This paper offers a theorization of how the state touches. Through an analysis of the extensive 2011 protests over Wisconsin Senate Bill 11, we interrogate the relatively non-violent interactions between police and protesters during the 17-day occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol building. On display there were diverse police deployments of "soft" force and haptic touching, technologies that enabled officers to subtly affect the movements and relations of protester crowds without resorting to familiar coercion-and consent-based politics. We offer a pair of concepts, cathexis and l'esprit de l'escalier, to diagram how statist touches were mobilized to catch individuals unawares and momentarily co-opt their bodily affects. These modes of control suggest much greater savvy regarding touch, force, and affect than is often granted in representations of the state apparatus. In light of this, we close with a reflection on the changing tactical grounds for struggle.

The collective ‘Las Patronas’ is one of Mexico’s most famous and most decorated activist groups. For the past 20 years, they have given food, water, and clothing to migrants on moving freight trains, without reciprocation. This article considers the centrality of the kitchen and of kitchenspace to the group’s project, especially as part of their strategy for becoming and remaining ‘public’. In Mexico, ‘the kitchen’ may be two different kitchens and two types of kitchenspace, one for the everyday, the other for the singular and special. The ceremonial cocina de humo figures prominently in the Patronas’ day-to-day lives as well as media representations. It legitimates their public place and enacts a ritual importance to their provisioning. In tracing the importance of kitchenspace, how the Patronas’ project becomes translated in media accounts such as the documentary De Nadie and the television show Tiempo de Héroes, and how the Patronas perform maternal domesticity to take up a form of authority, this article argues that the Patronas spatially perform publicness and domesticity non-exclusively. The Patronas’ strategy produces a spatially expansive, rather than exclusive, domesticity, and in so doing, the group explodes the domestic–public binary.

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Michel Foucault's Punitive Society lectures make clear that, for him, punishment presents a critical problem. On the one hand, Foucault struggles to develop a conceptual vocabulary adequate to punishment, and particularly to the prison-form as a penal development. On the other hand, the Punitive Society lectures clearly indicate the stakes of punishment. How, Foucault asks, might punishment focalize relations of power? How might it serve as a field of struggle? What does a punitive technology of power look like, if it exists? Indeed, across numerous works from the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault traces the varying place of penalties within penal and punitive tactics, showing how punishment reciprocates historical relations of power and problems of power. Yet it remains necessary to develop Foucault's account of punishment, which is never formalized. In this paper, I develop punishment as a polyvalent technology. Foucauldian punishment may be an analytic, a technology, and-in the allegorical "punitive city" from Discipline and Punish-a diagram of power. I argue that Foucauldian punitive power seizes the body in the name of an authority or a reified power to subordinate individuals to that authority, and with an objective to correct the individual's relation to a multiplicity. It operates "above," at the level of, and in "fragments" of embodied individuals. Further, with Foucault's account of the "punitive city," we find a theoretical model in which punishment becomes the ordering force of the social, and therein a diagram of punitive power exerted in extensive form across the social field.

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