desires. Like the senior policeman in Head On (1998), it deploys technologies of abjection to provoke affective dynamics whose violent intensities and reactionary barbarity it just steps back from and washes its hands of. As Derrida speculated, ‘there can be no law without the conscious, vigilant, and normal subject, master of her intentions and desires’ (1993, p. 3); but perhaps we can rewrite him here. By prohibiting drugs we assure the production of an uncivilised other, bare life, a domain of abject beings whose repudiation we rely on to legitimise our authority, our criminal order, our domain of operation, our sovereign violence.

Non-sovereign agency

I came to this essay wanting to understand how and why sexual humiliation and sexual violation have become such prominent mechanisms of drug policing in New South Wales. While the work of Giorgio Agamben (1998) would be an obvious place to turn to situate the forcible stripping of subjects as an instance of sovereign exception – the ‘inclusive exclusion’ that founds the law – like other critics I became frustrated with his blurring of political, historical and material-semiotic distinctions that might help explain why particular figures of bare life are produced – simultaneously invested and divested of biopolitical significance – in particular times and places (Guenther, 2012; Mills, 2004; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Moreover, while critically informative, Agamben’s work does not shed light on why sexual humiliation in particular might emerge as the mode of exception in such instances. Feminist, queer, decolonial and anti-racist scholarship on dispossession provides the conceptual and critical-historical frameworks necessary to situate these operations as technologies of abjection, performative displays in which the rhetoric of drugs is used to justify the forcible production of violable subjects and monopolise the terms of sovereign embodiment.

Lauren Berlant (2011) has criticised prevailing theories of sovereign power for encouraging dramatic, heroic, decisional, spectacular accounts of political agency. This informs Berlant’s efforts to flesh out forms of agency and biopoliticised experience that ‘do not occupy time, decision, or consequentiality in anything like the sovereign registers of autonomous self-assertion’ (2011, p. 98). Within the field of critical drug studies itself, there has been a great deal of work that draws on feminist and other new materialisms, assemblage theory, posthumanism, etc. to replace both the human subject and determinist pharmacology as privileged loci of agency and draw attention to how processes of human and nonhuman relationality, emergent causality and sociomaterial arrangements participate in the making of drug effects (see Dennis, 2019; Duff, 2011; Fraser et al., 2014; Malins, 2004; Race, 2014). This work provides indispensable critical, conceptual and methodological tools for tracing the materialisation of drug events but is less forthcoming about the cultural registers, the genres of experience, the gestural forms through which these relational dynamics are grasped by (historically situated) human subjects. Berlant’s (2011) efforts to characterise agency in terms that depart from sovereign heroics entails a detailed engagement with the historical, practical and affective processes involved in the political administration of bodies. Their work on ‘lateral agency’ gives a kind of texture to forms of ordinary experience that might provide a useful model for future work in critical drug studies and narcofeminism. But while Berlant frames sovereignty as a ‘fantasy that sustains liberty’s normative political idiom’, it is difficult to dispense with the concept entirely. As they concede, ‘even legal and normative ghosts have precedential power, after all’ (p. 98).

This point is obviously relevant for the critical analysis I have developed here, where the precedential power of the concept of sovereignty looms poignantly, both in performative acts of state violence and decolonial (Indigenous) critiques of them. To be sure, Indigenous sovereignty ‘invokes different sets of relations, belonging, and ownership that are grounded in a different epistemology from that which underpins the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 92). Grounded in custodianship and relationship with land, it prioritises a restored Aboriginal responsibility for this relationship that is very different from the territorial conceptions of sovereignty enacted by white possessive logics (Monaghan, 2015, p. 204). In this sense, it works ‘with and against’ conventional notions of sovereignty.

The process of working ‘with and against’ sovereignty might also be said to characterise queer and gender-diverse discourses of drug use, albeit in a very different way. In previous empirical work on the significance of drug use within queer, gay and gender-diverse practices of self-formation and world-building, we could not help but notice how often discourses of ‘disinhibition’ were invoked by our research participants to explain these relations (Race et al., 2022). The concept of disinhibition can be traced to 19th-century efforts to consolidate neurophysiology as a science, part of efforts to understand how orderly conduct could be achieved at the level of bodies. Drawing on reified concepts of the will, bound up with Victorian beliefs about morality of character and self-control, the fields of psychology, medicine and physiology came to conceive inhibition as a regulatory mechanism that enacts a hierarchical relation between the brain (the mind) and the body’s nervous system and physiological functioning (Smith, 1992) The notions of responsibility, integrity, self-control, the will, etc. embedded in this concept are precisely the qualities Derrida references when he says the law requires a ‘normal subject, master of her intentions and desires’ (1993, p.3). They are idealised properties of the sovereign, autonomous, responsible subject on which the modern liberal social contract is thought to rely (Rasmussen, 2011), and which drug use is said to compromise (Derrida, 1993; Keane, 2003; Sedgwick, 1993; Valverde, 1998).

