This essay examines a period of crisis in the national penitentiary system in Honduras, during emergency campaigns designed to combat transnational gangs, called maras. Emergency laws led to the incarceration of mara members by the thousands, overcrowding prisons and overburdening their already precarious architecture and design. I explore the ideological and material ruins of incarceration, wherein irregular bodies of sovereign force (death squads legitimized by emergency) and new expressions of criminal community (maras) offer divergent incarnations of political power. The essay’s title phrase, “gothic sovereignty,” invokes this perennial reemergence of death squads from the crypts of state power and the criminal aesthetics cultivated within the prison itself, as the maras reclaim sovereign power at the scale of the community. After several massacres targeting mara members in state penitentiaries, the intensified decoration of gang members’ bodies with tattoos of devils, clowns, and satanic symbols thrust the grammar of protest in Honduran politics to a limit where the architecture of confinement became a laboratory for criminal affects and political horizons projecting beyond the sociopolitical dimensions of the nation-state in crisis.

This essay examines the monstrous first as a figure haunting Western legal history, stripped of rights and often merging with the animal, and second, as a divergent sociality borne of emergencies, crises, and faultlines of late liberal governmentality. In particular I ask how the figure of the pathological and violent gang member structures debates about the US‐Mexico border crosser, and the limits of humanity before the law. The essay moves from a genealogy of the gang member in Honduras, to the refugee asylum seeker of 2018, to ask what forms of difference‐making, in the form of new monstrosities, might inform new notions of kinship and solidarity amid anthropocenic futures.

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