And sorry because I didn't sleep one minute last night and this was the off-the-cuff riff I reverted to when communicating with the people who pressed me.
Considering lineage of governmental thinking on "vagrants," sex workers, political dissidents (like anti-rent strikers), and "migrants."
Best not to collapse these into mere "threats to order," as it''s more interesting than that. By the end of nineteenth century, cross-pollination of "security"/"contagion" rhetoric/language in both medicine/public health and policing/federal border-making (borrows from science more broadly too, ie "reservoir'). "Sanitary threat" concept migrates into social governance. But beyond imaginative framework, they also cross-pollinate material technologies (police mapping of vice districts, epidemiological mapping, dossiers/filing cabinets, photography, identity records, quarantine stations). Permeability of national borders in an era of mass inter-imperial labor migration and globalizing empires happens alongside simultaneous birth/exponential expansion of "the city." Together, it creates conditions of ambiguity, then a subversion of social categories/taxonomies makes social taxonomies unreliable (ie, lower-class women of Montmarte in the 1890s wearing cute outfits in ways that an upper-middle-class suitor/cop can't reliably determine her class, which confounds social hierarchy, etc.).
The body is a problem because it physically exists in public space in a way that frustrates the state's ability to classify, regulate, and predict.
It's a problem of (at least) two things: spatiality (which is to say, containment; where are they and where are they allowed to occupy?) and taxonomy (who are they and who do they associate with and what is their race/class/gender?).
Imaginative (taxonomy) and material (spatiality) issue simultaneously.
Combined, though, it's about legibility.
The state has to perceive you as an object of knowledge. You are "brought into being" by that gaze.
Legibility to "governmental or quasi-governmental actors": public health officials, municipal authorities, psychiatrists, etc., in addition to cops, border agents, vice commissions.
Masked people (anti-mask laws which were explicitly about targeting masked rent-strike protestors, New York, 1840s): people insufficiently visible. "Cross-dressing" people (cross-dressing laws, US broadly, 1850s): people too visibly taxonomically ambiguous. Disabled people ("the Ugly Law," California, 1860s): people too visibly "exposed." Racialized people (lots of laws, everywhere, all the time): people too hypervisible.
There's an escalation in scale of governmental intervention involving bodily legibility.
Anti-prostitution law: "You can't do X." Anti-masking law: "You can't be in public in a way that makes X even possible." Vagrancy/cross-dressing prohibitions: "You can't be in public in a way that makes your social identity ambiguous."
From: "Did this person do X crime?" To: "What are the limits of how this person can appear in public while doing nothing illegal?" And eventually: "Appearing in public while doing nothing illegal but in a way which makes it unclear if something illegal might possibly happen is now also illegal." Like loitering laws or whatever.
It's an epistemological transformation. The governmental actor expands its understanding of its purview, its playing field, and the possible technologies/approaches that can achieve it.
This is why "vagrancy" is good to think with. Vagrant as quintessential illegible person. Governmental actor asks: "Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going? Are you ill? What legitimate place do you occupy in the social order?" Sex workers also. Also people with so little resources or recourse when brutalized by the state, and whom the public at large will also disavow.
And an issue of visibility/legibility is also often an issue of taxonomy/classification: How can the governmental/state figure efficiently describe and interpret this person?
Visibility--in a literal way--is a good prism to follow the concern with legibility. Because the mid/late nineteenth century also sees (pun intended) the advent of technologies which facilitate visibility: Print culture (magazines, pulp texts, newspapers, novels, trade/academic journals), photography, easily-reproducible maps, and eventually aerial photography (for new ways of visualizing the city/territory from above). People broadly could imagine a perspective of a city/national territory in apparent totality. But also increasingly-shared visual language of charts, graphs, diagrams. Caricatures/cartoons as shorthand/visual rhetoric.
Photography became the basis for bertillioange (mugshots, tracking/surveillance), and bertillionage was explicitly about recording "bodily features" and then classifying them. It was explicitly a practice anthropometry, like fingerprints. Developed by Bertillion in Paris in the 1870s (in aftermath of Paris Commune, where the police already had thousands of photos of sex workers but which were not yet systematically classified), officially adopted by Paris police as systematic practice in 1882, officially adopted by US police in 1887.
A cop can see a person but not know who they are, what their occupation is, if they're "infected" (medically or socially), what their political affiliation is, where they live.
A photograph solves one problem. A recorded address solves another. A map solves another. A medical exam solves another. But part of the significance of the advent of bertillionage, police photography, filing cabinets, registries, etc., (mid-1870s to mid-1890s) is that they collect those various taxonomic answers into a standardized record or registry. AND that same period is advent of public health thinking and transnational collaboration among states to quell labor dissent through monitoring/records-keeping, so a rhetoric/language/constellation informs and reinforces those practices/technologies with built-in moral appeal.
"Migrant/vagrant/sex worker will spread disease!" As in the "abjection" concept, social threat/contagion (are they politically subversive? are they morally transgressive?) is equated to physical threat/contagion (do they spread disease?). These people classically associated with interior/psychological uncleanliness are, like, secularized/rationalized (?) in modernist, scientific, Progressive-Era-"benevolent"-reformer paradigms as literally physically unclean--a disease vector--and then treated quite literally "like shit."
If "the city" grows exponentially in the late nineteenth century (and the bounds of empire become more ambiguous beyond national borders, in which increased global mobility complicates some of these) then something else also grows: the scale at which governmental actors conceive of the field of action (individual to population-scale, one block to a wider spatial web) AND the technologies required to make the governmental intervention actionable (photography, filing cabinets, registries, special vice divisions, public health departments).
The municipal scale is fruitful way to think about and demonstrate this. Because we already can roughly say: "Of course nation-states of the late nineteenth century shared these contours of concerns with public health, border-making, etc." It's the High/New Imperialism age (global/transnational history sees this; it's not novel).
Because the municipal/local level is where individual bodies encounter governance (in that era, anyway). (At municipal level, this period sees advent of: hospitals, tenements, disorderly houses, jails, public parks, playgrounds, theatres, "Chinese districts," vice districts, etc.)
The abstract "population" becomes a spatially situated collection of individual bodies.
And so governmentality/police power converges on the same mobile bodies. Mobility is important: sex workers are spatially diffuse (make a vice district), racialized bodies (interpreted by some of the public/state as inherently out-of-place) are hypervisible (concentrate in Black neighborhood or Chinese district), migrant is too mobile (passports and border regulation and ridiculous, frequent, routine visa-compliance checks).
Maybe theoretically a population might not always be simply arrested because it is mobile. But essentially the same containment is enacted, and a population may be functionally immobilized or something analogous to arrest through ridiculous limits on time. See (pun intended) debt peonage, visa requirements, time wasted waiting in line at a bureaucratic center, and Jasbir Puar's debilitating infrastructures. And theoretically a population might not always be simply medically examined because it is spatially dispersed. But essentially the same conditions of investigation/classification/invasive medical subjection are enacted through quarantine. The US pretty quickly just said "fuck it" and went there. See (puuuun intended) Angel Island Immigration Station, El Paso border fumigation chamber, Chamberlain-Kahn Act rounding-up women for forced medical testing. The population has to be made spatially and administratively legible in some way, and there are technologies other than "literal legal imprisonment" that accomplish a similar result.
