1This Thematic Section builds on the contributions presented in a panel on “Impolitic Bodies for Official Policies: Interfaces and Contradictions in the Relationship between Lives at the Edge and the Production of the Norm” at the SIAC conference held in Rome in September 2023. The panel contributors investigated connections between the body and official rules, focusing on how liminal actors living in informal or illegal social contexts represent themselves, and how the state creates processes of informalization and illegalization through its normative frames of inclusion and exclusion. The panelists took forward previous work concerned with how marginality is actively produced and maintained through policy, law, and social practices. Together, these forces contain, manage and control marginalized populations, rendering them perpetually “in-between” (Clough Marinaro 2022). Anthropological studies of resistance in such informal and illegal settings have extensively highlighted the state’s ambiguous role (Gledhill 1994; Panella, Little 2021; Smart, Fung 2023). Indeed, normative systems often rely on grey zones where intense rhetoric of illegality coexists with the state’s toleration of their persistence due to its institutional incapacity to propose viable alternatives (e.g. Smart 2021).

2While those analyses focus primarily on the administrative apparatus of the state, Michael Herzfeld’s seminal book The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (2004) broadens the discussion of the tension between regulation and informal actors to include the representation of the nation itself. The concept of Body Impolitic, as the word-play suggests, refers both to a resistant individual body and to an encompassing “political entity such as a nation-state” (Herzfeld, this issue). Herzfeld analyzes how the processes through which the nation is continuously (re)constructed involve a hierarchy of value whereby the social “backwardness” that the state attributes to certain economically liminal and informal actors is often accompanied by moral, aesthetic, and juridical connotations which crystallize to become normative frameworks (2004). Herzfeld thus argues that Crete – on which the book focuses - is an “impolitic” part of the Greek state, because although it supported the nationalist cause, many of its inhabitants have consistently resisted the state’s normative monopoly.

3Throughout this Thematic Issue we borrow from Herzfeld’s understanding of the impolitic body to explore how the state penetrates the bodies and lived experiences of people who are stigmatized as uncivilized, out of place, inappropriate, and are consequently deprived of political recognition and power. In analyzing how bodies become impolitic, we also focus on a process that we call freaktion to explore how official norms interact with various types of impolitic bodies, resulting in entire areas of social life becoming monsterized. This process unfolds in two main ways. First, overt policies of control and discrimination create social differentiations and symbolically impoverish individuals or groups – especially, but not only, economically deprived ones - whose entire life paths are then stigmatized as ab-normal. One striking example, out of the multitude that could be listed, is the way the Covid pandemic was used to pathologize the bodies of homeless people in Italy, thereby depriving them of what few protections they could previously access (Antinori, 2026; Haynes, 2026). Second, it unfolds through a more subtle form of soft power that gradually shapes individuals, so that their apparent freedom of choice and expression in fact channels them to conform to the objectives of official norms. A clear case is Buonvino’s discussion (this issue) of how cultural festivals are used in Morocco to generate national unity by performatively including the Berber minority into the dominant community. This festivalization, however, requires them to enact displays of compliance and docility that neutralize any threat of resistance.

5While such explicit forms of freaktion are now rare, we argue in this issue that more subtle forms are still with us, continuing to construct difference and unsettling strangeness as indecent and monstrous. The boundaries of what is perceived as such are not fixed, though. Rather, they shift in relation to the “orthopedics of form”: the social aesthetic standard that is so imposing, so heavily based on prejudice, that it becomes a moral norm. For us, the term freak encapsulates that which simultaneously attracts and frightens, serving as the scapegoat for collective fears and deviance. In other words, it reflects that intrinsically internal aspect of ourselves which, in the construction of social identity, remains parallel, silent, and hidden, only to manifest itself through the Other, constructed as other-than-self. The freak occupies a kind of frozen, reifying temporality; an abjection – a formal and moral disvalue – positioned at the extreme edge of society’s standards. Yet within those margins, the Other also finds interstices where it is met with compassion and wonder, and can achieve some recognition and emancipation.

