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Resumo

This analysis argues that armed Americans and their weapons are central agents in a network of objects and affects. Guns may not only assert agency on people but, also, firearm–human relations – emergent within the contested legal boundaries that discipline their bodily concealment and revelation – are best seen as an enchanted assemblage of performance, control, omnipotence, pleasure, and fear. Both material and semiotic in nature – guns are things that shoot and things that convey meaning. The cultural desire to secretly arm or openly carry a firearm in public spaces, and the range of motivations and reactions that frame it, inform this project. How are gun owners transformed by the corporeal relationships they have with their weapons? Moreover, how is this relationship a mode of affective embodiment, in which the gun so easily merges with its owner, forming and conforming to the body, dissolving into one's person unconsciously, much like but much differently than a cell phone?

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