Etae

TRANSPOLITICS 1AC
1ac
The assemblage of airport security allows the State to divide the

population into desirable and undesirable, channeling the
body into information.
Wilcox, Lecturer in Gender Studies, 15[Lauren B. Wilcox, University Lecturer in Gender Studies and phD in Political
Science,Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, 105-108, 2015]E.E.
At the same time, the materiality of bodies is not completely obscured or made irrelevant. The second part of this chapter shifts focus from bodies to
embodiment, that is, from bodies as signs in discourse to the experi ence of life as a body that people in culture can articulate (Hayles 1993, 148). I
focus on the gap between the supposed "neutrality" of the body scanners and the security assemblage and the
experiences of many who have protested the procedures as an invasion of privacy or a sexualized violation of
their bodies and on the experience of trans- and genderqueer people as moments of contestation over the
"truth' and materiality of the body. The informationalization of bodies in order to reveal deviancy and danger
reveals the investment of 'security' in rendering bodies legible the experience of trans- people as presenting 'anomalous'
bodies in this assemblage exposes the dynamics of security as not revealing the truth of suspicious or dangerous bodies, but in
producing deviant and "safe' bodies. These bodies are produced as deviant in the airport security assemblage not
just because they do not conform to gender expectations, but because they do not conform to the state's desire to regulate
bodies as fixed and unchanging, a desire that is undermined by the trans- disruption of the state's assumption of
bodies and genders as fixed and immutable. AIRPORT SECURITY ASSEMBLAGES AND BODIES OF INFORMATION While the
main focus of this chapter is the controversial body scanners, such technologies cannot be adequately theorized in isolation. Rather, they
must be seen as part of a broader milieu, or assemblage. The body scanners are a component of a broader security assemblage of
borders and especially airpor ts that includes multiplebodiesand technological artifacts and blurs the line between local and global in the provision
of security.' Bodies here are not only human bodies. Mark Salter reminds us that the airport is part of an architecture of
control that makes subjects into docile bodies (2007, 51-52). Bodies are produced by this security assemblage in relation to
other bodies and artifacts. I consider this security assemblage to be a "practice of violence; related to the other
practices of violence dis-cussed in this book, because it is a form of managing violence, interven-ing on a field in which
transportation networks and large crowds are sites where violence may occur both to the bodies of humans and to the
flow and functioning of international capital . It is also implicated in practices of normative violence as it
(re)produces certain bodies and certain lives as "real' and normal and others as aberrations . This assemblage
includes the technological artifacts of scanners, the architecture of airports into 'sterile' and "non.sterfle zones, the bodies of travelers,
and the personnel trained to conduct searches and translate Information about bodies into decisions about the
riskiness of a body. In this security regime, everybody is perceived as at least potentially destructive (Epstein 2007,
155). Airport security procedures are boundary-producing practices, insofar as they not only enact the sovereignty of statesover
their territory (even if airportsare not located at the geographic borders of states), but also produce boundar-ies between
acceptable bodies and deviant bodies. The territorial boundary between states is increasingly viewed as insuf-ficient for thinking about
the political effects of various forms of borders (Walker 1993; Rumford 2006; Walters 2006; Vaughan-Williams 2009). The airport serves as a
de-territorialization of the border; it is a liminal space, a space of transition from one state to the next (Salter 2005). As such, it is a
particularly significant place to investigate bodies as sites of politics . given the significance of the maintenance of bodies to
securing the borders, as discussed in the previous chapter. In the context of the "war on terror' in which security threats are not associated with any
particular territory or state but rather with mobile actors who seem to blend in to avoid detec-tion , threats to security are not imagined as
invading armies, but mobile individuals, actors, and processes (Adey 2004). Rather than the threat of nuclear war, which promoted a
national security apparatus focused on the military, the post-Cold War era has resulted in a shift in security focus to non-state and transnational
threats, including the drug trade, terrorism, and illegal immigration. Policing the borders has become a major security concern, and the line between
law enforcement and intelligence/military operations is blurred (Andreas 2003 ). Airport security assemblage also cannot be
understood apart from the broader movement toward Increased state surveillance in Europe and North America,
and especially toward the use of biometric technologies for both identification and verification of that Identity
(Pugliese 2010). Passports emerged as a way of regulat-ing movement and of determining who is a citizen and who is a
foreigner (Torpey 2000). The state borders (and the Schengen border in Europe) are increasingly managed biometrically. While border
management serves to sort out "insiders' and "outsiders : desirable and non-desirable travelers, n ational
identification schemes and attempts to both increase and central-ize the data collected (including the "Real ID'
program in the United States, which sets standards and coordinates local data) Increase the surveillance capacities of states and enable
their abilities to identify who does and who do not belong inside the state. In other words, the border, understood as a technology of social
exclusion, does not end at the border as state surveil-lance capacities increase (Lyon 2005). The United States deploys what it
terms a "multilayered" strategy for border security. The 'Secure Flight program is about identifying indi-viduals based on
their name. birthdate, gender, and address, requiring people to give this information exactly as it appears on
government-issued documents when they book flights. Thus, "Secure Flight serves as a type of virtual border, tracking visitors
before they reach the physical bor-der. " Secure
Flight matches this information with the FBI's Terrorism Screening

Center's 'no fly* list, which uses data mining and profiling tech-niques to 'pre-screen' individuals and create
this list based on a statistical calculation of riskiness. ' The focus here is not yet on the physical body of the traveler him- or
herself, but on data that the state can search for signs regarding risk or trustworthiness. The addition of gender and date of birth to the information
collected by the United States is intended to reduce the number of false positives of people selected for additional airport screen-ings and further
visa scrutiny because their names are similar to those on the Terrorism Watch List (Currah and Mulqueen 2011).
This promotes the body binary as truth while the infinite

possibilities of the mind are ignored.
Aas, professor in Criminology, 06[Katja Franko Aas, The body does not lie: Identity, risk and trust in
technoculture, Crime Media Culture, 2006]E.E.
At the same time, biometric identification does not present the familiar theme of postmodern, freefloating consciousness and the disappearance of embodiment in cyberspace (van der Ploeg,
1999a). Quite the opposite: biometrics gives the body unprecedented relevance over the mind. Now, the
body itself becomes the source of information. The coded body can talk. An iris scan or a fingerprint is
a first and necessary step into the world of information. A talking individual, who owns the body,
is in fact seen as unnecessary and, even more importantly, insufficient for identification. Now, only the body
can talk in the required ways, through the unambiguous and cryptic language of codes and algorithms .
When a body provides the password, a world of information opens . Databases begin to talk. On the
other hand, when the individual talks, the words are only met with suspicion . Quite often in cases of
biometric identification, the body can communicate when the mind does not want to. DNA samples
and fingerprints can give out information without individuals concession, often without
their knowledge. The whole point behind biometric identification is, in fact, that the mind is
deceiving while the body is truthful. Individuals stigma is therefore defined through their
biological makeup, rather than through their beliefs and behaviour. The body in a sense,
comes to be marked with stigmata signs on the flesh . . . Signs, moreover, written by the authorities,
that turn the individuals body into a witness against themselves (van der Ploeg, 1999a:
301). Or, to borrow Giorgio Agambens (2004) expression, bodies become marked by biopolitical
tatoos, which distinguish between good and bad citizens. The body thus emerges as a source of
instant truth. Surveillance of the body is therefore not simply a question of finding information
about individuals identities; it is also a question of creating identities. As van der Ploeg (1999a)
points out in her analysis of the Eurodac: rather than determining any preexisting
identity, these practices may be better understood as ways to establish identity, in the sense that identity
becomes that which results from these efforts (p. 300, emphasis in original). Immigration
authorities, faced with immigrants and asylum applicants possessing nothing but their
stories are, with the help of technology, able to produce an identity that is independent
of that story, and yet undeniably belonging to that person (p. 300). Identity is therefore not
established on the basis of self-knowledge and a biographical narrative that an individual can present about
him/herself. Rather, it is non-verbal and implemented through symbols that are completely empty of meaning .
The condition is well described in Lashs (2003) analysis of reflexive modernity, where
subjects no longer have enough time nor distance for reflection and creation of narrative biographies , and
where the Cartesian subject of I think therefore I am becomes instead I am I. As Lash notes, I
think therefore I am has to do with reflection. I am I has more to do with reflex (p. 51). One of the
consequences, in the case of biometric identification, is that this new logic transforms the ways
in which deviance is constructed and social norms are enforced. Technological systems no longer address
persons as whole persons with a coherent, situated self and a biography, but rather make decisions on the
bases of singular signs, such as a fingerprint (see also Jones, 2000; Aas, 2005).
This leads to the social exclusions of those whose minds do not tell
the truth which their body is speaking those who do not fit
in the binary of information.
My point here is not to repeat the familiar themes of post-modern fragmentation of the subject or the alienation
of the body and the self, although I do consider them relevant. The story of coded bodies and bodies as
passwords is not only a story about how passwords are accepted and privileges are obtained, but also a story of
passwords denied and doors closed. Biometric identification is gradually becoming a vital element in the
mechanisms of social exclusion (Muller, 2004). This form of identification is particularly relevant since its mode
of operation enables identification and denial of access at a distance, thus fitting perfectly into contemporary
modes of disembedded global governance. Using the Eurodac system, a police officer can get a fingerprint
identification in a matter of minutes rather than weeks or months. The decision to deny entry into a country can
be reached almost entirely by a technological system, rather than having to address the intricate issues of need,
despair and justifications for help. Biometric identification can, therefore, not only serve as a point of
discussion of the importance of the body and somatic individuality in contemporary culture, but also as an image
of the changing mechanisms of social exclusio n (Young, 1999). We can take a cue from Mary Douglass
(1970/2005) view of bodily control as an expression of social control . Douglas argues that the human body is
always treated as an image of society and . . . there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not
involve at the same time a social dimension (p. 79). She sees rituals of bodily control, of eliminating dirt, as
ways of containing disorder and organizing the social environment . Today, we too, are trying to maintain order
through the rituals of bodily control. A question arises, though: what kind of order is it? At first glance, one could
assume that this order is simply technological. Technical tasks, performed by biometric machines, may appear
just that technical tasks. Yet, as Heidegger (1977: 35) reminds us, the essence of technology is nothing
technological. Therefore, what is seemingly objective and purely technological, needs to be discerned. We need
to examine how images of order are constructed, and look into the symbolic and the social behind the veil of
the technological. The growing demand for technological verification of identity is a result of intricate
connections between our notions of the self, order, efficiency and security. Behind the growing acceptance of
new forms of verification of identity, by biometric passports , ID cards or DNA databases, are the fears
connected to those who are unidentified, unidentifiable or identity-less, such as potentially fraudulent welfare
recipients, terrorists, immigrants and asylum seekers. If dirt is matter out of place (Douglas, 1995), then they
are the dirty, the disorderly, the out of place, whose minds cannot be trusted but whose bodies do not lie.
When the body becomes a password, it must be either true or

false such systems do not take into account personal
negotiation
biometric information is that it can be understood by passport officials, aid workers, police officers and
laboratory technicians anywhere in the world. Most importantly, it can be understood by computers. The speed with
A vital aspect of
which they provide data about peoples origin, age and movements makes them quicker than any previous forms of identification.
With these technologies,

the deviance of individuals or better, their risk, are defined by a singular sign or a
combination of signs that require no communication with the holder of the signs. All these
procedures are in fact designed precisely to minimize the need for any such communication. Now, the body can give out
information without in any way involving the individuals in question. Except, of course, for their
They enable immediate action instead of time-consuming speech, negotiation and reflection.
physical presence. Several researchers and civil liberty groups have pointed out the possibilities for mistakes made by biometric
technologies and the almost nonexistent mechanisms for finding out and correcting these mistakes. Biometrics and DNA tend to be
presented as silver bullet solutions to pressing problems. However, the implementation of these technologies, as any other, is not
unproblematic as they are open to inaccuracy, misuse and privacy violations, something that has become apparent also in the recent
of biometric forms of
identification. Not only do they minimize the need for verbal communication, they almost
completely eliminate the possibilities for doubt and negotiation. 3 When our bodies function
as passwords, they enter a binary universe of acceptance or denial, positive or negative,
EU debates about biometric passports. 2 Here, we come to one of the vital aspects
right or false. The certainty of the answers, the exclusion of doubt and the perceived
infallibility of the technological systems, are a vital part of their effectiveness. However,
this binary logic has profound consequences for the nature of our sociality and social
norms. Lianos and Douglas (2000) go as far as concluding that technologically mediated contexts of
interaction lead to a transformation of culture so radical that it amounts to denial.
Negotiation is the prime constituent of culture. The cultural process involves essentially
the mutual understanding of communication and the development of mental skills that promote it.But
negotiating with an ASTE [Automated Socio-technical Environment] is by definition
impossible. The limits of interaction are set in advance and the whole existence of the user is condensed into specific
legitimizing signals which are the only meaningful elements for the system. (p. 106) technologically mediated systems for verification
of identity thus establish their own parameters of action. They are to a large extent self-sufficient, since they are capable of acting
without the local knowledge of the environments in which they operate. A UN aid worker thus no longer needs to possess detailed
knowledge of the people to whom he or she hands out aid, nor does an employer or a prison officer need to possess detailed,
personal knowledge of the people whose drug use they evaluate .
These systems are part of what Lash (2002: 15)

