Airport security procedures enact a performative repertoire of security policies and procedures that govern airport security. Using my own body to register the affective modes of airport security, I engage participatory critical rhetoric as a method to assess airport security’s repertoire of rhetorical performances. Affect is a particularly valuable concept for understanding the ways travelers are conditioned to comply with Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) directives as they move through security checkpoints. The screening processes perform acts of security that stand in tension with the resistive politics they enable. In this essay, I argue that security and resistance are performative modes (security performative and resistance performative) enacted in TSA’s airport security checkpoints. These modes produce a secured airport and a defiant public. Bodies that TSA “secures” enact affective states of security (and anxiety).
AmooreL.HallA. (2009). Taking people apart: Digitised dissection and the body at the border. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27, 444-464. doi:10.1068/d1208
BeanH. (2009). “A complicated and frustrating dance”: National security reform, the limits of parrhesia, and the case of the 9/11 families. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2, 429-459. doi:10.1353/rap.0.0108
6.
BeanH. (2010). Foucault’s rhetorical theory and U.S. Intelligence Affairs. Issues in the Rhetoric of Science and Technology, 6, 15-32. doi:10.13008/2151-2957.1067
7.
BeanH. (2013). Rhetorical and critical/cultural intelligence studies. Intelligence and National Security, 28, 495-519. doi:10.1080/02684527.2012.699284
8.
BennettT.GrossbergL.MorrisM. (2006). New keywords: A revised vocabulary of culture and society. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
CalafellB. (2014). Performance: Keeping rhetoric honest. Text and Performance Quarterly, 34, 115-117. doi:10.1080/10462937.2013.846476
12.
ColeD. (2011). The actions of affect in Deleuze: Others using language and the language that we make . . . Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43, 549-561.
13.
ConquergoodD. (1992). Ethnography, rhetoric, and performance. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78, 83-123. doi:10.1080/00335639209383982
14.
CurrahP.MulqueenT. (2011). Securitizing gender: Identity, biometrics, and transgender bodies at the airport. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 78, 557-582. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23347190
15.
DeLandaM. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. London, England: Continuum.
16.
DeleuzeG.GuattariF. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
17.
del RioE. (2012). Deleuze and the cinemas of performance: Powers of affection. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
18.
DouglasM. (1984). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York, NY: Routledge.
19.
For Basic Human Dignity and Liberty at Airport Checkpoints. (n.d.). We Won’t Fly. Available from http://wewontfly.com/
20.
FoxN.AlldredP. (2013). The sexuality-assemblage: Desire, affect, anti-humanism. The Sociological Review, 61, 769-789.
21.
FrancisG.HumphreysI.FryJ. (2002). The benchmarking of airport performance. Air Transport Management, 8, 239-247. doi:10.1016/j.ajsl.2015.03.004
22.
FrowdP.LeiteC. (2013). Affect at the airport. In SalterM.MutluC. (Eds.), Research methods in critical security studies: An introduction (pp. 149-154). New York, NY: Routledge.
23.
GkritzaK.NiemeierD.ManneringF. (2006). Airport security screening and changing passenger satisfaction: An exploratory assessment. Air Transport Management, 12, 213-219. doi:10.1016/j.jairtraman.2006.03.001
24.
GreeneR. (1998). Another materialist rhetoric. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 15, 21-41.
25.
HallR. (2015). The transparent traveler: The performance and culture of airport security. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
26.
HasianM. (2010). U.S. military perceptions of victories in Iraq, the “Long War” against terrorism, and the enduring rhetorical power of the 2006 counterinsurgency manual. Western Journal of Communication, 74, 570-587. doi:10.1080/10570314.2010.512902
27.
HessA. (2011). Critical-rhetorical ethnography: Rethinking the place and process of rhetoric. Communication Studies, 62, 127-152. doi:10.1080/10510974.2011.529750
28.
IvieR. L. (1995). Productive criticism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, 1. doi:10.1080/00335639509384093
LeoneK.LiuR. (2005). The key design parameters of checked baggage security screening systems in airports. Air Transport Management, 11, 69-78. doi:10.1016/j.jairtraman.2004.09.004
31.
LeoneK.LiuR. (2011). Improving airport security screening checkpoint operations in the US via paced system design. Journal of Air Transport Management, 17, 62-67. doi:10.1016/j.jairtraman.2010.05.002
32.