6Social and, especially, cultural anthropology has long made Otherness a constitutive theme, focusing critically on the construction of identity roles and relational concepts such as diversity (Leistle 2017), monstrosity (Ferraro, Brugo 2018), and associations with animality (Marchesini 2016; Csordas 2025). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996) was among the first to analyze how the social representation of the monster is built. He argued that on one hand, a characteristic of monsters is that they refuse to participate in the processes through which categorizations are made. They are “disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” (Ibid., 6). On the other hand, “the monster is ‘difference made flesh’” (Ibid., 7). It is not created ex nihilo, but through a process of fragmentation and recombination of elements that are extracted and reassembled as monstrous subjects. “The difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, and its mortality” (Girard in Cohen 1996: 12). Anthropological research has since focused further on the creation of the “monster” as a mirror that reflects societies, especially those grappling with violence or profound transformation (Musharbash, Presterudstuen 2020). Gaia Giuliani analyses several dynamics of monsterization focusing particularly on the representation of migrants. She shows how the multiplication of borders and norms on terrorism after 9/11 have polarized the differentiation between “Us” and the “Other”, creating “figures of race” (Giuliani 2021: 13) that legitimize dispositifs serving to label the “monster” and “alien”, and thereby mobilize moral panic. Migrants’ bodies at risk are thus made into risky bodies through an ongoing mirror effect which transforms victims into potential monsters.

7The monsterization of Otherness involves an initial sense of wonder, which momentarily opens a space for engaging with difference or envisioning alternative modes of communication. This gradually recedes, however, giving way to a feeling of alienation that quickly becomes a policy of alienation and de-subjectification of others. What remains is a lingering discomfort that then evolves into fear, moral judgment, stereotyping, and ultimately, feeds mechanisms of control. Africanist anthropology, for example, is well acquainted with processes of monsterization through accusations of witchcraft in environments marked by inequality and economic accumulation (Fisiy, Geschiere 1991; Comaroff, Comaroff 2008). The state or society progressively constructs forms of otherness through the cumulative effects of social differentiation and moral judgement, gradually separating individuals or groups from the normative order until they come to be understood as fundamentally and irreversibly “other”, whether in moral or physical terms.

8Our vision of the monster, linked to the concrete marginalization and domestication of people perceived as non-conforming to official norms, is rather different from the concept of monster developed by Donna Haraway. In her essay The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others (1992), Haraway advanced the concept of diffraction – a “mapping of interferences” that does not reflect but rather refracts and multiplies differences – to describe how “inappropriate/d others” resist fixed classification and normative social orders. Haraway’s focus is on a feminist consciousness whose critical standpoint is so strong as to disrupt the supposedly natural boundaries between human and non-human, male and female, nature and culture. Our perspective distinguishes itself from Haraway’s not in the idea that individuals endure the condition of socially imposed differentiation itself but rather in how they respond to it. We foreground the lived experiences of flesh-and-blood individuals who disturb the norm, while highlighting how they enact forms of resistance grounded in individual or collective choices.

9Today, the figures treated by dominant society as ab-normal have retained some recognizable patterns from the past. A clear example are the trans immigrants discussed by Antinori and Becatti (this issue), who are subjected to a three-way rejection simultaneously: of their bodies, nationalities and employment. They are in a condition of suspension, precariously positioned, exposed, beyond the two identity pillars of social organization and its systems of representation: the masculine and the feminine. In embodying hybridity, trans people and their bodies are frequently treated as “alien”, subject to moral scrutiny and sanction. This moral judgment consequently often forces individuals into sex work, leading to an almost total overlap in the condemnation of physical bodies and illegalized activities. The same reification of individuals with the moral pathologization of certain professions was evident in our own fieldwork with Senegalese migrants and Roma people engaged in informal or illegal street vending in Rome (Clough Marinaro and Panella 2021). Both groups are automatically subjected to the weightiness of the labels “immigrant” or “nomad”, which already imposes on them the negative mark of what Antinori and Becatti (this issue) refer to as a “sub-national alterity”. Indeed, as Marilungo argues in this issue, “migrant” is constructed as a status in itself, one that is further complicated according to whether one has (or doesn’t have) legal residence permits. It is a condition of inherent non-citizenship, not in the sense of formal paperwork, but in a deep exclusion from participation and belonging; from being seen and heard on one’s own terms.

10A second layer of stigma stems from the semiotic overlap produced, especially in the media, between Roma and Senegalese vendors and the illegalized products they work with: in the spectacle of news images of police displaying confiscated counterfeit goods, or in the repeated depictions of “nomad camps” as unruly deposits of discarded metals, appliances and other “junk” (Clough Marinaro and Panella 2021). In both cases, a perceptual slippage occurs between the bodies working in the unstable and mobile space of unauthorized street vending, and their goods, until the two become equated and the person themselves becomes perceptually illegal. This is further compounded by the frequent assumption that such vendors must be poor and thus also economically threatening. In the case of Roma, the dynamic entails a further labeling process that homogenizes vastly diverse realities under the single designation “Rom”, turning them into an entity that is by definition inherently deviant, dangerous, and consequently polluting, to be held at a safe and controlled distance (Cretan et al. 2022; Clough Marinaro 2014; 2015). Thus, both Senegalese street vendors and Roma people are constructed as monsters based on a combination of their ethnic minority status, the fact that they are considered morally non-conforming by society and the state, and because they embody a condition of economic precarity.