describes as culture at a distance and in which forms of life become forms of life at-adistance. Lash suggests that in technological cultures social relations and nature itself are
experienced at great distance and through human/machine interfaces. DNA and biometric
databases are media through which nature is externalized, stored, communicated and
analysed by actors distant in time and space:
These body binary ignores the personal truth, distancing a persons

reality from the information that their body tells.
Instead of seeing individuals in terms of a certain unity of body and mind, of their physical and social identity, the
corporal fused with the technological now prevails as the main source of information , and thereby, truth. It is
important to point out, though, that this truth, as Lyon (2001: 74) reminds us, is only individual. It is not a personal truth.
The body does not lie, but the truth it tells is still only the truth about the body, thus traces rather than tradition are
what connects body with place (p. 19). One gains information about how many times an individual has crossed a
border or attempted to enter a country illegally, about an individuals DNA profile, whether an individual has been using
drugs or how old he or she really is, but not personal knowledge about people and the causes of their actions . A
question is, of course, whether we can ever obtain such knowledge in the first place . However, biometric knowledge makes no attempts
at it. It is not knowledge based on mutual communication, but rather knowledge based on one-way
observation. It is clearly knowledge marked by a power relation.
The combination of a binary of the body alongside the binary of

that which is correct and incorrect forms a system in which
there is the abnormal body the body whose personal truth
conflicts with the truth that their body tells. This is the
transgender, the queer, who is both a nothingness, being
included in the binary of bodies; and a monstrosity, who goes
outside of the binary truth that the body tells
(This is not carded, but is rather an explanation of the points leading up until now, so that the next card can be
better understood)
The creation of the abnormal body leads to overkilling, in which

the queer body is killed for both its nonexistence in the eyes
of normative structures as well as its monstrosity and
nonconformity the killing of not just the body, but the
queerness itself. (Im not sure if this needs a trigger warning,
but if any card needed it, it would be this one).
Stanley, fellow in departments of Communication and Critical Gender Studies,
2011, [Eric A. Stanley, Presidents Postdoctoral fellow in the departments of Communication and Critical Gender Studies at the University of
California, San Diego. Along with Chris Vargas, Eric directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers(2013). A co\editor of the
anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) which won the Prevention for a Safe Society award
and was recently named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, Erics other writing can be found in the journals Social Text, American
Quarterly, and Women and Performance as well as in numerous collections, Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture,
https://queerhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/near-life-queer-death-eric-stanley.pdf, 2011]E.E.
Overkill is a term used to indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. Overkill is often determined
The
temporality of violence, the biological time when the heart stops pushing and pulling blood, yet the killing is not finished, suggests
the aim is not simply the end of a specific life, but the ending of all queer life . This is the time of queer death,
when the utility of violence gives way to the pleasure in the others mortality. If queers , along with others,
approximate nothing, then the task of ending, of killing, that which is nothing must go beyond normative times of life and death. In other words,
if Lauryn was dead after the first few stab wounds to the throat, then what do the remaining fifty wounds signify? The legal theory that is
offered to nullify the practice of overkill often functions under the name of the trans- or gay-panic defense. Both of these defense strategies
argue that the murderer became so enraged after the discovery of either genitalia or someones sexuality they
were forced to protect themselves from the threat of queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans-panic
by the postmortem removal of body parts, as with the partial decapitation in the case of Lauryn Paige and the dissection of Rashawn Brazell.
defense and received a four-year prison sentence after admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina transwoman, at least twenty times with a pair of scissors.
Importantly, this defense is often used, as in the cases of Robles and Paige, after the murderer has engaged in some kind of sex with the victim. The
logic of the trans-panic defense as an explanation for overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers us a way of
understanding queers as the nothing of Mbembes query. Overkill names the technologies necessary to do away with that which is
already gone. Queers then are the specters of life whose threat is so unimaginable that one is forced, not simply to
murder, but to push them backward out of time, out of History, and into that which comes before. 27 In thinking the overkill of Paige and
Brazell, I return to Mbembes query, But what does it mean to do violence to what is nothing ?28 This question in its elegant
brutality repeats with each case I offer. By resituating this question in the positive, the something that is more often than not translated as the human is
made to appear. Of interest here, the category of the human assumes generality, yet can only be activated through the 10 Stanley Near Life, Queer Death
!HUJA s Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar specificity of historical and politically located intersection. To this end, the human, the something of this
query, within the context of the liberal democracy, names rights-bearing subjects, or those who can stand as subjects before the law. The human, then,
makes the nothing not only possible but necessary. Following this logic, the work of death, of the death that is already nothing, not quite human, binds
the categorical (mis)recognition of humanity. The human, then, resides in the space of life and under the domain of rights,
whereas the queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and the zone of death . As perpetual and axiomatic
threat to the human, the queer is the negated double of the subject of liberal democracy. Understanding the nothing as the unavoidable
shadow of the human serves to counter the arguments that suggest overkill and antiqueer violence at large are
a pathological break and that the severe nature of these killings signals something extreme. In contrast, overkill
is precisely not outside of, but is that which constitutes liberal democracy as such. Overkill then is the proper
expression to the riddle of the queer nothingness. Put another way, the spectacular material-semiotics of overkill should not be read as
(only) individual pathology; these vicious acts must indict the very social worlds of which they are ambassadors. Overkill is what it means,
what it must mean, to do violence to what is nothing . Surplus Violence After finishing a graveyard shift washing dishes for minimum
wage at a local Waffle House, eighteen-year-old Scotty Joe Weaver stopped by his moms to give her some money he owed her
before heading home to his green and white trailer in the rural town of Pine Grove, Alabama. Scotty Joe was a drag performer in local
bars with a fondness and talent for working Dolly Parton. He had dropped out of school some years before in the hope of escaping constant harassment
and daily physical attacks. Scotty Joe, like many eighteen-year-old queers, was excited about his recent move to his own place
with his best friend Nichole Kelsay. Kelsays boyfriend, Christopher Gaines, had also been staying at their trailer
along with his friend, Robert Porter. Weavers modest trailer home was, according to his mother, not much and was puzzled into a neighborhood
of thirty or so trailers. 29 Returning home in the early morning hours, worn out from a long nights work, Weaver, alone, took a nap on his
couch. As Kelsay, Gaines, and Porter ate pancakes in a restaurant and made last-minute decisions regarding the
plan to murder Weaver that had begun the week before, Weaver slept for the last tim e. Kelsay, Gaines, and Porter
returned to the trailer home in the early afternoon and found Weaver still asleep. Kelsay Social Text 107 s Summer 2011 11 locked herself in the bathroom
as Gaines said to Porter, OK. Come on. Lets do it.30 Porter first struck Weaver in the head with a blunt
object. As blood poured down the back of his skull, Kelsay, Gaines, and Porter tied him tightly to a kitchen
chair. Over the next few hours, Weaver was beaten repeatedly and stabbed with an assortment of sharp objects.
Gaines and Porter then strangled him for about ten minutes with a nylon bag until he fell unconscious to the
floor. Blood was oozing from Weavers ears, which according to the prosecutor was a sign that he was still alive.
Unsure, Gaines kicked Weavers seemingly lifeless body to see if they had been successful. The details of what
happened, and what actually ended Weavers life, are lost within a collage of accusations and denial. Dr. Kathleen Enstice of the Alabama Department of
Forensic Sciences, through her sketches and snapshots at the trial, suggested that Weaver was also stabbed twice in his face and at least nine more times
in his chest with several cuts to the rest of his body. He was also partially decapitated . Weavers body was then, according to a jailhouse
phone interview with Gaines, wrapped in a blanket (and his head in a towel), dragged into Weavers bedroom, and placed on his mattress. Thinking that
if the airconditioning temperature was turned way down, the incriminating smells of decomposing queer flesh might be slowed, Gaines and Porter
cooled the room, took $80 in cash that Weaver had on him, along with his ATM card, and left . Kelsay, Gaines, and Porters
original plan was to throw Weavers body into a nearby river, and the three had even purchased cinder blocks to weigh him to the rivers floor. However,
the three feared that the body would surface, so after the murder they returned to the Walmart where the supplies had been purchased and received a
$2.11 refund for the cinder blocks. After hitting up the local Dairy Queen and Arbys for lunch, they went to Kelsays
mothers house to play some cards and relax. Later that evening Porter and Gaines returned to the trailer to
dispose of Scotty Joes body. They stuffed the blanket-wrapped body into the trunk of Gainess car, then stopped by a gas station and filled an
empty Coke bottle with gasoline. About eight miles deep in a nearby pine grove, Porter and Gaines laid out Weavers
body, along with other incriminating evidence, and doused it with the gasoline . After the two urinated on the
body, they set it afire and drove back to town. Weavers charred and mutilated remains were later found by a person on an ATV. Wounds
of Intimacy The queer, here Rashawn Brazell, Lauryn Paige, or Scotty Joe Weaver, is forced to embody to the point of obliteration
the movement between abject nothingness at one enda generality that enables queers to be killed so easily and
frequentlyand at the other end, the approximation of a terrorizing threat as a symbol of shattering difference,
monstrosity, and irreconcilable contradiction . This fetishistic structure allows one to believe that queers are an
inescapable threat and at the same time know that they are nothing . According to Lum Weaver, Scotty Joes older brother,
Gaines had always had issues with Scotty Joes homosexuality. As in the majority of interpersonal antiqueer violence, t he attackers knew, and in
this case even lived with, their target. The murder of Weaver must be read as a form of intimate violence not only because of
the relationship the murderers had to Weaver, but also, and maybe more important, because of the technologies of vivisection that
were deployed. As Kelsay, Gaines, and Porter had, according to testimony, at least a week to plan the murder, it seems logical that, during
that time in rural Alabama, they could have produced a gun that would have made the murder much less gruesome .
However, the three decided to cut and rip Weaver to pieces using raw force. The psychic distance that may be
produced through the scope of a hunting rifle, and the possible dissociation it might provide, is the opposite of
blood squirting from your former roommates chest and the bodily strength it takes to lunge a knife into the
flesh and bone of a human body. The penetrative violence, the moments when Gaines was thrusting his knife into Weavers body, stages a
kind of terrorizing sexualized intimacy . If Weaver was at once so easy to kill, and at the same time so monstrous that he
had to be killed, this intimate overkill might also help us to understand why antiqueer violence tends to take
this form. Weaver was, after all, the roommate and best friend of one of his killers. However, at the same
time, robbing him would not be enough, killing him would not be enough, the horror of Weavers queerness
forced his killers to mutilate, decapitate, and burn his body. This tender hostility of ravaging love and tactile brutality may be an
opening for the task of facing the question scribed on the bathroom wall, What if it feels good to kill or mutilate homos? The disavowal of the
queer threat through a murderous pleasure signals a much more complicated structure of desire and
destruction. This complex structure of phobia and fetishism, not unlike the pleasure and pain Kelsay might
have experienced as she helped slaughter her best friend, asks us to consider antiqueer violence outside the
explanatory apparatus that situates all antiqueer violence on the side of pure hate, intolerance, or prejudice
This also results is the construction of a dominant security discourse that allows the
state to wage wars in the name of isolating clear borders and binaries.
Redden and Terry 11 Stephanie, professor of political science at Carleton University, Jillian, Department of International Relations at
London School of Economics and Political Science, The End of the Line: Feminist Understandings of Resistance to Full Body Scanning Technology,
International Feminist Journal of Politics Jun2013, Vol. 15 Issue 2, p234-253. 20p. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=a9h&AN=88353443&site=ehost-live xx AD 7/16/15; AV
This literature is intimately connected to the theoretical work of feminist security scholars in International Relations who have unpacked some of the
complex relationships existing between gender and security. As Iris Marion Young (2003: 2) suggests, the logic of masculinist protection that has
increasingly permeated statesociety security relations in the post-9/11 era relies on particular understandings of fear and threat based in gendered
assumptions of masculinity and femininity. Using Youngs logic, we
see a particular way in which the security state

requires citizens to relinquish certain freedoms (such as a right to privacy) in order to
obtain security from potential threats to the State most commonly identified since
9/11 as terrorists. There is reliance in the security state on the notion of the State as
protector and con- sequently, of the public as protected which is highly gendered .
External to its borders, the security state uses its protector identity to wage wars, while
internally it must expose the enemy within in order to protect its people. As Young (2003: 8)
suggests, to protect the state and its citizens, officials must therefore keep a careful watch on the people within its borders and observe and search them
to make sure they do not intend evil actions. The
gendered roots and implications of these observations

