Interesting talk about TSA pat-downs continues to surface in the wake of back scatter technology installed across airports in the US and Canada. A recent NYT op-ed called Stripped of Dignity by Maureen Dowd, citing Alaskan state rep, Sharon Cissna, suggests that not everyone's bodies should be scrutinized in the same way by security pat-downs. In defending rights of children, seniors and folks living with disabilities, Dowd inadvertently(?) calls for less rights for suspected terrorist bodies. Unfortunately, one of the only benefits of back scatter technology, its potential to be race-blind, is undermined by the call to heighten passenger profiling as a way of avoiding humiliating "good, law-abiding people." Dowd says that one of her relatives wrote a letter to the TSA about a humiliating experience with her ostomy bag. She asks, "does having an ileostomy now make you a terrorist suspect?" Of course not, but I ask: does having a turban?
Shoshana Magnet responds to the potential biasing of security technology in her book chapter, Bio-Benefits: Technologies of Criminalization, Biometrics and the Welfare System. Here she questions whether biometrics are race-, gender-, class-, and disability-neutral mechanisms, arguing that biometric technologies facilitate the visualization of criminalization vis-a-vis modes of identity. Particularly vulnerable bodies become hypervisible, and bodies that comply with invasive security practices are rewarded as good citizens. This is my gross oversimplification of the brilliant chapter, but Magnet basically asks us to question the assumption that a more 'scientific' way of looking at the body is thus most 'neutral.' Fantastic!
I think Magnet's intervention is a wonderful contribution to how we privilege the visual realm in our positivist culture, what Puar refers to as "the privilege of seeing." I hope to build on these critiques of visualist culture in my future theoretical work :)
Off to flash vote mob! Ttfn!
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