Abstracting the checkpoint: American fantasy-lives and security nightmares

Abstract

Popular contemporary film and music aestheticize what is already well known throughout the Americas, but cannot be spoken at the state’s threshold: the global expansion of checkpoint architecture as the voyeuristic mechanism of state securitization. From Baauer’s Harlem Shake and Sean Paul’s She Doesn’t Mind, to Latin American films such as Maria Full of Grace and Por Sus Propios Ojos, I demonstrate the erotics of power simultaneously concentrated and disavowed within the space of the checkpoint. As a form of “security sexualization”, checkpoint technologies require the physical, optical or digital stripping of human bodies – a gatekeeping procedure of sovereign command, intrinsic to the satisfaction of security officials’ professional duties, in which denuding surveillance is rhetorically denied any sexual content. This article opens up critical discussion about the fantasy worlds of security sexualization as such, pointing attention to necessary filmic “abstractions” of the security state’s imposing homosociality, and the way in which checkpoint surveillance resists being represented at all.

Keywords:

• security
• sexuality
• checkpoints
• sovereignty
• war on drugs
• Latin America

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Fieni and Karim Mattar for inviting me to the American Comparative Literature Association panel from which this special issue of JPW has sprung into the world. The Departments of Anthropology at Stanford University and at University of Toronto hosted memorable visits, and were instrumental for trying out these ideas before a critically astute and receptive audience. Conversations with Fellows at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, during 2013, have also been helpful. Esther Fernandez, Diana Soltysik, Marina Welker, Adam T. Smith, Lucinda Ramberg, Saida Hodzic and Ian Whitmarsh have been wonderfully insightful interlocutors throughout the process of writing.