The End of the Line

Abstract

The transmission and interpretation of information generated from full-body scanners is increasingly becoming a site of contestation in airport security queues all over the world. Body scanning technology raises questions surrounding the rights of governments to images of human bodies, acts of surveillance and to what extent technologies such as full-body scanners are helping to make us more 'secure' -or are disadvantaging particular groups of bodies. We examine the use of full-body scanners and their consequences from a feminist perspective, demonstrating how the scanners constitute both a 'gendered technology' and a 'gendered practice'. In addition we present a typology outlining several forms of feminist resistance that have manifested in reaction to the use of this technology. While these acts do not necessarily pose an overt challenge to the larger airport security structure, as they occur within rigidly defined boundaries, they do offer the space for individuals to exercise some autonomy and control over their bodies. By engaging with feminist security scholarship as well as theoretical approaches concerned with reclaiming the 'everyday' as a space for feminist agency, we begin to unravel the complicated web of full-body scanning technology.---

“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).…”