and searches are nowhere more evident than in the use of body scanning technology in
airports around the world; this suggests that feminist security scholarship has likely
fruitful insights to call for analyses of full-body scanners and their impacts on the lives
of air travelers generally and particularly women. Lauren Wilcox also asserts this connection between international
security and protection which necessitates gender as a component of security practices. As she helpfully points out, this
practice of protection constitutes gendered identities that promote conflict-seeking
behavior in men and states looking to live up to dominant or hegemonic
understandings of masculinity (Wilcox 2009: 220). While Wilcoxs analysis focuses more specifically on military
action, it is possible to make similar feminist readings of security practices at the domestic and transnational level, such as the body scanning technology
employed in airports. The
connections between these technologies and a hegemonic

masculinity based in logics of protection result in practices that are deeply problematic
when examined through a gender lens. When considering the body as a central focus
for feminist security scholarship, it is possible to uncover the particular violence that
occurs in airport security queues when individuals are required to undergo full-body
scans. As previous examples pointed out, men are indeed susceptible to unjust and
inappropriate comments and interactions when passing through airport body
scanners, but so is commonly the case with security practices, the experiences of
women with full- body scanning technology are likely to be disproportionately negative
due to the pervasiveness of embedded gender inequalities in society. Indeed, as Kleiman makes clear,
these technologies have specific connota- tions for female passengers, stemming from their broader experiences as women in society. Primarily,
she argues, that it represents a modern manifes- tation of an old fear held by many
women: being stripped naked by a stran- ger, which has long served as a pervasive
device by which men keep women in line (Kleiman 2010: 2). As she explains: [Public
nakedness] puts a woman in mind of fear she carries around all the time . . . And thats
why I suspect most women know intuitively that full-body scans are the bridge too far:
the privacy violation that simply cant be tolerated. Ive been fortunate. Ive never been stripped
or raped. And I dont propose to let a government agent be the one to end my lucky
streak. (Kleiman 2010: 2, emphasis added) While it is important to note that this technology has negative and problematic implications for other
groups of passengers in addition to women, Klei- mans article importantly puts into relief the degree to which this technology has gendered effects in
practice. In this passage, Kleiman highlights the ways in which it draws on and contributes to existing gendered social experiences, outside the airport
security context. This also fits with Monahans (2009: 291) primary critique of viewing technology (especially surveillance technologies) as neutral,
because, as he asserts, in doing so, exercises
of power are rendered invisible by nature of the

supposed neutrality of technologies.
Thus, Our Advocacy: We Advocate to the abolishment of the secure

flight program within FAA owned airports as both a first step
and representation of the denial of bodily information
binaries
Another policy wont save usrather we must reject dominant policy constructions that
enshrine binary gender as the condition for securitized violence.
Beauchamp 09Toby Beauchamp, Ph.D. assistant professor of gender and womens studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign,
Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and U.S. State Surveillance After 9/11, 2009, Surveillance & Society 6(4): 356-366,
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org, ISSN: 1477-7487, pg. 363-364, ARAD: 7/17/15
NTAC is certainly not the only organization to advocate for the rights of legitimate transgender citizens by distinguishing those citizens from the figure of
the threatening terrorist. The Transgender Law Center in San Francisco has also released security alerts and recommendations aimed at transgenderidentified communities, including one statement jointly issued with NCTE, in which the two organizations criticize new security measures like the DHS
Advisory and Real ID Act. They note that although these measures were originally conceived in response to legitimate security concerns regarding false
documentation used by terrorists, they ultimately create undue burdens for transgender individuals who seek to legitimately acquire or change
identification documents (Transgender Law Center 2005: 1). Like NTACs concern that non-threatening transgender travelers could be mistaken for
terrorists, the responses from NCTE and the Transgender Law Center refuse to critically engage the rhetoric of terrorism justifying current state
regulation of gender more broadly, and in fact depend upon the figure of the (presumably non-trans, racialized) terrorist to play against the figure of the
legally compliant trans person. Recalling Joy James, here
again we might ask how ideals of compliance are

grounded in normative understandings of race, class and sexuality. The organizations
statement not only avoids a critique of state surveillance measures, but also asks for
rights and state recognition on the basis of legitimacy. In relation to trans populations, such a label is already
infused with the regulatory norms maintained by medical science and government policies. Legal legitimacy is typically based on identity documents,
most of which require sex reassignment surgery for a change of gender marker. Yet in almost all cases, surgeons request a formal diagnosis of Gender
Moreover, none of these

organizations responses to new security measures address the fact that pervasive
surveillance of gender-nonconforming bodies is inextricably linked to the racialization
of those bodies. Within the framework of the statement from the Transgender Law Center and NCTE, which bodies can be read as legitimate,
Identity Disorder a diagnosis that itself turns on the language of correction and normalization.
and which bodies are always cast as suspicious? The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, an organization in New York providing legal services to low-income
gender-nonconforming people, argues that the
current political climate of us vs. them leads to the

polarization of communities that could otherwise work in coalition , as individuals
attempt to divert surveillance onto other marginalized groups. The Law Project
suggests that assimilation going stealth, or claiming status as a good transgender citizen has become a primary
tactic for escaping state surveillance, targeting or persecution . But assimilation strategies are often used
in conjunction with the scapegoating of other communities. Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai convincingly address such polarization in their article Monster,
Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terror and the Production of Docile Patriots, arguing that the demand for patriotism in response to past and future terrorist
attacks produces docile patriots, who normalize themselves precisely through distinguishing themselves from other marginalized groups. For example,
regarding the profiling of Arab and Arab-appearing people after 9/11, Puar and Rai examine the response of many Sikh communities in the U.S., who
emphasized the difference between their respectable turbans and those worn by terrorists. With some even donning red, white, and blue turbans, Puar
and Rai note, the actions of these Sikh communities served to mark off Sikhs as a legitimate, patriotic and safe group of American citizens, in direct
contrast to differently-turbaned terrorists indeed, the ability of these Sikhs to become good citizens is directly dependent on their ability to clearly
distinguish themselves from the figure of the terrorist. Leti Volpp cites similar rhetoric in her article The Terrorist and the Citizen, writing that postSeptember 11, a national identity has consolidated that is both strongly patriotic and multiracial (Volpp 2002: 1584). Noting that the Bush
Volpp argues that

American identity and citizenship are in fact constructed against the figure of the
terrorist. The terrorist thus makes possible the construction of a national identity,
providing a contrast that the citizen is formed in opposition to. This reliance on the
notion of legitimacy as good citizens, as safe travelers, as willing patriots is similarly evident in the
statements made by many transgender advocacy organizations about new security
measures that target perceived gender deviance. Suggesting that trans people bring
their court documents with them, cooperate with authorities and prove their
legitimacy, the advocacy groups no longer rely on the strategy of concealing ones trans
status, or what I named earlier as going stealth. Instead, their primary advice is to reveal ones trans status, to
administration appears inclusive while systematically excluding those racially marked as potential terrorists,
prove that trans travelers are good citizens who have nothing to hide. Particularly in the context of the War on Terror, we might reread the notion of
going stealth to mean not simply erasing the signs of ones trans status, but instead, maintaining legibility as a good citizen, a patriotic American
erasing any signs of similarity with the deviant, deceptive terrorist. The
concept of safety thus shifts: rather than

protecting trans people from state violence, the organizations now focus on protecting
the nation from the threatening figure of the terrorist , a figure that transgender
travelers must distinguish themselves from by demonstrating their complicity in
personal disclosure. Creating the figure of the safe transgender traveler necessarily entails creating and maintaining the figure of the
potential terrorist, and vice versa. Because some bodies are already marked as national threats, the ability to embody the safe
trans traveler is not only limited to particular bodies, but in fact requires the
scapegoating of other bodies.
2ac
*** (_)Topicality (_)***
We Meet Checkpoints are a form of surveillance
Jones, Lecturer in Criminology, 08[Richard Jones ed. Katja Franko Aas, Helene Oppen Gundhus, Heidi Mork Lomell,
Technologies of InSecurity: The Surveillance of Everyday Life, Aug 21 2008 pg. 81]E.E.
The aim of this chapter is to suggest a general theoretical model of check-point
security . My central argument is that

checkpoint security is a specific kind of control practice within crime control and criminal justice, finding various applications in
police stations, at security roadblocks, prisons, courts, and national borders, but also more widely in society, at airports, underground railways,
ports, schools, mail rooms, galleries, offices, military facilities, shops, gated communities and even pubs and clubs indeed anywhere where it is thought
important to regulate those passing through. In many respects, security checkpoints are simply a form of situational crime prevention (used to
increase the effort, by controlling access to facilities or by screening exits), but I will argue that their usage is sufficiently widespread to be deserving of
criminological attention in their own right. One could argue too that security checkpoints are merely a particular form of
surveillance practice. In fact, security checkpoints can be seen to bridge situation crime prevention and
surveillance practices, suggesting a new way of conceptually linking these two areas togeth er. I aim to identify features
shared by security checkpoints with the aim of building up a general sociological model of their operation.
*** (_)A2: Terror DA/Body Scanners Good (_)***

Israel proves body scanners unnecessary for threat prevention
Taylor 13[Courteney L. Taylor, who received her JD from the University of Houston law Center, and her BJ in Print Journalism and BS in Public
Relations from the University of Texas at Austin,Touched by an angel: Why the United States should look to the est of the world for a new airport
security scheme and stop using full-body scanners, Houston Journal of International Law Vol. 35:2, Spring 2013]E.E.
Ben Gurion International Airport is one of three international airports in Israel97 and is the largest international airport in the country.98 As the airport with
the most traffic in Israel,99 and because of the airport's history of terrorist attacks,lOO the country requires those working in Ben Gurion International Airport to
employ a system of group profiling in order to prevent airplane terrorism. 101 And based on the fact that terrorists have not infiltrated
Israel's main international airport since 1972, their system of group profiling and personal interaction appears to be
working. 102 B. A Day in the Life of a Ben Gurion Passenger The typical trek through the Ben Gurion Airport looks something like this: as passengers enter
their respective terminals, most Jewish Israeli citizens pass through security after only having to partake in a brief conversation .
iO3 However, some Israeli Arabs and non-Jewish visitors are forced to engage in long periods of questioning , and are required to allow
airport security to do a thorough search of their luggage and their person. 104 Factors that are taken into consideration when deciding whether to require that a certain
passenger go through further security measures include: the passenger's ethnicity, religion, national affiliation, behavioral patterns, travel information, and previous
intelligence regarding the passenger. 105 In terms of the personal interaction aspect of Israel's airport security measures ,
the first layer of interaction takes

place outside the airport: cars that approach the airport are stopped and guards ask the passengers
questions.iO6 Then, before checking in for a flight, passengers must again answer a series of questions and are
required to show their travel documents.iO7 Throughout the entire personal interaction process, airport security is less concerned with
the actual answers passengers come up with and is more concerned with physical cues such as nervousness and tone of voice .iO8 But Israel's
reliance on actually interacting with passengers, both through personal questions and through ethnic, religious, and travel-history profiling may not be the biggest way that
United States airports differ from Israel's take on airport security. 109 The
Ben Gurion International Airport only uses X-ray machines

and metal detectors; there is not a single full-body scanner in use in the entire airport,
*** (_)A2: Tech Bad (_)***

