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Understanding Representation

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Journal of Visual Culture
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journal of visual culture

Points of Departure: The Culture of US Airport Screening

Lisa Parks

University of California-Santa Barbara, parks{at}filmandmedia.ucsb.edu

Treating the airport checkpoint as part of the new security regime, this article concentrates on three issues. First, it considers the working conditions of Transportation Security Agency (TSA) employees whom the US government pays to screen passengers, and emphasizes the enduring physicality of their labor despite the technologization of the checkpoint. Second, it explores new techniques of inspection implemented at TSA checkpoints and delineates practices of `close sensing' that establish continuities between looking and touching. Finally, the article describes the object-oriented visual economy that takes shape at the checkpoint, and suggests that the x-ray sequence ultimately exposes the state's inability to regulate the flow of objects and matter in the age of globalization. Thus the searches, exposures, and probes that define this threshold should be understood not just in terms of individual privacy invasions, but rather as an opportunity to focus on structural changes in federal labor, state surveillance and globalization that have emerged since 9/11.

Key Words: airport screening • imaging technologies • national security • 9/11 • objects • surveillance • travel

Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 6, No. 2, 183-200 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1470412907078559
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