The spectacle of terrorist threat is a tactic that the state uses to push surveillance policies—their politics creates a self-fulfilling policy where bodies who refuse to be docile and open to the state are violently eradicated
Hall 2015 [Rachel Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. Her research interests include issues of fear and security as well as gender. . "Terror and the Female Grotesque." Feminist Surveillance Studies (2015): 127-49.
In response to the threat of international terrorism, the United States has swiftly and uncritically embraced what I call the aesthetics of transparency in the post-9/11 era.1 Broadly, the aesthetics of transparency is motivated by the desire to turn the world (and the body) inside out such that there would no longer be secrets or interiors, human or geographical, in which terrorists or terrorist threats might find refuge. The military and security state’s objection to interiority is both physical and psychological, referring as much to the desire to rid the warring world of pockets, caves, spider holes, and veils as it is concerned with ferreting out all secrets, stopping at nothing in its effort to produce actionable intelligence from detainees. The aesthetics of transparency can thus be defined as an attempt by the security state to force a correspondence between interiority and exteriority on the objects of the preventative gaze or, better yet, to flatten the object of surveillance, thereby doing away with the problem of correspondence altogether. Circulating within the broader framework of the aesthetics of transparency, opacity effects visualize a body, geography, building, or institution as possessing an interior, a realm beyond what is visible. Opacity effects raise suspicion by the mere fact that they dare to present something that is not entirely visually accessible to the viewer or monitor. The U.S. security state’s desire to flatten the object of surveillance has influenced the development and implementation of new surveillance technologies in the post-9/11 era. In the United States and other Western nations, where the political leadership feels besieged by the threat of international terrorism, periodic media spectacles of deadly terrorist threats remind publics what is at stake if “we” do not adopt and uniformly submit to new surveillance technologies. In this manner, spectacles and specters of the terrorist threat nourish a political culture of compulsory transparency or unquestioning support for technological solutions to the threat of international terrorism.Media coverage of enemies of the United States in the war on terror and terrorist attacksor near misses in the “homeland” create a supportive context for the reception of new surveillance technologies. In this environment, the enemies of the United States in the war on terror (both iconic and ordinary) serve as the “opaque” bodies or “bad” examples from which the “transparent” traveler is encouraged to distinguish her body in domestic visual cultures of terrorism prevention. I do not understand these spectacles of opacity as intentional efforts on the part of media corporations to serve as agents of propaganda for the U.S. military or security state. Rather, I suggest that some military, government, and media professionals share an aesthetic orientation, which implies a global politics of mobility. In the post-9/11 era, colonial binarism is subtly recast. Instead of “the West and the Rest,” domestic-security cultures of terrorism prevention invest tremendous energy and resources into producing docile global citizen suspects who willingly become “transparent” or turn themselves inside out, such that they are readily and visibly distinct from the “opaque” enemies of the United States in the theaters of the war on terror. As Yasmin Jiwani observes (this volume), when bodies are recast as borders, the invisibility of unmarked or “transparent” bodies operate in relation to the hypervisibility of nominated or profiled bodies. According to the aesthetics of transparency animating these distant yet interdependent security cultures, it is the production of particular bodies as stubbornly opaque which justifies violent practices of torture and interrogation, and abandons them to the necropolitics of indefinite detention (Mdembe 2003). By contrast, the docile citizen-suspect’s presumed ability to participate in the project of biopolitics by affirming life in line with the conventions set by the U.S. security state makes physical violence against his or her body both unnecessary and unacceptable. Docile citizen-suspects are presumed capable of practicing what Nikolas Rose (1999) and Mitchell Dean (2009), among others, call “reflexive governance.” The term refers to the ways in which neoliberal strategies of governance “offload” risk management and homeland defense onto citizens (Andrejevic 2006b). In post-9/11 cultures of terrorism prevention, reflexive governance refers to the citizen’s “voluntary” transparency or her demonstration of readiness-for-inspection. I place voluntary in quotes to signal the coercive aspects of a performance demanded by the security state for the passenger to be permitted to board his or her flight.
The war on terror has created the spectacle of war through surveillance that allows the state to turn war into re-edited reality TV
Hall 2015 [Rachel Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. Her research interests include issues of fear and security as well as gender. . "Terror and the Female Grotesque." Feminist Surveillance Studies (2015): 127-49.