Body scanner tech bad destroys any trust not based off the body
Bodies, fused with the latest technologies, are proving to be vital to contemporary governance. Both state bureaucracies and
commercial enterprises are dependent on positively identifying people they deal with: from receiving a welfare benefit, crossing a
border, taking money out of a cash machine, entering an office building or being accused of committing a crime. In an anonymous
world, marked by global flows of people and bowling alone (Putnam, 2000), biological identification often seems the only feasible
answer. But what exactly is it an answer to? What kind of identities, what kind of images of who we are, and who we allow
are created out of this fusion of bodies and technologies, such as biometrics , DNA, drug testing, and
X-ray photography? This article explores what these different and diverse phenomena have in common, namely, their focus on
ourselves to be,
the body as a source of information and identification. Although it received considerable attention in Discipline and Punish (1977),
surveillance of the body has been, unlike other themes taken up by Foucault, a somewhat neglected field of criminological inquiry.
However, the picture is gradually beginning to change, particularly through the renewed interest in torture and the body as the
object of pain (Theoretical Criminology, 2003; Cohen, 2005), the feminist critique (Silliman and Bhattacharjee, 2002), as well as in
relation to the growing field of bio-politics and biocultures (Novas and Rose, 2000). This article, on the other hand, aims to explore the
body as an object of surveillance and a source of identification (Lyon, 2001). It will be suggested that the increasing focus on the
body cannot simply be seen as intensified surveillance of some a-historic, natural entity the body. The
phenomenon is deeply embedded in our technological culture which builds on radically new conceptions of
identity and embodiment (Haraway, 1991; Hayles, 1999). Translating human identity into information patterns not
only provides more information, it also creates new conceptions of identity .The article, therefore, seeks to analyse these new
modes of identification, and the implications of these practices for our notions of identity and social control. Furthermore, the focus
on the body is relevant not simply because of its growing popularity, but also because these technologies are
symptomatic of a more profound social development . How members of a society identify each other may be a
telling example of how they establish trust, or in this case, about the inability to establish trust through speech
and linguistic communication. When it comes to establishing the trustworthiness of strangers, an iris scan or a database of
DNA samples and fingerprints, is quicker and is seen as more reliable than a story told in an interview. It will be suggested that in
certain settings, bodies can function as passwords (Wired, 1997; Lyon, 2001; Muller, 2004). They can mean access to
privileges or failure and denial, depending on whether they are right or wrong. Therefore, it might be useful to
see the role of bodies as passwords as a step in understanding the changing mechanisms of social exclusion
and denial in contemporary, highly technological societies.
1AC
Body Scanner Aff Case
We begin with Katherine Cross explanation of normalized

transphobia in the airport:
quoted in Currah and Mulqueen 11Paisley, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn University, Tara,
Ph.D. student at Birbeck University of London, Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender
Bodies at the Airport, social research Vol. 78 : No. 2 : Summer 2011,
http://sites.middlebury.edu/soan191/files/2013/08/currahsecuritizinggender.pdf, pg. 6, ARAD: 7/13/15
As I engaged in the ritual striptease meant to appease the airline gods at Denver International Airport,
standing at the bin that I had claimed as my own with an advert I paid no attention to staring at me from its
bottom, a TSA agent walked up to me. I was depositing my grey blazer in the bin, my belt soon to follow, and I
grew nervous, my throat tightening as it often does on security lines. But all that the blue uniformed man did
was smile at me and say Good morning to ya, maam. At that moment I knew . . . that I was safe. For now.
Cross continues
quoted in Currah and Mulqueen 11Paisley, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn University, Tara,
Ph.D. student at Birbeck University of London, Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender
Bodies at the Airport, social research Vol. 78 : No. 2 : Summer 2011,
http://sites.middlebury.edu/soan191/files/2013/08/currahsecuritizinggender.pdf, pg. 8, ARAD: 7/13/15
I escorted my belongings, the worn leather boots that could theoretically contain a bomb, the belt that could
theoretically contain a trigger mechanism. Or cocaine. My handbag full of feminist literature (now theres something explosive). That was when
motion caught my eye and I saw something ominously towering over the old fashioned metal detector. The
rounded slate grey hulk of an X-ray machine scanning men and women in a surrendering position , arms held
unthreateningly high above their heads. I swallowed thickly wondering if the jig was up, if I would at last have
to face transphobia at the airport, if I would have to sit in a room listening to impertinent questions about what
was in my knickers.
The modern U.S. airport is a site of policing and subjugation of

bodies deemed unacceptable, untrue, or dangerous. Under
the guise of providing a Secure Flight, the state wages a
private war against travellers of deviant genders, races, and
religions every day at airport security checkpoints.
Full-body scanning technology normalizes and facilitates
transphobic violence by policing bodies that deviate from an
essentialist understanding of gender.
Magnet and Rodgers 12 (Shoshana, assistant professor in the Institute of Womens Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Tara, assistant professor of Womens Studies at the
University of Maryland, 2012, Stripping for the State, p. 111, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12) JS-D
Whole body imaging technologies can reveal

breasts, genitals, prostheses, and binding materials. These technologies also have the ability to zoom in on a particular area, including genitalia (National Center
for Transgender Equality 2009). As a result, bodies that do not fit normative gender identities may be singled out by the TSA for
special scrutiny, providing the possibility that transgender individuals may be outed to TSA personnel, or that
they may have their bodily privacy further invaded. Here, bodies rendered as matter out of place are policed. This
has especially devastating consequences for transgender individuals who are closeted and live in small towns ,
in which case being outed at the local airport could have broader consequences, such as implications for their
job security or for their relationships with friends and relatives. Moreover, a transphobic screener could easily cause
a transgender person to miss their flight by detaining them for special screening or could subject them to new
forms of humiliation and harassment. Given the potential consequences of whole body imaging technologies, Mara Kiesling, the executive director of the National
Center for Transgender Equality, identified whole body imaging technologies as one of the most pressing issues facing
transgender communities. Designed to identify matter out of place, whole body imaging technologies are deployed by the security industrial complex to
Backscatter and millimeter wave technologies have significant consequences for transgender bodies and mobilities.
render particular forms of gendered bodies as the norm and police those that deviate from essentialist
understandings of biological sex. In this way, these technologies serve as disciplining technologies designed to
produce properly gendered bodies. Designed without any consultation from transgendered/ transsexual communities
and implemented despite vociferous and organized opposition (Electronic Privacy Information Center 2009; National Center for Transgender Equality
2009), this virtual strip search demonstrates the importance of thinking about the centrality of transgender
identities to understanding state policing and security, much as Angela Davis (2003, p. 65) and others (Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2007; Julia Sudbury 2004) argue
for the importance of understanding the centrality of gender to punishment whether or not women make up the majority of prisoners. While trans folks may not make up the majority of passengers, it is
essential to analyze how whole body imaging technologies are a form of gender violence that prevents trans
folks from travelling, as this additionally demonstrates that whole body imaging technologies fail to work in that they do
not work in the objective and neutral ways claimed for them. Above, we highlighted Rachel Halls (2009) phrase, an aesthetic of transparency, to think about the visual
culture of the War on Terror given the plethora of new security technologies claimed to be able to strip away bodily exteriors in order to reveal the bare bones of the enemy within. Although Hall
specifically was examining security technologies like the Ziploc bags that are used to hold travelers liquids as they pass through checkpoints, it is crucial to account for the ways that whole body imaging
these technologies are deployed to

call particular performances of gender into question, mercilessly turning transgender bodies inside out in a
search to discover the truth of an individuals gender identity, helping to produce transgender bodies as
suspect.
technologies are imagined to be able to render travelers bodies visible to the states security apparatus. Particularly relevant is the way that
This norm is key to the structure of the security state and justifies
endless war in the name of protecting the civilian.
Redden and Terry 11 Stephanie, professor of political science at Carleton University, Jillian, Department
of International Relations at London School of Economics and Political Science, The End of the Line: Feminist
Understandings of Resistance to Full Body Scanning Technology, International Feminist Journal of Politics
Jun2013, Vol. 15 Issue 2, p234-253. 20p. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=a9h&AN=88353443&site=ehost-live xx AD 7/16/15; AV
This literature is intimately connected to the theoretical work of feminist security scholars in International Relations who have unpacked some of the
complex relationships existing between gender and security. As Iris Marion Young (2003: 2) suggests, the logic of masculinist protection that has
increasingly permeated statesociety security relations in the post-9/11 era relies on particular understandings of fear and threat based in gendered
assumptions of masculinity and femininity. Using Youngs logic, we
see a particular way in which the security state

requires citizens to relinquish certain freedoms (such as a right to privacy) in order to
obtain security from potential threats to the State most commonly identified since
9/11 as terrorists. There is reliance in the security state on the notion of the State as
protector and con- sequently, of the public as protected which is highly gendered .
External to its borders, the security state uses its protector identity to wage wars, while
internally it must expose the enemy within in order to protect its people . As Young (2003: 8)
suggests, to protect the state and its citizens, officials must therefore keep a careful watch on the people within its borders and observe and search them
to make sure they do not intend evil actions. The
gendered roots and implications of these observations

and searches are nowhere more evident than in the use of body scanning technology in
airports around the world; this suggests that feminist security scholarship has likely
fruitful insights to call for analyses of full-body scanners and their impacts on the lives
of air travelers generally and particularly women. Lauren Wilcox also asserts this connection between international
security and protection which necessitates gender as a component of security practices. As she helpfully points out, this
practice of protection constitutes gendered identities that promote conflict-seeking
behavior in men and states looking to live up to dominant or hegemonic
understandings of masculinity (Wilcox 2009: 220). While Wilcoxs analysis focuses more specifically on military
action, it is possible to make similar feminist readings of security practices at the domestic and transnational level, such as the body scanning technology
employed in airports. The
connections between these technologies and a hegemonic

masculinity based in logics of protection result in practices that are deeply problematic
when examined through a gender lens. When considering the body as a central focus
for feminist security scholarship, it is possible to uncover the particular violence that
occurs in airport security queues when individuals are required to undergo full-body
scans. As previous examples pointed out, men are indeed susceptible to unjust and
inappropriate comments and interactions when passing through airport body
scanners, but so is commonly the case with security practices, the experiences of
women with full- body scanning technology are likely to be disproportionately negative
due to the pervasiveness of embedded gender inequalities in society. Indeed, as Kleiman makes clear,
these technologies have specific connota- tions for female passengers, stemming from their broader experiences as women in society. Primarily,
she argues, that it represents a modern manifes- tation of an old fear held by many
women: being stripped naked by a stran- ger, which has long served as a pervasive
device by which men keep women in line (Kleiman 2010: 2). As she explains: [Public
nakedness] puts a woman in mind of fear she carries around all the time . . . And thats
why I suspect most women know intuitively that full-body scans are the bridge too far :
the privacy violation that simply cant be tolerated. Ive been fortunate. Ive never been stripped
or raped. And I dont propose to let a government agent be the one to end my lucky
streak. (Kleiman 2010: 2, emphasis added) While it is important to note that this technology has negative and problematic implications for other
groups of passengers in addition to women, Klei- mans article importantly puts into relief the degree to which this technology has gendered effects in
practice. In this passage, Kleiman highlights the ways in which it draws on and contributes to existing gendered social experiences, outside the airport
security context. This also fits with Monahans (2009: 291) primary critique of viewing technology (especially surveillance technologies) as neutral,
because, as he asserts, in doing so, exercises
of power are rendered invisible by nature of the

supposed neutrality of technologies.
Advocacy
Thus: We advocate for the end of the Secure Flight program to

curtail the United States Federal Governments domestic
surveillance.
Policy is insufficientstate securitization strengthens an American/terrorist
dichotomy and encourages trans people to cast suspicion onto others in order to prove
their legitimacy, leading to a cycle of infighting among deviant bodies.
Beauchamp 09Toby Beauchamp, Ph.D. assistant professor of gender and womens studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign,
Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and U.S. State Surveillance After 9/11, 2009, Surveillance & Society 6(4): 356-366,
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org, ISSN: 1477-7487, pg. 363-364, ARAD: 7/17/15
NTAC is certainly not the only organization to advocate for the rights of legitimate transgender citizens by distinguishing those citizens from the figure of
the threatening terrorist. The Transgender Law Center in San Francisco has also released security alerts and recommendations aimed at transgenderidentified communities, including one statement jointly issued with NCTE, in which the two organizations criticize new security measures like the DHS
Advisory and Real ID Act. They note that although these measures were originally conceived in response to legitimate security concerns regarding false
documentation used by terrorists, they ultimately create undue burdens for transgender individuals who seek to legitimately acquire or change
identification documents (Transgender Law Center 2005: 1). Like NTACs concern that non-threatening transgender travelers could be mistaken for
terrorists, the responses from NCTE and the Transgender Law Center refuse to critically engage the rhetoric of terrorism justifying current state
regulation of gender more broadly, and in fact depend upon the figure of the (presumably non-trans, racialized) terrorist to play against the figure of the
legally compliant trans person. Recalling Joy James, here
again we might ask how ideals of compliance are

grounded in normative understandings of race, class and sexuality. The organizations
statement not only avoids a critique of state surveillance measures, but also asks for
rights and state recognition on the basis of legitimacy. In relation to trans populations, such a label is already
infused with the regulatory norms maintained by medical science and government policies. Legal legitimacy is typically based on identity documents,
most of which require sex reassignment surgery for a change of gender marker. Yet in almost all cases, surgeons request a formal diagnosis of Gender
Moreover, none of these

organizations responses to new security measures address the fact that pervasive
surveillance of gender-nonconforming bodies is inextricably linked to the racialization
of those bodies. Within the framework of the statement from the Transgender Law Center and NCTE, which bodies can be read as legitimate,
Identity Disorder a diagnosis that itself turns on the language of correction and normalization.
and which bodies are always cast as suspicious? The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, an organization in New York providing legal services to low-income
gender-nonconforming people, argues that the
current political climate of us vs. them leads to the

polarization of communities that could otherwise work in coalition , as individuals
attempt to divert surveillance onto other marginalized groups. The Law Project
suggests that assimilation going stealth, or claiming status as a good transgender citizen has become a primary
tactic for escaping state surveillance, targeting or persecution. But assimilation strategies are often used
in conjunction with the scapegoating of other communities. Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai convincingly address such polarization in their article Monster,
Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terror and the Production of Docile Patriots, arguing that the demand for patriotism in response to past and future terrorist
attacks produces docile patriots, who normalize themselves precisely through distinguishing themselves from other marginalized groups. For example,
regarding the profiling of Arab and Arab-appearing people after 9/11, Puar and Rai examine the response of many Sikh communities in the U.S., who
emphasized the difference between their respectable turbans and those worn by terrorists. With some even donning red, white, and blue turbans, Puar
and Rai note, the actions of these Sikh communities served to mark off Sikhs as a legitimate, patriotic and safe group of American citizens, in direct
contrast to differently-turbaned terrorists indeed, the ability of these Sikhs to become good citizens is directly dependent on their ability to clearly
distinguish themselves from the figure of the terrorist. Leti Volpp cites similar rhetoric in her article The Terrorist and the Citizen, writing that postSeptember 11, a national identity has consolidated that is both strongly patriotic and multiracial (Volpp 2002: 1584). Noting that the Bush
Volpp argues that

