Airport Outings: The Coalitional Possibilities of Affective Rupture

ABSTRACT

This article advances a theory of affective rupture and explores its potential as grounds for coalition across substantial lines of difference. Using the unanticipated “outing” of gender-normative breast cancer patients at airport security checkpoints as a case study, I argue that it is in moments of unanticipated scrutiny and vulnerability that existing affective economies are disrupted and new affiliations are facilitated among groups with asymmetrical privilege and contesting agendas. In the case of breast cancer patients, I argue that this affective rupture at the security checkpoint can be grounds for coalition with transwomen who have been similarly mistreated by the Transportation Security Administration for their gender variance. I conclude with a brief sketch of the possibilities and limitations of such a coalition.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• airports
• breast cancer
• coalition
• security
• trans rights

Acknowledgments

I offer my sincerest thanks to my anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback and encouragement. This work would not have been possible without the support of faculty and graduate students at Syracuse University and University of Georgia. I am particularly indebted to my thesis advisor, Dr. Erin J. Rand, and my dissertation advisor, Dr. Celeste M. Condit.

Notes

For this article, I adopt the term breast cancer patient to designate the array of women who are currently in various phases of breast cancer—from diagnosis, surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to reconstruction, prosthetics, and remission. I do this not only to highlight the fact that the discourse of breast cancer medicalizes women’s bodies by figuring people as patients but also to avoid the political valences of the competing labels of “breast cancer survivor” and “breast cancer victim.” I use the word transwoman to designate those individuals who identify with this term or to those designated male at birth who do not identify with that designation. This category comprises an array of individuals, including those who identify as transwomen without modifying their gender performances or undergoing gender-affirming surgeries, those who modify their gender performances to reflect their gender identity, those who engage in hormone replacement therapies or gender-affirming surgeries, as well as those employing any combination of this list. Used as an umbrella to cover a full spectrum of gender performances that deviate from normative gender/sex binaries, the term trans can include transwomen, transmen, transgender, transsexual, androgynous, genderqueer, genderfluid, and queer bodies.

Baril explains: “In trans studies, the prefix ‘cis’ is the antonym of ‘trans.’ A cissexual and cisgender (cis) person is one who has not undergone a sex/gender transition (Serano, 2007). Some authors speak of transphobia (Shelley, 2008), some of cissexism (Serano, 2007), and still others use the terms ‘cisgenderism’ and ‘cisnormativity’ (Bauer et al., 2009; Baril, 2013, pp. 396–397; Baril and Tevenen, 2014; Baril, 2015). While these terms are different … they are variations on a theme designating the material, normative system of oppression that affects transgender/transsexual (trans) people, whom it considers inferior and less normal than cis people” (111).

Klawiter and Lerner argue that it was through their ability to claim surgery as a cure for breast cancer that surgeons elevated their position within the field of medicine (Klawiter 63; Lerner 30).

The exception to this disassociation between transwomen and breast cancer patients is largely reduced to instances where LGBT groups offer support services to and advocacy for members of the LGBT community affected by breast cancer.

Here “unanticipated vulnerability” marks the moments of scrutiny that deviate from the expectations of the breast cancer patient traveler. In other words, while White, heteronormative breast cancer patients may be accustomed to some forms of security—having luggage screened, removal of belts, hats, and shoes—the AIT devices and enhanced pat-down procedures extend those methods of surveillance onto the patient’s body in ways unforeseen. This unforeseen surveillance of one’s body and identity, rather than just one’s possessions, is what generates such potent experiences.

Disability as a unifying term for those with bodies that deviate from an ableist norm is highly contentious. Many advocates distance themselves from the term on the grounds that it reifies the differently abled as the outliers to a body norm. Furthermore, the implication that disability connotes some flaw that should be corrected, often through medical intervention, rather than a simple difference that merits accommodations, creates a stigma separating different groups and discouraging affiliations.

The relentless focus on breast cancer and its relationship to femininity—pink, cheerfulness, colorful headscarves, and so on—belies the significant number of men who develop breast cancer.

This list of scholars advancing work on the political potential of affect and emotion is substantial. In lieu of a lengthy list, I offer a small number or works crucial to this article’s deployment of theorizations of affect and emotion. This list includes Ahmed; Berlant; Brennan; Condit; Smith and Hyde.

In addition to Sturken and Berlant, see Cloud and Feyh’s theory of “emotional fidelity” as a proposed method for discerning progressive from regressive uses of affect and emotion.

Ahmed recounts this story in her chapter on hate, “The Organization of Hate”; however, the woman’s response, while perhaps situated within a culture of racial hatred, seems to more closely resemble what I would label disgust. Regardless of the specific emotion deployed in that moment, the process of subjectivation through affect works the same. The woman is positioned as a subject who hates or is disgusted and Lorde is positioned as a subject who is hated or disgusting. Thus, through the exchange, both individuals are positioned as subjects within an existing affective economy.

This likely occurred because, prior to going through the scanner, Petosky passed as a cisgender female. As a result, the screener operating the machine pressed the pink scan button. This button then deployed one of two algorithms used by the machine to determine any anomalous object on the traveler’s body. The two algorithms, designated as pink and blue on the machine, are set to scan individuals based on the “typical” female body and the “typical” male body, respectively. Therefore, while the outline the screener sees is generic, the scan itself is gendered. The presence of Petosky’s penis, then, registered as an anomaly.

All of the following tweets were posted to Shadi Petosky’s twitter account between September 21, 2015, at 1:08 p.m. EST and September 22, 2015, at 1:25 a.m. EST. In lieu of citing each tweet separately, I have included Petosky’s first tweet about the experience in Works Cited. Direct links to individual tweets can be found in The Advocate’s report on her experience (located in Works Cited under Ennis).

Prior to Petosky’s experience at the airport, most accounts of trans people’s mistreatment by the TSA were published only in trans advocacy publications or LGBTQ-news based blogs and forums.

This theory of affective rupture draws heavily from Butler’s theory of grievability and precarity. She argues that, because of existing epistemological frames of power, some lives “cannot be apprehended as injured or lost [because] they are not first apprehended as living” (Frames of War 1). For Butler, this apprehendability as vulnerable to injury or loss—as precarious and grievable—is the grounds for recognition as a life and the foundation for making demands on a given system to change to protect life and mitigate precarity. Like Ahmed, Butler states that the line between grievable and ungrievable is marked by affect and affective responses. Therefore, an affective response to the way the world “impinges” upon us unexpectedly shifts the allocation of grievability and the possibilities for how we see and relate to others (Frames of War 34).

Their point is well made, although such generalizations should not discount the possibility that the mildness or severity of the emotional outcome depends on radically different individuals and contexts involved.