Elsewhere I argue that two Western media images from the war on terror offer a particularly poignant example of how photography may be used to produce opacity effects: a photograph of Saddam Hussein’s spider hole (a very small subterranean hideout), taken from above, looking down into the darkness; and the image of his medical examination, featuring the dark cavity of his mouth being pried open by a U.S. military inspector (R. Hall 2007). Analysis of the latter image establishes how Hussein and other spectacular models of “stubborn” opacity hail docile citizen suspects to “voluntarily” perform transparency within the domestic security cultures of terrorism prevention. In the visual cultures of the war on terror, opacity effects are racialized via photographic depictions of skin tone, hair, and head coverings. As Kellie D. Moore argues (this volume), any skin tone other than the whitest of white threatens to obscure the truth sought via the surveillant gaze.For the privileged Western spectators of the war on terror, wartime surveillance provides discipline and entertainment, or better yet, discipline-as-entertainment. Consider cnn’s online special report “Saddam Hussein: Captured.” The site offers an interactive reenactment of Hussein’s capture.2 Hussein is figured as the stubborn, misbehaving outlaw who must be physically and forcibly subdued. The scene of capture is akin to a scene from an early reality-tv program like Cops or some other true-crime show. The “money shot” of this genre features cops violently subduing animalized suspects. Such programs rehearse the drama of a predictable power dynamic between individuals coded as inferior based on their race, class, and lack of education, and the rational cops, who know how to “handle” them. While we don’t get to see Saddam Hussein taken down, the images and video of his medical exam accomplish a similar spectacle of dominance and submission. In the image of his medical inspection, U.S. soldiers confirm the identity and reality of his body by demonstrating its depth and penetrating the surface. “We” get to see the dark cavity of his mouth and extreme close-ups of his teeth. The medicalization of this encounter signifies Hussein’s physical submission to U.S. authority, connotes his animality, and—to the Eurocentric viewer—may suggest a benign version of U.S. imperialism, which has science, medicine, and the Enlightenment on its side. This painstakingly documented and widely circulated medical exam rehearses what Robert Stam and Ella Shohat have called the “animalizing trope” of empire or “the discursive figure by which the colonizing imaginary rendered the colonized beastlike and animalic” (1994, 19). This medical scene is reminiscent of the spectacular examination of slaves on the auction block. In drawing this comparison, I am not trying to be provocative, but rather insisting that the animalizing trope of empire is a racist strategy of dehumanization.
The omnipresence of surveillance regimes distinguishes between bodies who are feminized and those who look violently with the male gaze
Hall 2015 [Rachel Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. Her research interests include issues of fear and security as well as gender. . "Terror and the Female Grotesque." Feminist Surveillance Studies (2015): 127-49.
The pressure to perform voluntary transparency via submission to screening by the new surveillance technologies demands, in turn, what Robert McRuer (2006) named “compulsory able-bodiedness.” McRuer demonstrates the interrelation between what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality” and compulsory able-bodiedness. His analysis of various popular-culture texts also demonstrates how the cultural ideals of heterosexuality and able-bodiedness are further inflected by normative ideals regarding body types, beauty, and health. In post-9/11 security cultures, approximating the state’s idea of what passes for normal becomes a matter of national security. In this context, if you fear humiliation and judgment at the checkpoint because your body does not approximate the cultural ideal, that has nothing to do with the technology’s prying eyes, rather, it is your fault: your failure to master the body project leaves you at risk of humiliation. Full-body scanners, which were rapidly installed in airports across the United States and beyond in response to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to down Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on 25 December 2009, examine the rough outlines of the passenger’s anatomical form in order to identify “objects against bodies” or “forms that aren’t traditionally part of the human physique” (Sachs 2010). Of note here is the telling use of the term traditional to describe “the human physique” (in the singular). Like whiteness or heterosexuality, transparency claims the ground of neutrality, while in fact the transparent body desired by the security state is not neutral but, more accurately, normate, the term Rosmarie Garland Thompson (1996) has used to refer to what is understood as the generalizable human being or the body type thought to be normal. In the context of post-9/11 security cultures, the appearance of normalcy takes on the characteristics of transparency, defined as that which we do not see or notice, as opposed to those signs of bodily difference from the norm, which register visually in the form of stigmata. Magnet (2011) makes a similar argument regarding how the outsourcing of the U.S. border externalizes the threat of terrorism and inscribes it on othered bodies and bodies thatreside outside the nation. The white body is normalized and serves as a standard against which others will be judged (Jiwani, this volume). And as Moore’s analysis of Ibrahim’s appropriation art and Rihanna’s appearance on abc’s 20/20 demonstrates, “the transparent aesthetics practiced by law enforcement operate through an association