11An element of ambiguity emerges when such illegalized bodies are then presented as victims, themselves, of illegality. We see this in demonstrations where undocumented migrants stand in solidarity with other sub-Saharan migrants working as agricultural laborers, participating in union-organized demonstrations demanding workers’ rights against exploitation (Clough Marinaro, Panella 2021). This destabilization of the stereotype of the threatening illegal immigrant is unsettling, producing that same dynamic of attraction/rejection that is typical of freaktion. Similarly, Marilungo (this issue) notes how the illegalized bodies of migrants along the Balkan route are portrayed both as victims of disaster and as bearers of disaster within Europe.

12What all the above examples have in common, beyond their evident diversity and specificities, is that they are all figures constructed in the public imagination, made up of multiple ontological and relational intersections. These progressively build up a social differentiation through the rigid binary logic of “Us”/“Other” but at the same time they make the image of the targeted “Others” ever more moldable and insubstantial.

15In addition to these concrete forms of social and economic erosion, there are more insidious processes in which the concept of poverty extends beyond the economic realm and spills into the ontological, threatening the very foundation of personhood. In the postface to this issue, Pietro Vereni illustrates how the state intertwines the safeguarding of society and the marginalization, impairment, or elimination of certain social actors: migrants, refugees, and criminalized individuals, to name a few, considered threats to the integrity of the nation. Vereni shows how sovereignty itself is rooted in dynamics of differentiation, social exclusion, and annihilation. In addition to the actual denial of formal legal rights – such as the obstacles created to giving residency permits to migrants – many are left in a limbo of varying degrees of illegalization. Here too, dynamics of marginalization absorb social actors labelled as “illegal” within its frames of ab-normality. Such conditions are nuanced, though, and call for careful reflection, often sliding along a spectrum between the illegal, informal and legal.

16What we term freaktions, therefore, is the ever-changing galaxy of control, reconfiguration, adaptation, and resistance between marginalized categories and official norms in a world that appears to have lost the curious disorientation that fosters encounters with the Other. Instead, it accelerates toward alienation, incommunicability, and conflict. This raises a critical question: What is the ethical boundary between individual choice and the socio-political norm? For us, this boundary lies precisely in the “impolitic body”, understood as an “exposed” body. Albeit on varying scales, examples of this corps exposé emerge in all the contributions of this Thematic Issue. They reveal an alternative form of biopolitics that goes beyond the Foucauldian vision of a passive body governed through the technologies of political power. The body, as each person’s ultimate resource, affirms a condition of existence that is inherently assertive and irradiant, even when it is dead (Taussig 2025). Its unpredictability within normative systems transforms it into a powerful emblem of free action and of bearing witness, rooted in hope: a force that asserts the simple fact of being alive. Hope functions as an inner energy that has tangible effects on everyday life. In the past 20 years, anthropological and philosophical scholarship has explored the spatial and temporal dimensions of hope (Miyazaki 2006; Zigon 2009) and its concrete capacity to reshape reality, especially in periods of crisis (Narotzky, Besnier 2014). In this volume we see it particularly clearly in the determination of people along the Balkan route seeking to mold their future despite the fierce physical barriers that constrain them (Marilungo, this issue) and in the perseverance of trans sex workers in building beauty and solidarity in the face of poverty and exploitation (Antinori and Becatti, this issue). In all the other contributions, hope emerges more subtly as a mode of endurance, as a capacity to continue living, imagining, caring, celebrating, and projecting oneself into the future. This is evident in how a Roma community resists the debilitating biopolitical control of the state (Solimene, this issue), how Amazighe performers continuously redefine their identity through music, dance and storytelling in ways that negotiate with but do not succumb to dominant impositions (Buonvino, this issue), and in how young recruits of French Polynesia’s Régiment du Service Militaire Adapté use the institution to access resources without entirely submitting to the state’s attempts to shape them (Ledderucci, in this issue).

