On the Affective Governmentality of Trafficking: The Problem of the Recalcitrant

State institutions address the citizens who apply for funds or other form of help by classifying them as deserving or undeserving applicants. These classifying processes occur in face-to-face interactions where unwritten norms concerning the appropriate (affective) behaviour of a deserving applicant will contribute to shaping the success of the application (Dubois 2010, Penz / Sauer 2016). What happens though when the subject of governance is not an applicant at all, as is often the case with victims of trafficking, but a public position to which the subjects are asked to submit? These victims find themselves (according to our research on the German situation) on the one hand confronted with expectations of behaving like the “ideal type” victim (Christie, 1986) of whom a certain emotive repertoire is expected, and on the other, they run the danger of being archetypical “abject subjects” (Tyler 2010) against whom “public anxieties and hostilities are channelled”. This presentation will show the emotional expectations and reactions of the state agencies against the non-compliant, thus deviant, victim of trafficking in a series of institutional interactions.