At the airport we line up, remove our shoes, empty our pockets, and hold still for three seconds in the body scanner. Deemed safe, we put ourselves back together and are free to buy the beverage we were prohibited from taking through security. In The Transparent Traveler Rachel Hall explains how the familiar routines of airport security choreograph passenger behavior to create submissive and docile travelers. The cultural performance of contemporary security practices mobilizes what Hall calls the "aesthetics of transparency." To appear transparent, a passenger must perform innocence and display a willingness to open their body to routine inspection and analysis. Those who cannot-whether because of race, immigration and citizenship status, disability, age, or religion-are deemed opaque, presumed to be a threat, and subject to search and detention. Analyzing everything from airport architecture, photography, and computer-generated imagery to full-body scanners and TSA behavior detection techniques, Hall theorizes the transparent traveler as the embodiment of a cultural ideal of submission to surveillance.
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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Hall, Rachel, [date] author. The transparent traveler : the performance and culture of airport security / Rachel Hall. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN9780822359395 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN9780822359609 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN9780822375296 (ebook) 1. Airports—Security measures—United States. 2. Aeronautics, Commercial—Security measures—United States. 3. United States. Transportation Security Administration. 4. United States—Social conditions—21st century. I. Title. HE9797.4.S4H35 2015 363.28'70973—dc23 2015010109
Cover art: Hasan Elahi,Transit v4.1, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
For Dustin
CONTENTS
ix Acknowledgments
1INTRODUCTIONRETHINKING ASYMMETRICAL TRANSPARENCYRisk Management, the Aesthetics of Transparency, and the Global Politics of Mobility
25CHAPTER 1THE ART OF PERFORMING CONSUMER AND SUSPECTTransparency Chic as a Model of Privileged, Securitized Mobility
57CHAPTER 2OPACITY EFFECTSThe Performance and Documentation of Terrorist Embodiment
77CHAPTER 3TRANSPARENCY EFFECTSThe Implementation of FullBody and Biometric Scanners at US Airports
109CHAPTER 4HOW TO PERFORM VOLUNTARY TRANSPARENCY MORE EFFICIENTLYAirport Security Pedagogy in the Post9/11 Era
131CHAPTER 5PERFORMING INVOLUNTARY TRANSPARENCY The TSA’s Turn to Behavior Detection
157CONCLUSIONTRANSPARENCY BEYOND US AIRPORTSInternational Airports, “Flying” Checkpoints, ControlledTone Zones, and Lateral Behavior Detection
179Notes
205Bibliography
219Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first became interested in airport security in 2006, when living and work ing apart from my partner, Dustin Howes. He was teaching in southern Maryland. I was teaching in southern Louisiana. During the two long years that we lived apart, I spent a lot of time alone in both major metropolitan and small regional airports. Initially, airport security grabbed my attention as an irritating obstacle: a bureaucratic apparatus separating me from the one I loved. I sought my revenge through writing. I would pass the time by jotting down observations and later developed those sketchy notes into snapshots or short, sharply focused critiques of various aspects of the per formance and culture of airport security. Since those early attempts to document and mount a response to airport madness within the United States after 9/11, many colleagues have offered constructive criticism and encouraged me to keep working on it. Kelly Gates and Shoshana Magnet gave me my first opportunity to write about airport security for an audience when they asked me to join a panel on surveillance at the National Communication Association in the fall of 2006. Later, they kindly extended me an invitation to submit a revised ver