17A further dimension of impolitic bodies must also be emphasized: the relationship between hope, ethics, and corporeality (Panella, Little 2021). Here, corporeality is not only associated with action and movement, but with the very state of being alive. In all of the articles in this issue, hope emerges as an almost automatic survival mechanism, anchored in breath and the physical presence of the living body; a presence that carries weight, that asserts itself as an encumbrance that is political as much as it is material. This bodily presence exists irrespective of its relational possibilities, particularly in contexts where access to basic civic resources – such as employment, citizenship, or freedom of movement – is restricted. The daily endurance required of those whose bodies fall outside normative legal or physical frameworks – and who are often exposed to very real dangers – reverberates within public space. The body becomes the material reflection of the state’s mechanisms of appropriation and normatization, and at the same time, its cumbersome presence disrupts that social and moral order. It challenges the ethical and juridical legitimacy of the state, while simultaneously carving out grassroots forms of resistance and adaptation.

18This collection of essays thus moves beyond the dichotomy often found in political and sociological literature, which constructs the body either as an object of control, discipline, and state violence, or as a resistant agent set on producing political change through struggle and subversion (Rosén 2024). Through the lens of corporeality, this Thematic Issue proposes the “exposed body” as a vector that shocks and shapes moral and aesthetic arrangements and calls into question the ethical legitimacy of the norm. More specifically, we continue to explore the tension between processes of informalization and illegalization inherent in any state-building process, and the counteraction strategies enacted in daily life by marginal and liminal bodies. While acknowledging the conditioning power of a neoliberal state that reifies human diversity within the boundaries of its norms, we also highlight how this process involves resistance by individuals through the exposed condition of their own bodies. We argue that the body of liminal actors is “impolitic” not only because of its aesthetic or juridical deviance from the representations imposed by political authorities and official norms. It is also impolitic for two other, albeit contradictory, reasons. On the one hand, as a body in action, it may correspond to “out of law” aesthetics and moralities (Bobel, Kwan 2011), such as those imposed on trans individuals and other marginalized identities. On the other hand, it incarnates an intrinsic meaningfulness as bare flesh: it carries an existential weight of presence which makes it an inescapable ethical and political interlocutor, despite itself, in a society otherwise ruled by political principles of interdiction, prediction, prevention, transparency and smart efficiency. As Pietro Vereni highlights in his Postface to this Issue, persistently present impolitic bodies expose the contradictions and fragility of the state and its rules through their ambiguity, opacity, and refusal to conform. They assert the possibility of life beyond dominant categories and demand ethical recognition by confronting us with vulnerabilities that we prefer to ignore.

19Consequently, impolitic bodies are heavy. They evoke a form of friction - or freaktion - inherent to lived experience; they embody both vulnerability and precarity while constituting a chronic disturbance and challenge to the norm, attracting negative moral judgments from outside. Some of these flesh-and-blood individuals who disturb the norm enact resistance grounded in individual or collective choices. These may simply involve internally processing discrimination or repression, without this response necessarily resulting in overt or confrontational actions. In these situations of imposed differentiation, even unarmed existence/resistance becomes revolutionary: the daily reiteration of one’s condition as social refuse, rooted in the “simple” fact of existing. Precisely because frail individuals are often perceived by the state as “inert” or politically irrelevant, the concept of the “impolitic body” emphasizes the inherent dignity and autonomy of these margin-bodies. They exist, and in simply being, they bear witness; they are bodies that testify, possess a voice, and assert their status as created, intentional beings.

20The ethnographic accounts that make up this issue explore this contradictory interplay between intimacy and public representation by examining practices of corporeality from within a diverse set of contexts and experiences of marginality. In each contribution, we encounter ways in which people’s bodies and identities are objectified and pathologized, turned into threats that must somehow be domesticated. Yet the neutralization that this domestication aims for is never complete. The subjects involved refuse to disappear or entirely succumb, and in doing so they force us to see the violence and power but also, often, the absurdity inherent in official processes and norms. They reveal the limits of the state’s ability to fully control and homogenize. Silvia Antinori and Giacomo Becatti analyze how, within LGBTQI+ communities in Rome, social differentiation emerges between those who conform to shared aesthetic and moral norms – shaped in part by the Italian state’s reifying processes – and those who fall outside this dual value system. Those who do not align with the state’s vision of citizenship are cast as uncivilized subjects, subsumed under the broad umbrella of “urban decay”. Nevertheless, they persevere in asserting not only their existence but their identity and autonomy. Marginalized LGBTQI+ individuals navigate a fluid environment of inclusion and exclusion reproducing, within their own communities, dynamics of differentiation, inequality, and rejection. In this sense, Antinori and Becatti speak of “disvisibility” rather than invisibility: a regime characterized by mobility and reciprocity between different shades of inclusion and exclusion, formality and illegalization.