While the queer recitation of this discourse to explain the generative pleasures of drug use is not without its problems (insofar as it reinstalls the sovereign subject, mind/body dualism and so on), it was clear that disinhibition was referencing something that was felt to be of particular significance for our research participants. As Nico, a 40-year-old non-binary participant recounted, ‘one of my girlfriends, when we first started being intimate . . . there was so much shame, like internalised queer-phobia around my feelings of desire for her’. On Nico’s account, this made sex a ‘disconnected’, overthinking, unenjoyable experience for them both. ‘But when I was on drugs, I could just be in my body and experience it as the sensual, pleasurable experience that it was. Like, without having any of those stories in my head about who we supposedly were and what we were doing, it just felt good’ (Race et al., 2022, my italics).

Nico’s reference here to norms of gender intelligibility (‘who we supposedly were’) enables an understanding of disinhibition as a way of naming a difficult but existentially vital negotiation with those norms. As Judith Butler puts it:

Indeed, if my options are loathsome . . . it follows that my sense of survival depends on escaping the clutch of those norms by which recognition is conferred. . . . Indeed, the capacity to develop a critical relation to these norms presupposes a distance from them, an ability to suspend or defer the need for them, even as there is a desire for norms that might let one live. The critical relation depends on a capacity, invariably collective, to articulate an alternative, minority version of sustaining norms or ideals that enable me to act. (2004, p. 3, emphasis added)

For Nico and many other of our research participants, the discourse of disinhibition seemed to provide a (normatively intelligible) state of exception that allowed them to suspend or defer the cognitive execution of norms of gender intelligibility in processes commonly undertaken with others (queer partying) that have given rise to new self-understandings and collectively articulated worlds (see Race, 2018; Race et al., 2022; Florêncio, this volume).

If the use of drugs to enact this suspension of gender norms brings queer, gender-diverse and other drug users into inordinate proximity with liminal domains of unintelligibility, ‘uninhabitable zones’, these practices might nonetheless be recognised as attempted instantiations of the critical relation that Butler outlines in this passage, invested with transformative desire (2004, p. 3). To produce the embodied terrain of these efforts as necessarily abject, as the policing technologies I have discussed in this essay do, can then be recognised for what it is: a political decision and political act that is anxious to preclude whatever transformations such terrains are felt to make possible. By associating drug use with degrading scenes of sexual and social abjection, and producing this association as necessary and inevitable, as innumerable antidrug campaigns set out to do (Race, 2004; Rasmussen, 2011), power wants to shut down and rule out in advance the critical potential and material transformations of gender norms and other norms of recognition that are felt to make lives more livable; that enable us to act.

Of course, not all disinhibitions are free from danger, nor critically promising in this way. As well as bearing the potential to generate world-expanding realisations and indescribable pleasures, drug and alcohol use is too often implicated in unpredicted dynamics, casualties and accidents whose material corollaries and affective impacts unfold in ways that can only remind us of our corporeal vulnerability and dependence on others, human and nonhuman relations. Nor is their productivity neatly extricable from wider structures of domination and legacies of oppression. The gendered and sexual hegemonies that pattern the direction of alcohol-related violence are an obvious case in point (Moore et al., 2022). Kyla Wazana Tompkins has unearthed the relation between ‘white disinhibition’ and the production of black criminality in relation to alcohol, cocaine, morphine and opium in the USA, showing how the pleasures of ‘disinhibited intoxication’ are bound up in ‘racial fantasies and formations’ (2017, p. 73), as well as present-day enactments of a genre she calls ‘white sovereign entrepreneurial terror’ (see also Cooper, 2015; Stuelke, 2022). Indeed, while the rhetoric of drugs is involved in criminalising logics that play out according to slightly different racial, gendered and sexual contours in Australia to those that characterise the US war on drugs, ‘white sovereign entrepreneurial terror’ is not a bad descriptor for the uninhibited use of police powers we see in NSW today (see also Rafael, 2019; Saldanha, 2013).

For Athena Athansiou, ‘being dispossessed refers to processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers that define cultural intelligibility and that regulate the distribution of vulnerability’ (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 2). This definition chimes neatly with the analysis of drug policing I have developed in this essay, which is inspired by the narcofeminist commitment to understanding the gendered, racial and intersectional dimensions of punitive drug policies. Over the course of their conversation, Butler and Athanasiou search together for ways of thinking dispossession outside of the logic of possession; thus Butler asks, ‘whether we can find ethical and political ways of objecting to forcible and coercive dispossession that do not depend upon a valorization of possessive individualism?’ (p. 7). The answer they envision consists in a ‘plural performativity’ that cuts across legible identities to assemble new collectivities that foreground the relationality of bodies in the process of protesting unjust forms of violation. With its focus on the intersectional production of harms through prohibitionist logics, a narcofeminist perspective has much to contribute here. In my own context, popular critiques of drug policing too often fall down on identarian claims of discrimination and prejudicial targeting. In this essay, I have tried to articulate a broader basis for resistance, for ‘being affected by the corporeal dynamic of relatedness, mutual vulnerability, and endurance’ (p. 177).