Objective/context:

Based on the Colombian case, an interpellation of the concept of sovereignty in contemporary critical political theory is proposed from a feminist, queer, and decolonial perspective through the analysis of the role of cruelty against LGBTIQ+ people in establishing a form of para-institutional sovereign power in neoliberal wars.

Methodology:

This theoretical research is supported by documentary analysis of the reports of the National Center of Historical Memory of Colombia.

Conclusions:

The colonial and cisheteropatriarchal circulation of cruelty is shown to be an essential element in installing a disciplinary power that affects society as a whole and establishes a specific form of sovereign power. In the neoliberal stage of capital, this form updates a government of bodies that distinguishes between citizenship and colonial subjects and is constitutive of the nation-state.

Originality:

Demonstrating this hypothesis has the consequence of unveiling a specific form of exercise of power that produces bodies through the establishment of what I call the government of suffering, which I define as control, rationalization, and administration of suffering. This form of power goes beyond the reading framework suggested by the paradigms of biopolitics and necropolitics; thus, to encompass this dimension of the political, I propose the concept ofpathospolitics, understood as the form of power that turns suffering into an object of government and is deployed through this government.