(S)he shall not be moved: Gender, bodies and travel rights in the post-9/11 era

Abstract

Using examples from the gendered targeting of airport security assemblages post-9/ 11, this article points out that the travelable body is straight; healthy; identifiable in sex, gender and race; not clearly religious; and, depending on where it is in the world, of a particular race and/ or ethnicity. This article looks at the securitized production of the travelable body through gender lenses. It reads several key changes in people's rights to movement as gendered, as significant and as signifying fundamental changes in (gendered) security orders. Particularly, building on Cynthia Enloe's use of the idea of secure states containing insecure women to critique both the actual security of the state and women's position in it, this article makes the argument that the gendered violations of people's rights to movement and bodily integrity post-9/11 is a step backwards both for human security within the state and for the national security of the state.

Gender at the Border: Global Responses to Gender-Diverse Subjectivities and Nonbinary Registration Practices

“…Now prevalent in airports worldwide, millimeter-wave imaging machines like the one Petosky passed through require security agents to interpret every passenger's gender by pushing either a pink ("female") or a blue ("male") button as they approach the machine. As was the case in this situation, bodies that do not match the security agent's reading as unequivocally male or female activate security responses (Clarkson 2019;Magnet and Rodgers 2012;Quinan 2017;Sjoberg 2015). What transpired was documented by Petosky on Twitter during a series of live tweets that detailed the humiliating treatment she endured at the hands of TSA agents (Spalding 2016).…”

“We touch their heart”: Plastic Automaticity and Affective Labour at Jakarta Soekarno‐Hatta Airport

“…(CheckinAgent03, female, 20s) Perhaps over-confidently, Jakarta's staff see human profiling practices as more holistic and trustworthy than self-check-in or a machine checking identity documents, as these technologies might miss making intuitive connections and associations. Of course, there are the commonly gendered techno-mediated visual and physical practices of sexist, and cissexist forms of airport security scrutiny that produce the passenger as "untravellable" (Redden and Terry 2013;Sjoberg 2015), especially as they express imperfect human proclivities and judgements within, through, and especially at the fringes of human-machine interfaces at airports. In Jakarta, these technologies, it seems, cannot be solely relied upon, but draw from skilled embodied sensitivities usually cast as female capacities-especially intuition which has been characterised in very different but in caring and also diagnostic labour practices (James 1989).…”