between objectivity and whiteness” (this volume, 116). Built into the aesthetics of transparency as it is currently mobilized by the U.S. security state is the desire for a generalizable body type which can be easily recognized as innocent or nonthreatening and thus efficiently be “cleared” for takeoff. Consider a graphic entitled “Technology that Might Have Helped,” published by the New York Times two days after Abdulmutallab’s failed bombing of Flight 253.4 The graphic pictures the images produced by x-ray backscatter and millimeter-wave screening machines, respectively. In addition to showing readers the difference between the images produced by the two types of technology, the New York Times describes the differences in terms of visual technologies with which the reader is already familiar. The image produced by backscatter machines “resembles a chalk etching,” whereas the image produced by the millimeter-wave machines “resembles a fuzzy photo negative.” It could also be said that the elongated head and spindly fingers on the backscatter image resemble a humanoid alien from a midcentury science-fiction film, while the sleek metallic perfection of the figure in the millimeter-wave image is reminiscent of the star robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Note that both of the sample body images on display appear hollow, flat, futuristic, slender, fit, relatively young, and able-bodied— not to mention the fact that the images picture all bodies, regardless of skin tone, as fuzzy white or metallic silver outlines. Media discourses about full-body scanners domesticate them by reference to the norms of U.S. popular and consumer cultures, which celebrate Euro-American standards of beauty, health, and fitness. Consequently, the transparent traveler is defined via her ability to discipline 7.2 New York Times graphic depicting body images produced by x-ray backscatter and millimeter wave screening technologies. New York Times, “Technology That Might Have Helped,” 27 December 2009 (www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/27/us /terror-graphic.html). Terror and the Female Grotesque 135 the grotesquely opaque body, whose abjection communicates the perpetual threat that the docile passenger-suspect’s body will somehow fail to perform transparency up to code. Consider a cheeky, flirtatious piece of gonzo journalism entitled “Reporter Faces the Naked Truth about FullBody Airport Scanners” (2010), for which Andrea Sachs of the Washington Post underwent a full-body scan by a millimeter-wave machine so she might “experience the technology’s prying eyes first hand.” Rather than report information regarding what firms would profit from the technology’s adoption or raise questions regarding its use, the reporter modeled for the reader how to make the adjustment to a new layer of security. The article’s tone oscillates between sexual teasing and self-punishing narcissism. Sachs stresses the threat of being found unattractive in the images produced by the new machines. The experience of having one’s clothes virtually peeled away by the new scanner is articulated in terms of vanity and sexual attractiveness or (gasp) repulsion, rather than as a process that renders each body suspect. There is no tucking or lifting or sucking in of guts that the tsa cannot see through with the new machines. Even as Sachs worries about what she considers to be her major corporeal flaw (a belly button placed too high on her torso), she mock scolds herself to put vanity aside for the sake of homeland security: “Get over yourself, honey: The full-body scanning machines at airport security checkpoints weren’t created to point out corporeal flaws but to detect suspicious objects lurking beneath airline passengers’ clothing.” Sachs’s “get over yourself,” comment is meant to reassure passengers that when scanned, the body becomes nothing more than a medium or environment, but it also presumes the passenger’s feminine vanity and irrelevance. What the feminist philosopher Mary Russo conceptualizes as the “female grotesque”—that cavernous figure associated “in the most gross metaphorical sense” with the female anatomical body—circulates here as a comic foil to the opaque terrorist. As Russo has written, the word “grotesque evokes the cave—the grotto-esque. Low, hidden, earthly, dark, material, immanent, visceral. As bodily metaphor, the grotesque cave tends to look like (and in the most gross metaphorical sense be identified with) the cavernous anatomical female body” (1994, 1–2). While the enemy’s stubborn opacity rationalizes physical penetration and punishment of his body in the theaters of the war on terror, the mock vanity of the female grotesque reduces serious critique of the full-body scanners to a self-deprecating joke. In the end, Sachs tells the reader that the security expert conducting her scan eventually erased the image, but it stuck with her. She ends the article by expressing her support for the new technology, given the very real threats to America’s safety posed by terrorism. “In the end,” Sachs (2010) writes, “I found it comforting to know that the body scanner would uncover items missed by older equipment and that we travelers have one more layer of protection against those exceedingly crafty terrorists.” There is a politics to feeling afraid of another “crafty” terrorist attack and comforted by the installation of full-body scanners at U.S. airports. In the context of airport security, performing voluntary transparency is coded as “hip” in the postfeminist spirit of agency and empowerment via preparation of the body in anticipation of the male gaze. Because the new norms of airport security culture borrow from the norms of U.S. consumer culture, they presume a passenger who sees “her” body as a project. In their essay on how celebrity white women tweet and how those tweets are read on gossip sites, Dubrofsky and Wood (this