Air travel inverts gender surveillance to target male bodies
Evidence
The boys and young men with whom I spoke expressed far more body-related anxiety about the actual act of travel (going through security, interacting with TSA officials, and boarding aircraft) than did young women. This is somewhat counter to conventional understandings or treatments of gender and the body, which take as their starting point the assumption that the feminine body encounters a disproportionate amount of attention and surveillance. While this is certainly the case in a preponderance of social settings, it is instructive to turn attention to the spaces in which men’s bodies are mined for meaning, such as “in-between” places like airplanes, transit carriages, and terminals. Thus, terrorism was the organizing logic behind the gendered racialization of Iranian American boys and men as they attempted to fly to their destinations. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 381
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to my earlier reading on ‘monster/terrorist/fag’ complex and on how liminal spaces reorder power — resonance with Canary’s analysis of surveillance and passing. — connects to: More Facebook use increases body surveillance regardless of gender — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1478; Iranian American men face heavier travel-related body surveillance than women. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian…, 846