21Marco Solimene takes the case of the eviction of an informal settlement of Bosnian Roma in Rome to highlight how the Italian state’s longstanding policies regarding “nomads” have produced Roma’s illegalization and marginalization over time. He simultaneously shows how interactions between state authorities and Roma bodies produce ambivalent outcomes, where power and subversion become entangled. He demonstrates how, within the space of illegalization and social rejection exemplified by the looming eviction of the camp, acts of resistance emerge through strategies of avoidance and ostentation, as well as alternative forms of potency. Claudia Ledderucci, in turn, focuses on how the state in French Polynesia seeks to use a (para)military apparatus to deliver welfare programs to marginalized local youth, revealing the extent to which this militarization through embodied practices shapes the subjectivities of its young recruits. At the same time, despite their apparent compliance with the structures of power into which they are channeled, these individuals carve out pockets of autonomy, negotiation, and self-governance.

22Michela Buonvino describes neo-traditionalist policies promoted by the Moroccan state, particularly through the institutionalization of festivals of Berber culture. Her analysis uncovers how bodies involved in dance performances are subjected to processes of normatization, producing commodified representations of national intangible heritage through state technologies of power and knowledge. Even in this case, however, the apparent participation of the local population in the commodification and exoticization of Amazigh cultures conceals a complex interethnic encounter characterized by dynamics of social differentiation enacted by the Arab population toward the Berber minority.

23Sara Marilungo offers an account of the Bosnian/Croatian border, crossed by thousands of transnational migrants. Drawing on abolitionist perspectives on carceral and border regimes, she shows how these migrants resist their illegalization and racialization in a context in which the border is understood as “a biopolitical matrix that organizes populations” (Marilungo, p. 96, this issue). She highlights the Bosnian police’s policy of dispersing migrants, aimed at preventing the formation of “illegal” encampments and simultaneously defusing the emergence of collective political identities, thereby maintaining a state of dispossession that, through illegalization, produces clandestine bodies.

24Arianna Colombo and Riccardo Malatto (forthcoming in Anuac; December 2026) reveal how medical categories such as symptom and pathology contribute to the structural violence experienced by migrants and others in ethno-psychiatric clinical settings. They use visual art to show the interrelation between the concept of “persona”, care, and aesthetics in the production of knowledge of suffering, showing how the needs and perspectives of the patients themselves are so often unheard.

25The collection closes with a discussion by Michael Herzfeld and Pietro Vereni. Michael Herzfeld, in his essay, revisits the concept of the “body impolitic” through the lens of “civic disability”, defined as “the inability of a polity to deal with its internal contradictions”. In other words, the polity is not the sum of the state’s laws, but rather a stance, a way of life, an “ethical space” (Herzfeld 2019: 28) rooted in social norms (rather than political ones), such as the reciprocal theft of livestock in Crete, which from the perspective of the state appears both archaic and subversive. In his contribution to this issue, Herzfeld suggests extending the analysis of encounters between resistant actors and the state to the concept of polity, to bring to light not only the first level of analysis – one of inequality and political repression – but also the ethical mechanisms that guide the behaviors of liminal actors in relation to state norms. The reflections of Vereni and Herzfeld show that the ethical dimension is a crucial trait d’union to analyze the relationship between bodies and political power, because it is intrinsically tied to bodily vulnerability. Moreover, this ethical dimension is increasingly important not only for defending the rights of “authorized” citizens who fall within the state’s normative frameworks, but also for making space for those expressions of “archaism” that lie outside them and that sketch out alternative visions and aesthetics of being in the world.

26Vereni offers a careful and cross-cutting analysis of Herzfeld’s concept of the “impolitic body”, highlighting its methodological and epistemological strengths and weaknesses. Focusing on the Special issue’s contributions, Vereni moves toward a more integrative notion of “impoliticness”, drawing on Judith Butler and Jasbir Puar. Here, impolitic bodies are recognized as having a range of margins for maneuver, allowing them to assert themselves as “persons” within systems of control and depersonalization. In emphasizing how the impolitic body and political control are intimately interrelated, Vereni shows how state power operates through a dynamic in which opacity and transparency, margin and center, formality and informality are fluid and deeply entangled.