As novas odisseias de Ulisses: políticas de saúde e a imigração em Espanha e na U.E.

Abstract

There are several phenomena that although seemingly isolated, point out to a relationship between State’s punitive and/or population control policies and the criminalization of specific social groups. However, if we take as reference the very crisis experienced by the European Union, it is possible to perceive an ambiguity with respect to non-European immigration in contemporary Europe, that interchanges the punitive discourse with an “integration” discourse based on multicultural policies. The Ulysses syndrome, a psychiatric model increasingly popular in the EU States, explains the specific symptoms of non-European immigrants and highlights the contradictions in that relationship. Both in the field of “health”, as to in the prison policy, the EU extends potentially as a laboratory of the “colonial gaze” in which the non-European immigrant, especially the “illegal”, is increasingly being understood as a person that opposes the notion of “modernity”. Based on the correlation between State/border control policy, this paper aims to review this complex context from a post-colonial critical perspective.