American identity and citizenship are in fact constructed against the figure of the
terrorist. The terrorist thus makes possible the construction of a national identity,
providing a contrast that the citizen is formed in opposition to. This reliance on the
statements made by many transgender advocacy organizations about new security
measures that target perceived gender deviance. Suggesting that trans people bring
their court documents with them, cooperate with authorities and prove their
legitimacy, the advocacy groups no longer rely on the strategy of concealing ones trans
status, or what I named earlier as going stealth. Instead, their primary advice is to reveal ones trans status, to
administration appears inclusive while systematically excluding those racially marked as potential terrorists,
prove that trans travelers are good citizens who have nothing to hide. Particularly in the context of the War on Terror, we might reread the notion of
going stealth to mean not simply erasing the signs of ones trans status, but instead, maintaining legibility as a good citizen, a patriotic American
erasing any signs of similarity with the deviant, deceptive terrorist. The
concept of safety thus shifts: rather than

protecting trans people from state violence, the organizations now focus on protecting
the nation from the threatening figure of the terrorist, a figure that transgender
travelers must distinguish themselves from by demonstrating their complicity in
personal disclosure. Creating the figure of the safe transgender traveler necessarily entails creating and maintaining the figure of the
potential terrorist, and vice versa. Because some bodies are already marked as national threats, the ability to embody the safe
trans traveler is not only limited to particular bodies, but in fact requires the
scapegoating of other bodies.
Under the guise of objectivity, airport backscatter machines

digitally dissect bodies that pass through them, violently
dehumanizing them into data points and reconstructing them
as machines that desire their own flaying. This conquest of
the body mirrored the development of European conquest in
the New World and reflects the reshaping of foreign
territories into colonies that serve the imperialist war
machine.
Amoore and Hall 9 (Louise, PhD and professor and researcher of global geopolitics, security, and political theory at the University of Durham, and Alexandra,
PhD and researcher in geography at Durham, Taking people apart: digitised dissection and the body at the border, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, volume 27, 448-450) JS-D
Backscatter, then, involves the systematic reduction of the body into its identifying traces, from which new
composite projections can be made--a form of what we term `digitised dissection'. Historically, dissection has
made knowledge of the body and its interiority possible, implying a neutral practice of partitioning for
inspection, but also the violent dismemberment of flesh. Jonathan Sawday (1995) traces a burgeoning fascination with anatomy to the
European Renaissance, when writers, thinkers, and artists became entangled in what he calls a `culture of
dissection'. Àrtistic' and `medical' visualisations of the body were inseparable in 16th-century centres of Renaissance learning: anatomy was a required
subject for artists, and lifelike wax and wooden sculptures of dissected bodies were displayed to the public
(Benthien, 2002, page 45). Dissections in this era were important public events, sometimes lasting days, and the motifs of
anatomy and flaying featured frequently in art, theatre, literature, and popular culture. This `culture of
dissection' contained the beginnings of what would later become scientific rational enquiry , a particular way of
understanding the world. Yet it also held within it a dark enthralment with bodily surfaces, depths, and interiors which
later claims to objectivity and learning (with the 17th-century triumph of `science' in its modern sense) could not fully mask (Sawday, 1995,
page 5). Illustrations of dissections from the 16th century show bodies happily participating in their own
dissection, flaying their own skin to reveal their bodily interior. This ``willing self-presentation'' (Benthien, 2002, page 64) has been linked
to the Calvinist doctrines of rigorous self-examination and exposure (Sawday, 1995, pages 110^111). This glad participation in disclosure mirrors
contemporary `confessional' demands within border and visa regimes, where travellers are expected to reveal
and `flay' their histories, identities, associations, and bodies to knowing expert eyes in the name of `safety'
(Salter, 2006, page 181). The partitioning of the body in Renaissance anatomy theatres was allied to a broader partitioning of the world to gather knowledge: unpeeling the skin
(3)
to reveal somatic secrets was an attempt to divine, demonstrate, and publicly reassert the social and moral order (Sawday, 1995, page 75).
Celebrated anatomists of the day,
such as Andreas Vesalius, championed distinct and lasting ways of viewing the body, and also the world; removing the skin and naming what lay beneath was a revolutionary new
we still operate with the

belief that ``knowledge of what is essential means breaking through shells and walls in order to reach the
core that lies in the innermost depths'' (2002, page 7). Bodily dissection and the systems of knowledge it produces
are always connected to the way in which this knowledge is inscribed. Early dissection practices evolved alongside the development of mechanical printing: the body's bloody density had to be made intelligible and
communicable via conventions of representation that were shaped by the flat spatiality of the anatomical atlas,
through which knowledge was disseminated (Waldby, 2000, page 91). Furthermore, explorations of the body mirrored
the contemporary exploration of new territories . In a discussion of anatomy practices in Elizabethan England, Kate Cregan (2007, page 49)
argues that dissection of the body was related to the emerging science of cartography; anatomisation and
territorialisation were both practices of ùnification and disintegration', and the violent, yet creative,
conquering and mapping of territory was mirrored in the violent and creative abstraction and rebordering of
the body and its systems within anatomic practices. Anatomy, then, has always been a potentially violent
`writing practice' through which flesh is disintegrated to extract knowledge and to generate ``reproducible and
communicable traces''; contemporary digitisation and `virtualisation' of dissection continue this trend by
writing flesh as digital code (Waldby, 2000, pages 89, 94). In this way, Backscatter is a specific, securitised medium through
which flesh is made comprehensible, reforming a digitised whole from residue, recomposing a sense of
solidity from calibrations of planes, crevices, and boundaries. This process retains partition and extraction at
its core. In an age of bytes, pixels, and codes, dissection remains an inherently violent practice of translation
that knows by `tearing apart' (Stafford, 1993, page 38). If the Renaissance response to bodily interiors was one of awe at the mapping of an unknown territory,
way of `seeing' the body as layers and systems (Benthien, 2002, page 45; Cregan, 2007, pages 49, 54). Claudia Benthien argues that
then the confident burgeoning rationalist paradigms of 18th- century Enlightenment art and science understood dissection more broadly as a paradigm ``for any forced, artful,
As `life' became the object of epistemological conquest in models of

science and governance within biopolitics (Foucault, 2000, page 73), the body came to be imagined as a machine. This
contrived, and violent study of depths'' (Stafford, 1993, page 47).
distinctly modern `ànatomical body'' (van der Ploeg, 2003, page 65) in turn became the subject of an intense and studied calibration and measurement (Sawday, 1995, page
32). Dissection was now not only a surgical probing, but a ``searching operation performed on a recalcitrant substance'', capturing perfectly the Enlightenment preoccupation
with ``decoding, dividing, separating, analysing, fathom- ing'' bodies, beliefs, and ideas in order to attack ``the duplicity of the world'' (Stafford, 1993, page 47). All deceptive
appearances could be brought to truth under methodical and meticulous analysis.
Valorization of faux-objectivity lays the groundwork for institutional

violence by privileging the views of those isolated from
problems and promoting indifference in the face of brutality.
Stone-Mediatore 7 (Shari, PhD and professor of philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University, Challenging Academic Norms: An Epistemology for Feminist and
Multicultural Classrooms, NWSA Journal, volume 19, p. 57-58) JS-D
the valorization of traits associated with objectivity can have realand dangeroushistorical
effects. In particular, an unqualified valorization of distance and detachment promotes the kind of moral numbness
that facilitates institutionalized violence. Certainly, a theorist should have some degree of distance from her subject matter insofar as her knowledge claims should not be
Even if objectivity is a myth,
immediate personal reactions but well considered and publicly accountable reflections. However, when we confuse absolute emotional and geographic distance from one's subject matter with "objectivity,"
such distance is itself a social location, namely, one of isolation from social problems. As a result, when we
sanctify sheltered social standpoints as "professional distance," we privilege the voices of those who can remove
themselves from social ills while we undervalue the voices of those who experience social suffering more
directly. Likewise, when we valorize detachment, we overlook the qualities of the world that are known through
physical and emotional closeness. Dedicated forest defender Joan Norman indicated the importance of knowledge gained through closeness to phenomena when she attributed
we forget that
her appreciation for forests to her walks in the woods with her grandson. "You cannot [End Page 57] just read about wild places," she says, "you have to go there" (O'Shea 2005, 42). Social critics Arundhati
Roy and Paul Farmer practice a similar creed when they travel, respectively, to Adivasi communities in India and to rural Latin America to walk among and offer support to people subjected to economic
violence. Only "compassion and solidarity," says Farmer, allow a writer to break the conditioned silence of subjugated people and to hear expressions of pain and struggle that await sympathetic ears
when we confuse distance and detachment with rigor, we promote, under the guise of professional
responsibility, an irresponsible inattention to living beings and a concomitant ethics of callousness and
indifference. Nazi administrators exemplified such contradictions of objectivity when they assumed an
"objective attitude" toward the death camps, attending to technicalities of mass execution as coolly as if they
were managing a bank (Arendt 1992, 69). Although ordinary academics and bureaucrats are less directly involved in
murder, our disciplined aloofness can similarly bury violence in technical abstractions while our conscience
defers to "professionalism." For instance, purportedly objective French reporters and United Nations members
refrained from taking a stand on French colonialism in Algeria, only to model apathy in the face of colonial
violence, while today's "experts, from anthropologists to international health specialists choose to collude" with
economic violence by ignoring it in the name of "neutrality" (Fanon 1963, 778; Farmer 2003, 10, 17). "Objective" discourses facilitate this charade, as
(2003, 27).5 Ultimately,
when planners of India's big dams shield themselves from ethical questions raised by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of individuals by reducing these people to the category "Project Affected
People," or simply "PAP," a term which conveniently "mutate[s] muscle and blood into cold statistics" (Roy 1999, 32). For Nazi bureaucrats, French colonial reporters, and contemporary analysts alike,
objectivity provides a convenient alibi for turning our back to pain and suppressing compassionate impulses that would otherwise be troubled by violence.
2AC K Answers
A2: Cap K/Neolib
Turnthe illusion of choice presented to travellers when passing

through security is an essential self-defense mechanism of
neoliberalism.
body imaging technologies are also marketed using a rhetoric of choice . As the TSA asserts: The
passenger has the option of receiving a full pat down or going through the Whole Body Imaging system (National
Center for Transgender Equality 2009). Here, we see how the need for a strip search is naturalized as the question becomes, instead of
Why must I submit to a strip search? a matter of What kind of strip search would I prefer? As such, the
deployment of whole body scanners through a rhetoric of choice manifests a logic of neoliberal
governmentality. Inderpal Grewal notes that, by the early twenty-first century, consumer culture has become central to
neoliberalism, promoting endlessly the idea of choice as central to a liberal subject and enabling the hegemony
of both capitalist democracy, American style, and the self- actualizing and identity-producing possibilities of
consumption (2005, pp. 219220). A rhetoric of consumerist choice and concomitant freedoms is everywhere in a US citizen/consumers experience of air travel, from Southwest Airlines
In this way, whole
promise that low fares mean You are now free to move about the country, to flight attendants stoking customer loyalty with the familiar phrase: We know you have a choice of carriers when you fly, and
In airport security contexts, such neoliberal discourses position individual

travelers as having agency to choose which option, scanner or pat-down, best suits their travel schedule (e.g., Is there
enough time for a pat-down or would the scanner be more efficient?) or their personal preferences (e.g., Id rather not have a strangers hands on my body so Ill choose the
scanner)when in fact the subject can only choose between slightly different expressions of the states interests in
bodily surveillance. The accelerated culture of surveillance and enforcement (Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Bruce Pratt & Robin L.
Riley 2008, p. 4) that is used to justify an increasing invasion of bodily privacy becomes ever more insidious and difficult
to critique when imposed practices of state surveillance are re-presented in terms of individual or consumer
choice. To choose one or the other option at the security checkpoint is an elaborately choreographed routine
through which one affirms enrolment as a citizen/subject under the states watchful monitoring; exercising
ones right to choose between screening methods is, rather perversely, rewarded with the so-called freedom
to travel. Ultimately, one may opt out of passing through a body scanner (Sara J. Welch 2010), but not out of the increasingly invasive and pervasive surveillance practices themselves, unless
thank you for choosing our airline (Southwest 2010).
one relinquishes the right to air travel. Even then, to opt out of the articulation of ones identity and embodied location to the networked code/space of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and global
positioning system (GPS) data is a virtually impossible proposition in contemporary US culture (Dodge & Kitchin 2004; Caren Kaplan 2006).
A2: Race
Scanners reinforce perceptions Muslims as terrorists and threats to

