Regulating “high-risk funerals” in Chile
Governmentality and the politics of mourning
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl.2653Keywords:
High-risk funerals, security governance, preventive penality, politics of mourning, ChileAbstract
This article examines Chile’s Law 21.717, known as the “high-risk funerals” law, as a socio-legal device that securitizes certain highly visible forms of public mourning and reorders urban space through a logic of preventive penality. Methodologically, it applies Carol Bacchi’s WPR (What’s the Problem Represented to be?) approach to the legal text, its legislative history, and related public materials in order to reconstruct the representation of the “problem” and identify its assumptions, silences, and effects. The analysis shows that the law frames certain funerals as threats to public order and, in doing so, delineates “risky” territories and problematized subjects, establishing hierarchies of mourning: who may be publicly grieved, under what conditions, and which forms of public mourning are tolerated or repressed. By bringing WPR into dialogue with debates on governmentality, the politics of mourning, and urban regulation, the article contributes to socio-legal discussions on security governance, urban inequality, and the regulation of mourning’s public visibility.
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