Points of Departure

The Culture of US Airport Screening

Bibliographic Data

ID20074312
AuthorsLisa Parks (0000-0002-3781-5145, University of California, Santa Barbara, corresponding author)
Year2009
Pages163-178
Publication date2009-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueDeleuze and Law (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230244771_10
OpenAlexW2183359304
ISBN9780230244771
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited5

For the past several months I have been conducting an experiment at airport security gates, shooting photographs of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) facilities and screeners to determine how long I can go on before I will be asked to stop. After shooting photos in 12 airports I have received only one warning at the US-Canada border while taking a picture of a twenty-something woman of colour being interrogated by TSA workers after she was physically searched in a nearby makeshift room. I only became visible to the TSA at the moment I witnessed her visibility, but in general as a white woman I go relatively unnoticed in a US security regime largely based on racial profiling. If I were a person of colour it is possible that many of these images would not exist, that my camera would have been taken, the images destroyed, or I might not have even taken the risk in the first place. In any case, it has become clear to me that the airport is no longer just a ‘non-place’ as Marc Auge (Auge, 1995) famously described it over a decade ago, but in the context of the US-led war on global terror it has possibly become ‘the place’, a charged and volatile domain punctuated by shifting regimes of biopower

Administration (probate law) · Advertising · Archaeology · Art · Business · Context (archaeology) · Geography · Media studies · Meteorology · Political science · Race (biology) · Racial profiling · Sociology · Terrorism · Visibility · War on terror · White (mutation) · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

Tools

Open DOILibgen