security and are steeped in a tradition of colonial ambition.
University of Maryland, 2012, Stripping for the State, p. 112, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12)
body
imaging technologies also violate prohibitions that many religions have against revealing your nude body in
public. As in the example with which we began this article, a protest staged by a Muslim woman in Iraq highlights the ways that whole body imaging technologies remain
connected to systemic forms of inequality. Certainly, these technologies have a disproportionate impact on those
Muslim women who follow religions prohibitions against appearing without the hijab or niqab in public , as
they are compelled to be subject to a virtual strip search in front of male security officers . Although variable in its meanings
over time (Minoo Moallem 2005), post-9/11, the veil is frequently represented in Canadian and US media as a primary signifier of
Otherness (Malek Alloula 1986; Moallem 2005). Significantly, and in keeping with the trend toward identifying the gender identity of suspect bodies that we highlighted above, an
obsession with verifying the gender identity of Muslim women who wear the niqab has been central to the War
on Terror. Claims that male terrorists could hide underneath the traditional dress of Muslim women are
commonplace, as niqabs and burqas are represented as security threats (Daniel Pipes 2006). For example, one news article asserting the
importance of whole body imaging technologies claims that they are necessary because Terrorists will employ novel methods to artfully conceal suicide devices. Male bombers may
dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny (Pandagon n.d.). These claims became a full- fledged moral panic following the escape of UK murder
suspect Mustaf Jama. Jamas alleged getaway, in which he purportedly fled the UK by dressing in a niqab and using
his sisters passport, led to assertions regarding the need for more robust visualization technologies (Brian Brady 2006),
even though reports that Jama had left the country by wearing a niqab were never confirmed. Claims about the
importance of visualizing veiled bodies reference stereotypes about the inscrutability of racialized subjects (Edward
W. Said 1978). More specifically, they reference problematic assumptions about the difficulty in fixing the gender identities of
orientalized bodies (Richard Fung 1993), while simultaneously referencing a feminized Orient, one whose secret interiors must be
Whole body imaging technologies may reveal a persons religion affiliation by making visible the religious signifiers they may be wearing, such as crucifixes or stars of David. In addition, whole
unveiled and exposed to the light of Western knowledge (Gabeba Baderoon 2003). Technologies able to make othered bodies both see-able and knowable
have a long historyfrom fingerprinting and phrenology (Cole 2001; Stephen Jay Gould 1996) to the development of photography specifically to visualize othered orientalized bodies (Lalvani 1996). The
these technologies are deployed to further the colonial

gaze, compelling security officers to penetrate behind the veil and invade the bodily privacy of Muslim women.
attempted implementation of whole body imaging technologies in Iraq demonstrates the ways that
A2: Ableism
Body scanners and related discourses increase stigma against
disabled and differently sized bodies by constructing them as
threats to travellers.
University of Maryland, 2012, Stripping for the State, pp. 112-113, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12)
body imaging technologies additionally single out disabled bodies for increased scrutiny.
Catheters, evidence of mastectomies, as well as colostomy appliances are made visible by these whole body
imaging technologies, providing information about travelers private medical histories to TSA security
personnel without their informed consent (Stuart F. Brown 2008; Klitou 2008). Discourses around
backscatter X-rays and millimeter wave scanners also construct differently-sized bodies as deviant. In an
article titled Beware the fat man in the middle seat, fat bodies are represented as threatening because whole
body imaging might not be able to identify weapons hidden between folds of fat and flesh (Jen Phillips 2007). Feminist
It is important to note that whole
disability theorists remind us that the category of disability is one that is socially constructed (Rosemarie Garland Thomson 1997; Susan Wendell 1996). For example, those who need a wheelchair to get
around are categorized as disabled, whereas those who need a car to get around can be constructed as able-bodied. Similarly, we can see the ways that whole body imaging technologies may manipulate
existing categories of disability. For example, although traveling with a colostomy bag currently poses no problem to mobility, following the introduction of whole body imaging technologies, this may
change. Travelers with colostomy bags or other types of disabilities may be subject to increased inspection and further searches in ways that make it more difficult or unpleasant for them to travel. In
the potential of these new technologies to single out differently sized bodies for closer inspections , leaving
some travelers especially vulnerable to humiliation or aggressive searches, demonstrates that whole body
imaging technologies do not work in the objective or neutral ways claimed for them.
2AC Case
addition,
A2: Genital blurring

Images taken by scanners can be saved and genital-blurring software
doesnt work consistently
Unlike pat-downs, the TSA asserts that whole body imaging technologies actually afford travelers increased bodily privacy. As operators sit in closed booths a small distance away from the passengers
The TSA also asserts that these images have

no storage capacity, and thus an image could not be saved to be circulated later. Moreover, the TSA argues that because
whole body imaging technologies have the capacity to blur genitalia, they guarantee bodily privacy, and thus
can be differentiated from a traditional hands-on strip search. However, it is worth noting that the Canadian government did
not purchase the software that allows them to blur passengers genitalia, and that there are reports that even when in use, the
software works imperfectly (Electronic Privacy Information Center 2009). Certainly, two cases called these claims into question. TSA
security officer Ronald Negrin was arrested in 2010 for beating a co-worker with a police baton after a year of
relentless insults about his small penis size, which fellow employees saw regularly when he passed through the
backscatter X-ray at Miami International Airport (Kyle Munzenrieder 2010). One might ask, if whole body imaging technologies do
not reveal genitalia, how could this case of prolonged workplace harassment occur? Similarly, the claim that whole body imaging
being scanned, the TSA claims that there is no privacy risk that the operator could take a photo of the image produced by the backscatter X-ray.
technologies did not have the ability to print or store images was called into question after famous Bollywood actor Shahrukh Kahn alleged that two security personnel asked him to sign naked images of
the US Marshals
Service admitted that it had secretly saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave
system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse (Bianca Bosker 2010).
himself. Although Heathrow airport has denied Khans claims (Alastair Jamieson 2010), security documents made clear that this situation could have arisen when
A2: Policy solves/topical version of aff
Policies cant stop transphobia; this is a question of civil rights

versus liberationand only the latter is capable of effecting
meaningful, lasting change.
Ettinger and Lee 6 (Mordecai Cohen, MA and adjunct faculty at California Institute of Integral Studies, and Alexander, FTM trans person and founder of Transgender, Gender
Variant, and Intersex Alternative Sentence Project, lefturn.com, http://www.leftturn.org/lessons-left-radical-transgender-movement) JS-D

These changes in large part are due to mainstream LGB civil rights organizations making efforts to reunify with the transgender community. While this trend is due in no small part to the decades of
protesting our marginalization from the LGB movement, the cost of rejoining the gay movement now in its conservative adulthood is that the transgender community must now face the same political
The transgender community

must now choose between defining its goals in terms of liberation or civil rights. Whereas civil rights by
definition means the rights a government grants to its citizens, liberation connotes a much more global and
universal freedom that values human diversity and expression . Thus, the contours of a civil rights movement
are necessarily defined by existing government structures and the societal status quo, no matter how
fundamentally flawed. Civil rights wins are incremental and do not squarely challenge the hierarchies and
systems of oppression, including imperialism, white supremacy, and even the gender binary. Looking at the state of race-based
US civil rights movements, ones that the white-dominated mainstream gay movement feels free to shamelessly co-opt, civil rights have failed to bring true justice
for slavery or colonial genocide. Instead, we now live in a country where rather than fighting white supremacy
and the legacies of slavery, progressives are distracted by the necessity of defending the meager crumbs of deeplyflawed affirmative action programs and other related government-granted benefits. What the government so miserly gives it can even
more easily take away. Liberation instead challenges dominant ideas of what it means to be human, and how
human beings should treat each other and ourselves; it is a challenge to existing hierarchies and the systems of
oppression that reinforce them, including government systems themselves . The transgender communitys highest promise to humanity is to
choices that the adolescent gay political movement faced decades ago that resulted in transgender peoples expulsion from the gay rights movement.
liberate everyone from the gender binary, to explode this concept so that all people can experience the fullness of human experience. The gender binary currently confines people to a certain pre-defined
set of choices and experiences, based on ones anatomy at birth (or anatomy as shaped by the surgeons knife if one is intersex). While the womens liberation movement has expanded these sets of choices
and experiences for biological women (and to some extent, for transgender men), the binary still remains.
Body Scanners Affirmative
1AC
We begin with Katherine Cross explanation of normalized transphobia in the
airport:
Currah and Mulqueen 11Paisley, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn University, Tara, Ph.D. student at Birbeck University of
London, Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport, social research Vol. 78 : No. 2 : Summer
2011, http://sites.middlebury.edu/soan191/files/2013/08/currahsecuritizinggender.pdf, pg. 6, ARAD: 7/13/15
As I engaged in the ritual striptease meant to appease the airline gods at

Denver International Airport, standing at the bin that I had claimed as my own
with an advert I paid no attention to staring at me from its bottom, a TSA
agent walked up to me. I was depositing my grey blazer in the bin, my belt
soon to follow, and I grew nervous, my throat tightening as it often does on
security lines. But all that the blue uniformed man did was smile at me and say
Good morning to ya, maam. At that moment I knew . . . that I was safe. For
now.
Later, Cross continues
Currah and Mulqueen 11Paisley, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn University, Tara, Ph.D. student at Birbeck University of
London, Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport, social research Vol. 78 : No. 2 : Summer
2011, http://sites.middlebury.edu/soan191/files/2013/08/currahsecuritizinggender.pdf, pg. 8, ARAD: 7/13/15
I escorted my belongings, the worn leather boots that could theoretically

contain a bomb, the belt that could theoretically contain a trigger mechanism.
Or cocaine. My handbag full of feminist literature (now theres something
explosive). That was when motion caught my eye and I saw something
ominously towering over the old fashioned metal detector. The rounded slate
grey hulk of an X-ray machine scanning men and women in a surrendering
position, arms held unthreateningly high above their heads. I swallowed
thickly wondering if the jig was up, if I would at last have to face transphobia
at the airport, if I would have to sit in a room listening to impertinent
questions about what was in my knickers.
Cross narrative of transphobia at the airport is an excerpt of increasing local
tension between differences. Something as simple as flying, whether it be for
business, emergency, or travel in general has become a new information
gathering machine, monitoring the difference of subjects in an attempt to
eradicate potential threats to its hegemony.
These surveillance policies are reflective of a broader system of domination
and destruction that attempts to root out difference at places as simple as the
airport. The Secure Flight program relies on matching consumers genders
to the FBIs terrorist watch list. This is part and parcel of a broader war on
terror turned war on differencethe result is an unending form of
discursive and material transphobic violencerejecting this securitization is a
necessary precondition to disrupting the bureaucratic dysphoria that renders
identities intelligible.
Currah and Mulqueen 11Paisley, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn University, Tara, Ph.D. student at Birbeck
University of London, Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and Transgender Bodies at the Airport, social research Vol. 78 : No. 2
: Summer 2011, http://sites.middlebury.edu/soan191/files/2013/08/currahsecuritizinggender.pdf, pg. 3-10, ARAD: 7/13/15
the TSAs Secure Flight program requires consumers to provide

their name, their date of birth, and their gender exactly as they appear
Implemented in 2009,
the airline with
on government-issued identity documents when they book flights. The airlines then transmit that
information to the TSA. Before allowing a boarding pass to be issued, the TSA will
compare that data against the watch lists maintained by the FBIs Terrorism
Screening Center and confirm that the passenger is not on any of the lists. To
pass into a sterile area in the airport, individuals must present an identity document that
exactly matches the information already given to the airline. By providing more discrete
data points of reference, according to TSA officials, passengers can significantly decrease the likelihood of watch list
misidentification (TSA 2011). According to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, from December 2003 to January
2006, of the tens of thousands of individuals who were identified for further screening at the airport as well as in visa application
processes, roughly half were false positives, primarily because their names were similar to those on the Terrorist Watch List (GAO
adding date of birth and gender to the pieces of

information that are collected will reduce the number of false positives
without increasing risk and thus ensure Secure Flight. The notion that ones
classification as male or female will not change is such a widely held belief
that gender classification has been part of state practices of recognition since
the earliest days of modern state formations (Noiriel 2001). In addition, gender has been a central
2006: 13). According to the TSA,
mechanism for the distribution of rights, obligations, and resources, including voting, registration for the draft, and eligility for
States powers to classify individuals by gender is essential to much

