Looking Right,Looking Busy: The Vigilant Body and the Production of Performative Surveillance in Private Security

Abstract

How do security guards use their bodies to produce vigilance? Complementing the scholarly interest in technological advancements in security and remote surveillance, this research examines the concept of the vigilant body—an idealized disposition where physical appearance and performance shape how surveillance workers produce vigilance. By studying security guards, I argue that visible vigilance is a relational co-production, where guards’ bodies act as material and symbolic conduits that transmit and receive the meaning of vigilance through visibility, recognition, and social interpretation. Drawing on work and organization scholarship, I show how surveillance and policing practices intended to deter crime and assert authority function as forms of aesthetic labor. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico City's booming private security sector, including observations, in-depth interviews, and carnal ethnography, in which the author worked as a security guard, this study reveals that guards must look the part and remain visibly busy to embody vigilance. Guards signal attentiveness through aesthetic and bodily cues to deter threats and reassure clients. This performance is shaped by material conditions and racialized, gendered, and classed aesthetic expectations. By framing vigilance as aesthetic labor, I show that policing and surveillance practices rely not only on sustained attention but also on the approval of those being watched. These findings deepen our understanding of performative surveillance work and offer new insights into the meaning of vigilance in different occupational contexts.