MagnetS.RodgersT. (2012). Stripping for the state. Feminist Media Studies, 12, 101-118. doi:10.1080/14680777.2011.558352
33.
MarratiP. (2006). Time and affects: Deleuze on gender and sexual difference. Australian Feminist Studies, 21, 313-325.
34.
MassumiB. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
McHendryG.MiddletonM.EndresD.Senda-CookS.O’ByrneM. (2014). Rhetorical critic(ism)’s body: Affect and fieldwork on a plane of immanence. Southern Communication Journal, 79, 293-310. doi:10.1080/1041794X.2014.906643
37.
MiddletonM. (2014). “SafeGround Sacrementon” and rhetorics of substantive citizenship. Western Journal of Communication, 78, 119-133. doi:10.1080/10570314.2013.835064
MiddletonM.Senda-CookS.EndresD. (2011). Articulating rhetorical field methods: Challenges and tensions. Western Journal of Communication, 75, 386-406. doi:10.1080/10570314.2011.586969
40.
MitchellG. (2006). Team B intelligence coups. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 92, 144-173. doi:10.1080/00335630600817993
OwenS.EhrenhausP. (2014). The Moore’s Ford lynching reenactment: Affective memory and race trauma. Text and Performance Quarterly, 34, 72-90. doi:10.1080/10462937.2013.856461
43.
PezzulloP. (2014). Deterritorializing. Text and Performance Quarterly, 34, 97-98. doi:10.1080/10462937.2013.841321
44.
PollockD. (2010). Performative writing. In GencarellaS.PezzulloP. (Eds.), Readings on rhetoric and performance (pp. 114-135). State College, PA: Strata Publishing.
45.
ProbynE. (2010). Writing shame. In GreggM.SeigworthG. (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 71-90). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
46.
RatelleJ. (2013). How participant observation contributes to the study of (in)security practices in conflict zones. In SalterM.MutluC. (Eds.), Research methods in critical security studies: An introduction (pp. 75-80). New York, NY: Routledge.
47.
ReddenS. (2012). How lines organize compulsory interaction, emotion management, and “emotional taxes”: The implications of passenger emotion and expression in airport security lines. Management Communication Quarterly, 27, 121-149. doi:10.1177/0893318912458213
48.
RingroseJ. (2011). Beyond discourse? Using Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis to explore affective assemblages, heterosexually striated space, and lines of flight online and at school. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43, 598-618.
49.
RuddickS. (2010). The politics of affect. Theory, Culture & Society, 27, 21-45.
50.
SalterM. (2007). SeMS and sensibility: Security management systems and the management of risk in the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority. Air Transport Management, 13, 389-398. doi:10.1016/j.jairtraman.2007.07.004
51.
SalterM. (2008). Politics at the airport. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
52.
SalterM. (2013a). Expertise in the aviation security field. In SalterM.MutluC. (Eds.), Research methods in critical security studies: An introduction (pp. 105-109). New York, NY: Routledge.
53.
SalterM. (2013b). Introduction. In SalterM.MutluC. (Eds.), Research methods in critical security studies: An introduction (pp. 1-15). New York, NY: Routledge.
54.
SalterM.MutluC. (2013). Research methods in critical security studies: An introduction. New York, NY: Routledge.
55.
SchneierB. (2003). Beyond fear: Thinking sensibly about security in an uncertain world. New York, NY: Copernicus Books.
56.
SeigworthG.GreggM. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In GreggM.SeigworthG. (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1-25). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
57.
Senda-CookS. (2013). Materializing tensions: How maps and trails mediate nature. Environmental Communication, 7, 355-371. doi:10.1080/17524032.2013.792854
58.
StolerL. (2009). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
59.
StollerG. (2013, July12). Oh, the humiliation of flying today; passengers are more than fed up: Some feel violated. USA Today, p. 1B.
60.
StrineM. (1998). Articulating performance/performativity: Disciplinary tasks and the convergences of practice. In TrendJ. (Ed.), Communication views from the helm for the 21st century (pp. 312-317). Boston, MA: Allyn & Beacon.
61.
TaylorB. (1996). Make bomb, save the world: Reflections on dialogic nuclear ethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 25, 120-143. doi:10.1177/089124196025001007
62.
TaylorB. (2002). Organizing the “unknown subject”: Los Alamos, espionage, and the politics of biography. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88, 33-49. doi:10.1080/00335630209384358
63.
TaylorD. (2007). The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