state-sponsored discrimination based on sexual orientation: for bans on samesex marriage to work, officials need to know the gender of the parties applying
for marriage licenses. In the United States, an individuals gender marker as M or F is included on all state-issued
identity documents or in records associated with the document. But for people often grouped under the
term transgender, the gender marker on a piece of state-issued ID can be
troublesome: a transgender woman presenting herself as female at the
airport, might, unlike other women, have an M on her passport. Conversely, someone
who looks like a man might show a drivers license with the gender marker of F. While the heightened intensity
of such gender scrutiny is new, the problem itself is not: the lack of a neat
correlation between an individuals body, her gender identity and
presentation, and the identity document(s) she carries has long posed an
obstacle for those whose gender identity does not correspond to social
expectations for the gender assigned to them at birth. As Currah points out elsewhere, Sex
changes. When some individuals cross borders, walk into a government office to apply for benefits, get a drivers license, go to
pensions.
prison, sign up for selective service, try to get married, or have any interaction with any arm of the state, the legal sex of some
almost every
state agencyfrom federal to municipalhas the authority to decide its own rules for sex
classification. The lack of a uniform standard for classifying people as male or female means that some state agencies will
people can and often does switch from male to female, or female to male. To complicate matters even more,
recognize the new gender of people who wish to change their gender and some will not. For most people, this does not appear to be a
problem. For others, it is (Currah forthcoming). For example, in New York City, the policy of homeless shelters is to recognize ones
new gender and so to house transgender women in womens shelters, and transgender men in mens shelters; the policy of
corrections system, on the other hand, basically ensures that most trans-women are segregated with male prisoners and most transmen with female prisoners. The criteria for gender reclassification on identity documents is far from uniform; some agencies require
sexual reassignment surgery before they will change the gender classification while others do not. In 2010, for example, the U.S.
Department of State changed its policy for gender re-reclassification on U.S. passports and eliminated the requirement for genital
surgery (Department of State 2010). But in New York City, the applicant must submit evidence that convertive surgery has been
performed before officials will change the gender marker on a birth certificate (Currah and Moore 2009). Other agencies will not
change the gender classification in any case: officials in Idaho, Ohio, or Tennessee will never amend the gender markers on the birth
For transgender people, the immense number of state actors

defining sex ensnares them in a Kafkaesque web of official identity
contradiction and chaos. As one woman testifying before a New York City Council hearing put it,
I do not suffer from gender dysphoria. I suffer from bureaucratic dysphoria. My
ID does not match my appearance. I worry every time I apply for a job, every
time I authorize a credit card check, every time I buy a plane ticket, every time
I buy a beer at the corner deli. I have changed my name but my gender
certificates they issue.
continues to be officially and bureaucratically M (Currah 2009: 254). Michelle Billies calls this
experience identification threat, which she describes as a daily contest, a struggle over control of ones body as well as the
When an individuals cultural legibility is not

affirmed by their identity papers, even everyday quotidian transactions
become moments of vulnerability. The logic of the Secure Flight program
assumes that the gender marker on a piece of ID will lessen confusion
reducing the number of false positive matches to the government watch lists
rather than generate it. But for transgender passengers at the airport, a
perceived mismatch between the gender marker on their ID and the gender
they present is flagged as an anomaly. And at the airport, an anomaly is an event that automatically
definition of societal membership (2010: 2).
triggers higher levels of scrutiny. In the ominous moment when identification threat looms as transgender passengers approach the
their vulnerability stems from the gender norms operationalized and

backed by the force of law at the airport. Conversely, in the eyes of security agents,
if something about a passengers gender appears odd, she is treated as a
potential social threat (Billies 2010: 2). As a result of the Secure Flight program,
travelers whose gender marker on their identity document does not reflect an
airline employees or TSA agents perception of their genderin its embodied
totalityrisk facing humiliating interrogations, sexually assaultive pat downs,
outing to colleagues, even denial of travel. Blogger Katherine Cross presents a phenomenological
security area,
account of identification threat: As I engaged in the ritual striptease meant to appease the airline gods at Denver International
Airport, standing at the bin that I had claimed as my own with an advert I paid no attention to staring at me from its bottom, a TSA
agent walked up to me. I was depositing my grey blazer in the bin, my belt soon to follow, and I grew nervous, my throat tightening
as it often does on security lines. But all that the blue uniformed man did was smile at me and say Good morning to ya, maam. At
that moment I knew . . . that I was safe. For now (Cross 2011). In response to the Secure Flight program, the leading transgender
rights organization tells its constituents in a widely circulated know your rights flyer that they have the right to travel in any
gender you wish, whether or not it matches the gender marker on your identification. But, this widely circulated advisory adds, the
TSA suggests that transgender travelers carry a letter from their doctor (National Center for Transgender Equality 2010). In late
2010, the situation faced by transgender travelers was made even worse when the TSA began using advanced imaging technologies
at airports in the United States. According to a leading transgender advocacy organization, these machines generate a
threedimensional image of the passengers nude body, including breasts, genitals, buttocks, prosthetics, binding materials and any
The stated purpose of body

scanningor enhanced genital pat downs for those who refuse to walk
through the scanneris to identify potential threats to the airplane and its
passengers. Those threats are hidden on the body. Terrorists, warns the
Department of Homeland Security in an advisory to security personnel, will
employ novel methods to artfully conceal suicide devices (2003). Under Secure Flight alone,
objects on the persons body, in an attempt to identify contraband (NCTE 2009).
the point of vulnerability is in the TSA agents comparison of an identity document to the individual presenting herself. After clearing
that hurdle, passengers whose histories or bodies radically confound gender norms could breathe a little sigh of relief. But with the
two new types of technologies deployed the
Whole Body Imaging program uses both

millimeter wave and backscatter image technologiesthe body enters the
picture, literally. The use of this technology represents a different instantiation of the securitization of gender and erects yet
another obstacle to transgender travelers. This program was not put in place to verify identity, yet, for many transgender travelers,
the images of the body unintentionally became another site , to paraphrase Fassin and
dHalluin, of gender veridiction, a place where truth is sought (2005). To illustrate, let us
return to Crosss vignette, continued from above: I escorted my belongings, the worn leather boots that could theoretically contain a
bomb, the belt that could theoretically contain a trigger mechanism. Or cocaine. My handbag full of feminist literature (now theres
something explosive). That was when motion caught my eye and I saw something ominously towering over the old fashioned metal
detector. The rounded slate grey hulk of an X-ray machine scanning men and women in a surrendering position, arms held
unthreateningly high above their heads. I swallowed thickly wondering if the jig was up, if I would at last have to face transphobia at
the airport, if I would have to sit in a room listening to impertinent questions about what was in my knickers (Cross 2011). As it
happened, Cross was not directed to walk through the body imaging scanner that day. But when travelers do get whole body scans or
undergo intrusive pat downs (touching breast and genital areas), in some cases TSA agents are seeing in the image or feeling in the
pat downs things they do not expect to be theremale genitalia on female travelers, or breasts on male travelers. They are also not
seeing or feeling things they do expect to be there: men without penises, women without breasts. These
atypically
gendered bodies tend to trigger security responses. A letter written to the head of the TSA from
three transgender advocacy groups describes incidents that have been reported to them. They document one case, for example, in
a male transgender attorney was detained for two hours on his way to an
out-oftown court hearing by TSA agents because his intimate anatomy, as
indicated by a whole-body image scan and a subsequent pat down, did not
conform to agents expectations of what a mans body should look or feel
like. During his detention, he was subjected to humiliating personal questions and comments about the history of his body and
his identity. But thats not all: a bomb appraisal unit was called in to evaluate him
as a potential threat. Eventually, he was allowed to board a later flight. But he was advised to carry a physicians
which
letter regarding his transgender status whenever he flies so that the situation could be resolved more quickly the next time (Keisling
et al. 2010). For transgender individuals, unfortunately, these are not isolated events (see, for example, Kirkup
2009).3 In fact, when Currah mentioned to a friend that he was working on this article, the friend revealed that the same thing had
happened to him: after walking through the body scanner, and then undergoing an enhanced pat down, he was taken to a small
room where agents announced they had found a gonadal anomaly that had to be investigated as a potential threat to the security
For other transgender people, the fear of gender-based

interrogation is so great that they have chosen not to fly. According to Katherine Rachlin, a
of the airplane before he could board.
clinical psychologist and member of the board of directors of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, The full-body
Patients
anticipated that they would be publicly outed by screeners who saw that there
was a mismatch between a persons documents and presentation and their
body parts. . . . Patients had increased anxiety and even panic attacks just
contemplating the possibilities. Those prone to depression went deeper into
depression as their option to travel was taken away (Rachlin 2011). In describing the anomalies
scanners became news long before they were actually used in local airports and were a major topic in therapy.
and uncertainties that emerge in the ways that gender has been securitized at the airport, we are not suggesting that these
particular events, however distressing to the traveler, are comparable to the gross injustices done to some peoples, individuals, and
bodies in the name of national security (nor do we mean to imply that there is no overlap between transgender individuals and
the proliferation of
sites where individuals can be stopped, searched, and required to verify their
identityas part of the war on terror or as a consquence of federal and state
initiatives to identify, locate, and deport illegal aliensonly amplifies the
importance of examining the production and policing of legal identity. Nikolas Rose
victims of intensified surveillance and racial profiling) (Queers for Economic Justice 2010). Indeed,
and Mariana Valverde suggest that there is much to be learned from drilling down into the apparently more minor, mundane . . .
meticulous and detailed work of regulatory apparatuses (Rose and Valverde 1998: 550). We have followed that suggestion in
producing this very granular analysis of conflicts over gender classification in the U.S. airport.
This norm replicates transphobic violence and ushers in an essentialist

understanding of gender.
Magnet and Rodgers 12 (Shoshana, assistant professor in the Institute of Womens Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Tara, assistant
professor of Womens Studies at the University of Maryland, 2012, Stripping for the State, p. 111, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12) JS-D
Whole body imaging

technologies can reveal breasts, genitals, prostheses, and binding materials.
These technologies also have the ability to zoom in on a particular area, including genitalia (National Center for Transgender Equality 2009). As a result, bodies that
do not fit normative gender identities may be singled out by the TSA for
special scrutiny, providing the possibility that transgender individuals may be
outed to TSA personnel, or that they may have their bodily privacy further
invaded. Here, bodies rendered as matter out of place are policed. This has
especially devastating consequences for transgender individuals who are
closeted and live in small towns, in which case being outed at the local airport
could have broader consequences, such as implications for their job security or
for their relationships with friends and relatives. Moreover, a transphobic screener
could easily cause a transgender person to miss their flight by detaining them
for special screening or could subject them to new forms of humiliation and
harassment. Given the potential consequences of whole body imaging technologies, Mara Kiesling, the executive director of the National Center for
Transgender Equality, identified whole body imaging technologies as one of the most
Backscatter and millimeter wave technologies have significant consequences for transgender bodies and mobilities.
pressing issues facing transgender communities. Designed to identify matter out of place, whole body
imaging technologies are deployed by the security industrial complex to render particular forms of
gendered bodies as the norm and police those that deviate from essentialist
understandings of biological sex. In this way, these technologies serve as
disciplining technologies designed to produce properly gendered bodies.
Designed without any consultation from transgendered / transsexual communities and
implemented despite vociferous and organized opposition (Electronic Privacy Information Center 2009;
National Center for Transgender Equality 2009), this virtual strip search demonstrates the importance of
thinking about the centrality of transgender identities to understanding state
policing and security, much as Angela Davis (2003, p. 65) and others (Ruth Wilson Gilmore 2007; Julia Sudbury 2004) argue for the importance of
understanding the centrality of gender to punishment whether or not women make up the majority of prisoners. While trans folks may not make up the majority of passengers,
it is essential to analyze how whole body imaging technologies are a form of

gender violence that prevents trans folks from travelling , as this additionally
demonstrates that whole body imaging technologies fail to work in that they do not work in
the objective and neutral ways claimed for them. Above, we highlighted Rachel Halls (2009) phrase, an aesthetic of transparency, to
think about the visual culture of the War on Terror given the plethora of new security technologies claimed to be able to strip away bodily exteriors in order to reveal the bare
bones of the enemy within. Although Hall specifically was examining security technologies like the Ziploc bags that are used to hold travelers liquids as they pass through
checkpoints, it is crucial to account for the ways that whole body imaging technologies are imagined to be able to render travelers bodies visible to the states security
these technologies are deployed to call particular

