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Annexia Benway Summary

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Naked Lunch The citizens of Annexia are submitted to random document inspections by an official Examiner; they are expected to meet “impossible deadlines,” and are constantly on the verge of arrest for failing to comply with procedures. Examiners do not wear official uniforms, they are often dressed in bathing suits or pajamas, and when a group of people is stopped for inspection, only a few are given stamps, the rest are subsequently arrested “because their cards were not properly stamped.” The state takes advantage of its authority. The threat of imprisonment, especially when gauged against an essentially random system of law enforcement, is not enough to achieve the state’s ideal. The citizens of Annexia are not afforded privacy; they …show more content…

Benway, a representation of the state’s control, relates Carl’s homosexuality to a disease, saying “We regard it as a misfortune… a sickness… certainly nothing to be censured or uh sanctioned any more than, say, tuberculosis.” By comparing the two, Benway is able to imply that homosexuality is life threatening and contagious. Benway tells Carl that the threat of illness requires the intervention of “authorities concerned with public health.” For this intervention of the state to occur, Carl must concede that he is abnormal, and that it is the state’s responsibility to rehabilitate him. In effect, Carl and other patients create a social stigma of their …show more content…

Benway, “an advisor to the Freeland Republic,” where the citizens are “well adjusted, cooperative, honest, tolerant, and above all clean”; in other words: normal, functional. However, Lee points out that this cleanliness/normalness is a “façade,” the result of what Foucault understands as the conception of the “model man,” whose “healthy life” in an endpoint to which the “diseased” must be rehabilitated. The citizens of Freeland engage in “free love and continual bathing,” which implies the society’s demand for heightened social relations. Social engagement becomes a quality of Freeland’s “model man.” The deviation from this model is represented by schizophrenics, who express a lowered rate of social engagement, allowing the state authority to classify their predilections as diseases that must be cured. In Freeland, the tertiary spatialization of schizophrenia and addiction is a system that focuses on creating a populace that is complicit, satisfied, and submissive, much like Annexia. Just as the citizens of Annexia suffer a state-enforced isolation from one another, the schizophrenics and junkies of Freeland also fall under the state’s power; they must be isolated and cured, and it is Dr. Benway’s job to facilitate their

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