volume) update Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze for the postfeminist digital era, arguing that the recipient of the gaze is a participant in creating the image on display and actively fashions the body for consumption. They point out that it is only white women celebrities who are granted agency in the form of producing their bodies for the male gaze. Famous women of color are regularly discussed, critiqued, and celebrated on gossip sites, but their bodies are consistently treated as “natural” and therefore beyond their control. The bodies of famous white women, however, are depicted as ongoing projects or life works, of which those white celebrities can be proud because of the effort they have put into producing their bodies as attractive by the standards of the male gaze. Building on these keen insights, I argue that in the context of airport security the “good” passenger-suspect operates according to a gendered model of reflexive governance, which defines itself in opposition to the female grotesque. In short, the “good” passenger acts like a vain white woman from the United States who is always ready for sex. Indirectly, then, the “good” passenger’s take on the new surveillance technologies constructs the terrorist threat by reference to the figure of the female grotesque, the woman who fails to prepare her body for the male gaze, or the woman who refuses male sexual advances. Ultimately, Sachs models feminine heterosexual acquiescence to the new surveillance technologies. This framing of the new surveillance technologies resonates with a romantic view of the security state as the terrified passenger’s knight in shining armor and finds its precursor in American comic books and films featuring a lusty, muscle-bound superhero with x-ray vision. Consider the following iconic scene from the 1973 film adaptation of Superman: on a balmy night in Metropolis, Lois Lane interviews Superman on her terrace. She wears a billowy, flowing white gown and cape (you know what he’s got on). As Lois questions Superman about his special powers, she learns that he has x-ray vision but cannot see through lead. “What color underwear am I wearing?,” the inquisitive reporter asks frankly. A lead planter stands between them. His response is delayed, so Lois moves on to other probing questions. It is not until later, when she steps out from behind the planter, that he answers her. “Pink,” he says flatly, chastely. “What?,” she asks, looking confused. “They’re pink, Lois.” She turns to him for clarification and finds him staring at her crotch. “Oh,” she nods in understanding and blushes slightly. A few minutes later, as they are flying over the city together, Lois continues her interview with Superman in her head, posing additional questions in a whispery, childlike voice full of wonder: “Can you read my mind?” In this romantic sequence from Superman (1973), acts of seeing and showing-through double as sex acts for the human-superhero couple, expressing the romantic longing for a super man capable of recognizing and potentially fulfilling feminine desires. Superman’s ability to literally see through Lois’s evening gown extends, metaphorically to his magical capacity to read her mind. In the terms of 1970s popular psychology, his x-ray vision is not only a superpower but also a metaphor for true love or what it means to be “in sync” with another person. The superhero’s x-ray vision produces pleasure for the intrepid reporter who secretly wears pink underwear. The experience of being “seen through” feminizes Lois, temporarily softening the tough-as-nails city reporter. At the end of the flight scene, Superman drops Lois off on her terrace, leaving her in what appears to be a blissful, postcoital trance so he can return to the thankless work of fighting crime. Lest you think I am making too much of one silly article, Sachs’s modeling of feminine heterosexual acquiescence to the new surveillance technologies is representative of many more stories, photographs, and political cartoons that also rely on gendered and sexualized scripts of encounters between passenger-suspects, on the one hand, and surveillance technologies or representatives of the security state, on the other. One can see this media narrative neatly encapsulated in the 6 December 2010 cover image of the New Yorker, which upends the romantic formula of Superman by reversing gender roles to comic effect.In so doing, influential U.S. media outlets like the Washington Post and the New Yorker participate in and promote what Magnet has called “surveillant scopophilia,” which refers to the ways in which new surveillance technologies produce “new forms of pleasure [for some] in looking at the human body disassembled into its component parts while simultaneously working to assuage individual anxieties about safety and security through the promise of surveillance” (2011, 17). This selective treatment aligns the new technologies with U.S. consumer and popular cultures of surveillance, where sex and sex appeal (or the tragic lack thereof) are the only story being told. The “sexy” or comically asexual exposed body is uniformly white. In this manner, the sexualization of the new surveillance technologies in U.S. discourse domesticates the machines while obscuring the global racial norm used to determine which bodies are presumed capable of reflexive governance via high-tech screening and which bodies are presumed incapable or unwilling to practice reflexive governance and must therefore be forcibly subdued.
The hetero-patriarchal white-supremacist gaze cannot be separated from visualization—this reaffirms patriarchal and sexualized understanding of otherness that deems race as associated with terror
Hall 2015 [Rachel Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. Her research interests include issues of fear and security as well as gender. . "Terror and the Female Grotesque." Feminist Surveillance Studies (2015): 127-49.