Overview
At the airport we line up, remove our shoes, empty our pockets, and hold still for three seconds in the body scanner. Deemed safe, we put ourselves back together and are free to buy the beverage we were prohibited from taking through security. In The Transparent Traveler Rachel Hall explains how the familiar routines of airport security choreograph passenger behavior to create submissive and docile travelers. The cultural performance of contemporary security practices mobilizes what Hall calls the ""aesthetics of transparency."" To appear transparent, a passenger must perform innocence and display a willingness to open their body to routine inspection and analysis. Those who cannot-whether because of race, immigration and citizenship status, disability, age, or religion-are deemed opaque, presumed to be a threat, and subject to search and detention. Analyzing everything from airport architecture, photography, and computer-generated imagery to full-body scanners and TSA behavior detection techniques, Hall theorizes the transparent traveler as the embodiment of a cultural ideal of submission to surveillance.
Full Product Details
Author: Rachel Hall
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.30cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.340kg
ISBN: 9780822359609
ISBN 10: 082235960
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 25 September 2015
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
In this compelling study of the politics and culture of airport security, Rachel Hall brings into sharp focus the cultural performances of risk management enacted within and beyond the post-9/11 passenger screening process. Having nothing to hide and proving it by presenting oneself as perpetually prepared for inspection has become the default stance of the modern mobile subject, whether she's passing through airport security, uploading vacation photos to her social media site, or making a hands-free call from her car. For readers wanting a clearer picture of where the 'war on terror' has taken us, Hall's book is well worth the ride. --Kelly A. Gates, author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance
In this compelling study of the politics and culture of airport security, Rachel Hall brings into sharp focus the cultural performances of risk management enacted within and beyond the post-9/11 passenger screening process. Having nothing to hide and proving it by presenting oneself as perpetually prepared for inspection has become the default stance of the modern mobile subject, whether she s passing through airport security, uploading vacation photos to her social media site, or making a hands-free call from her car. For readers wanting a clearer picture of where the 'war on terror' has taken us, Hall s book is well worth the ride. --Kelly A. Gates, author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance
Rachel Hall's study of the performance of surveillance, transparency, and screening at airports offers acute perceptions about the cultural impact of the TSA's screening practices, and her notion of transparency has both immediate political implications and lasting explanatory power. Current debates over surveillance and demands for transparency make this book important and incredibly prescient. --Diana Taylor, author of Performance
Rachel Hall describes a state of emergency that has probably been normal in the rest of the world since the inception of mass air travel, and to non-Americans, it has a whiff of naivety. Nevertheless, this is an excellent book. As Hall observes, the technological and cultural advances in the area of security have been so great and so rapid in recent years that they constitute a major part of our contemporary lives. Her argument centres on notions of transparency, from its aesthetics in a broadly architectural sense, to transparency in terms of biopolitics, to transparency as performance. She writes persuasively of security as theatre, or as she puts it pithily, a cultural performance of risk , demanded both by those in authority and their institutions, and their subjects. It couldn't be any other way: without complicity on the part of the consumer, security simply couldn't be enacted in the way that it is. -- Richard J. Williams Times Higher Education Rachel Hall's study of the performance of surveillance, transparency, and screening at airports offers acute perceptions about the cultural impact of the TSA's screening practices, and her notion of transparency has both immediate political implications and lasting explanatory power. Current debates over surveillance and demands for transparency make this book important and incredibly prescient. -- Diana Taylor, author of Performance In this compelling study of the politics and culture of airport security, Rachel Hall brings into sharp focus the cultural performances of risk management enacted within and beyond the post-9/11 passenger screening process. Having nothing to hide and proving it by presenting oneself as perpetually prepared for inspection has become the default stance of the modern mobile subject, whether she's passing through airport security, uploading vacation photos to her social media site, or making a hands-free call from her car. For readers wanting a clearer picture of where the 'war on terror' has taken us, Hall's book is well worth the ride. -- Kelly A. Gates, author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance
Author Information
Rachel Hall is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University, and the author of Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture.