performances of gender into question, mercilessly turning transgender bodies
inside out in a search to discover the truth of an individuals gender identity,
helping to produce transgender bodies as suspect.
apparatus. Particularly relevant is the way that
The result is the construction of a dominant security discourse that allows the
state to wage wars in the name of isolating clear borders and binaries.
Redden and Terry 11 Stephanie, professor of political science at Carleton University, Jillian, Department of
International Relations at London School of Economics and Political Science, The End of the Line: Feminist Understandings of
Resistance to Full Body Scanning Technology, International Feminist Journal of Politics Jun2013, Vol. 15 Issue 2, p234-253. 20p.
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=88353443&site=ehost-live xx AD 7/16/15; AV
This literature is intimately connected to the theoretical work of feminist security scholars in International Relations who have
unpacked some of the complex relationships existing between gender and security. As Iris Marion Young (2003: 2) suggests, the logic
of masculinist protection that has increasingly permeated statesociety security relations in the post-9/11 era relies on particular
we see a
particular way in which the security state requires citizens to relinquish
certain freedoms (such as a right to privacy) in order to obtain security from
potential threats to the State most commonly identified since 9/11 as
terrorists. There is reliance in the security state on the notion of the State as
protector and con- sequently, of the public as protected which is highly
gendered. External to its borders, the security state uses its protector identity to wage
wars, while internally it must expose the enemy within in order to protect its
people. As Young (2003: 8) suggests, to protect the state and its citizens, officials must therefore keep a careful watch on the
people within its borders and observe and search them to make sure they do not intend evil actions. The gendered
roots and implications of these observations and searches are nowhere more
evident than in the use of body scanning technology in airports around the
world; this suggests that feminist security scholarship has likely fruitful
insights to call for analyses of full-body scanners and their impacts on the lives
of air travelers generally and particularly women. Lauren Wilcox also asserts this connection
between international security and protection which necessitates gender as a component of security practices. As she
helpfully points out, this practice of protection constitutes gendered
identities that promote conflict-seeking behavior in men and states looking to
live up to dominant or hegemonic understandings of masculinity (Wilcox 2009:
220). While Wilcoxs analysis focuses more specifically on military action, it is possible to make similar feminist readings of
understandings of fear and threat based in gendered assumptions of masculinity and femininity. Using Youngs logic,
The
connections between these technologies and a hegemonic masculinity based
in logics of protection result in practices that are deeply problematic when
examined through a gender lens. When considering the body as a central focus
for feminist security scholarship, it is possible to uncover the particular
violence that occurs in airport security queues when individuals are required
to undergo full-body scans. As previous examples pointed out, men are indeed
susceptible to unjust and inappropriate comments and interactions when
passing through airport body scanners, but so is commonly the case with
security practices, the experiences of women with full- body scanning
technology are likely to be disproportionately negative due to the
pervasiveness of embedded gender inequalities in society. Indeed, as Kleiman makes clear,
security practices at the domestic and transnational level, such as the body scanning technology employed in airports.
these technologies have specific connota- tions for female passengers, stemming from their broader experiences as women in
Primarily, she argues, that it represents a modern manifes- tation of an

old fear held by many women: being stripped naked by a stran- ger, which
has long served as a pervasive device by which men keep women in line
(Kleiman 2010: 2). As she explains: [Public nakedness] puts a woman in mind
of fear she carries around all the time . . . And thats why I suspect most
women know intuitively that full-body scans are the bridge too far: the privacy
violation that simply cant be tolerated. Ive been fortunate. Ive never been stripped or
raped. And I dont propose to let a government agent be the one to end my
lucky streak. (Kleiman 2010: 2, emphasis added) While it is important to note that this technology has negative and problesociety.
matic implications for other groups of passengers in addition to women, Klei- mans article importantly puts into relief the degree to
which this technology has gendered effects in practice. In this passage, Kleiman highlights the ways in which it draws on and
contributes to existing gendered social experiences, outside the airport security context. This also fits with Monahans (2009: 291)
primary critique of viewing technology (especially surveillance technologies) as neutral, because, as he asserts, in doing so,
exercises of power are rendered invisible by nature of the supposed neutrality

of technologies.
We demand the abolition of the Secure Flight Program to curtail the United
States federal government's domestic surveillance.
Our security discourse is more than bankrupt, it is broken. The Secure Flight
program exists not as a policy of safety for the homeland, rather, a failed
policy from the mobilization of the war on nonbinary genders. You should
prefer a politics of affective assemblage building that refuses anything but
infinitythe attempt to render gender as a form of static ontological being is
the epitome of the self/other dialectic that relies on a constitutive other to
securitize against.
What complicates the passage of a transgender individual through airport security is that her identity is obvious in the way it is
expected to be by the TSA. A United Nations human rights special rapporteur pointed out that counterterrorism measures that
involve increased travel document security, such as stricter procedures for issuing, changing and verifying identity documents, risk
unduly penalizing transgender persons whose personal appearance and data are subject to change (United Nations 2009: 19). Yet,
The biometric use of gender should not

be seen as just a policy decision that, however unjustly, limits the freedom of a very small minority of individuals. It also shows
how particular notions of gender come to be stabilized through their
incorporation into larger systems of organization and control. In actuality, how gender is
the transgender experience at the airport is more than just an exception.
there is
no unitary notion of gender to which an individual simply does or does not
conform. It is not only personal appearance and data that change, but the very concept of gender. In shifting our analysis this
way, we can, following Deleuze, ask a more productive set of questions: in what
situations, where and when does a particular thing happen, how does it
happen, and so on? A concept, as we see it, should express an event rather than an
essence (1995: 14). As an event, the concept of gender is bound to the particular context in which it occurs, whether it be the
airport, the doctors office, or the courtroom. Likewise, there is no coherent, singular state authority
policing gender definition, but different authorities: indeed, the state is just as messy and diffuses a concept as
defined in any particular context depends not on what one might think gender is, but on what it does in that context:
gender (Currah forthcoming). That different state actors dispersed across the U.S. federal system of government have different
requirements for changing gender markers on identity documents illustrates this point. Sometimes genital surgery is required,
we might see these

arbitrary and conflicting rules for gender reclassification in another light: not
as perplexing contradictions but instead as expressions of different state
projects: one centered on recognition, the other on distribution. The concept
of assemblage, from Deleuze and Guattari, provides one way of understanding
how the contingent, chaotic, and epistemologically ungroundable concept of
gender can be deployed in security mechanisms as if it were a tangible hard
fact. Assemblages can be understood broadly as functional conglomerations
of elements in which each element gains meaning in its relation to the others
in the assemblage (Currier 2003: 203). The security assemblage at the airport is a convergence of many parts, from
sometimes not. But instead of fixating on what gender really is, how it ought to be defined,
technologies and security strategies to bodies and social norms; it is, like the airport itself, a messy system of systems, embedded
The airport security assemblage

prevents certain individuals and materials from reaching the plane, while it also allows
within numerous networks and social spheres (Salter 2008: xiii).
the maximum number of people to pass through unrestricted, so as not to inhibit the flow of commerce (U.S. GAO 2010: 10).
Gender can be seen as one of many flows or forces that come into the
assemblage: it is not invented in the airport assemblage, but reconfigured by
it in specific ways. As Haggerty and Ericson explain, flows exist prior to any assemblage, and are fixed temporarily and
spatially by the assemblage (2000: 608). In the context of an ever more uncertain and unknowable world of possible risks, gender
Gender, in the security assemblage at the airport, is

deployed as a biometric, a piece of data tied directly to the body. This
securitized variant of gender, operationalized in the assemblage, is more
than just a norm from which transgender individuals constitute an exception. As
Currier points out, a self-identical body (or object) cannot be identified prior
to, or outside of, the field of encounters that articulate it within any specific
assemblage; instead, through the assemblage, something new or other is
created (2003: 331). At the airport, the something other for gender is what we are calling its securitization. The securitization
anomalies are cause for heightened suspicion and scrutiny.
of gender is doubly useful in conceptually grasping what happens to gender at the airport. Following Roses observations about the
we have used securitization to describe how gender

becomes an object of state (and increasingly private and privatized) surveillance through the
two TSA programs. In that sense, the security in securitization reflects forms of
control associated with sovereign powerbarriers, bans, prohibitions,
punishments, searches by uniformed personnel, interrogations. But identity in general
securitization of identity,
and gender in particular are also securitized in another senseas a form of risk management, as techniques for governing the
Risk management is not only a central mechanism of

governmentality, but also of capital. In fact, it may be that the financial analogy is the most apt here. In
finance, securitization involves the bundling of disparate pieces of debt into
financial instruments. And what is debt? Debts are obligations, promises to
repay at some point in the future. Securitization is, as Randy Martin explains,
the future made present (2007:18). In the security systems assembled by the Transportation Security
future (Valverde 2007: 163).
Administration, the disparate identities/bodies/documents that fall under the rubric of gender are provisionally stabilized into objects
The TSA recommends that

transgender people, especially transgender people in transition, carry
letters from their doctors. These letters generally affirm the genuineness of
the individuals attachment to the new gender, and, in doing so, become forms
of security. Likewise, the evidence required to change the gender classification on an identity documenttypically affidavits
from physiciansattest to the permanence of the new gender in the future. Just as the securitization of debt
attempts to turn promises about the future into tangible commodities in the
present, the securitization of an individuals gender tries to render uncertainty
about the future more predictable. Foucault pointed out in a 1978 lecture that to manage contingency, the
temporal, the uncertain . . . have to be inserted within a given space (2007: 20). Security is comprised of
spatial arrangements that create a milieu that can manage or lessen the
impact of whatever unpredictable events the future holds. While identity as being, as
that will hold steady over timea promise of identity as future sameness.
narrative, as process, is a temporal category, the bodyin our case the gendered bodyis figured as spatial, something that can be
To pass through airport security

without issue, an individuals gender is securitized by attempting to turn the
body into not such a source of information but a promise about the present
and the future. As individuals flow through the systems of surveillance and
control in the airport, transgender peoplewith their incongruous and
unexpected histories, documents, and bodiesoften find themselves in the
uncomfortable interstices between spatial and temporal registers, between
stasis and change, between what one is and what one says or does.
known by the presence or the lack of certain configurations of flesh.
Another policy wont save usrather we must reject dominant policy

constructions that enshrine binary gender as the condition for securitized
violence.
Beauchamp 09Toby Beauchamp, Ph.D. assistant professor of gender and womens studies at the University of Illinois,
Urbana Champaign, Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and U.S. State Surveillance After 9/11, 2009,
Surveillance & Society 6(4): 356-366, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org, ISSN: 1477-7487, pg. 363-364, ARAD: 7/17/15
NTAC is certainly not the only organization to advocate for the rights of legitimate transgender citizens by distinguishing those
citizens from the figure of the threatening terrorist. The Transgender Law Center in San Francisco has also released security alerts and
recommendations aimed at transgender-identified communities, including one statement jointly issued with NCTE, in which the two
organizations criticize new security measures like the DHS Advisory and Real ID Act. They note that although these measures were
originally conceived in response to legitimate security concerns regarding false documentation used by terrorists, they ultimately
create undue burdens for transgender individuals who seek to legitimately acquire or change identification documents (Transgender
Law Center 2005: 1). Like NTACs concern that non-threatening transgender travelers could be mistaken for terrorists, the responses
from NCTE and the Transgender Law Center refuse to critically engage the rhetoric of terrorism justifying current state regulation of
gender more broadly, and in fact depend upon the figure of the (presumably non-trans, racialized) terrorist to play against the figure
here again we might ask how ideals of

compliance are grounded in normative understandings of race, class and
sexuality. The organizations statement not only avoids a critique of state
surveillance measures, but also asks for rights and state recognition on the
basis of legitimacy. In relation to trans populations, such a label is already infused with the regulatory norms
of the legally compliant trans person. Recalling Joy James,
maintained by medical science and government policies. Legal legitimacy is typically based on identity documents, most of which
require sex reassignment surgery for a change of gender marker. Yet in almost all cases, surgeons request a formal diagnosis of
Moreover, none
of these organizations responses to new security measures address the fact
that pervasive surveillance of gender-nonconforming bodies is inextricably
linked to the racialization of those bodies. Within the framework of the statement from the Transgender
Gender Identity Disorder a diagnosis that itself turns on the language of correction and normalization.
Law Center and NCTE, which bodies can be read as legitimate, and which bodies are always cast as suspicious? The Sylvia Rivera Law
the
current political climate of us vs. them leads to the polarization of
communities that could otherwise work in coalition , as individuals attempt to
Project, an organization in New York providing legal services to low-income gender-nonconforming people, argues that
divert surveillance onto other marginalized groups. The Law Project suggests
that assimilation going stealth, or claiming status as a good transgender citizen has become a
primary tactic for escaping state surveillance, targeting or persecution. But
assimilation strategies are often used in conjunction with the scapegoating of other communities. Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai
convincingly address such polarization in their article Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terror and the Production of Docile
Patriots, arguing that the demand for patriotism in response to past and future terrorist attacks produces docile patriots, who
normalize themselves precisely through distinguishing themselves from other marginalized groups. For example, regarding the
profiling of Arab and Arab-appearing people after 9/11, Puar and Rai examine the response of many Sikh communities in the U.S., who
emphasized the difference between their respectable turbans and those worn by terrorists. With some even donning red, white, and
blue turbans, Puar and Rai note, the actions of these Sikh communities served to mark off Sikhs as a legitimate, patriotic and safe
group of American citizens, in direct contrast to differently-turbaned terrorists indeed, the ability of these Sikhs to become good
citizens is directly dependent on their ability to clearly distinguish themselves from the figure of the terrorist. Leti Volpp cites similar
rhetoric in her article The Terrorist and the Citizen, writing that post-September 11, a national identity has consolidated that is both
strongly patriotic and multiracial (Volpp 2002: 1584). Noting that the Bush administration appears inclusive while systematically
Volpp argues that American identity and

citizenship are in fact constructed against the figure of the terrorist. The
terrorist thus makes possible the construction of a national identity, providing
a contrast that the citizen is formed in opposition to. This reliance on the
statements made by many transgender advocacy organizations about new
security measures that target perceived gender deviance. Suggesting that
trans people bring their court documents with them, cooperate with
authorities and prove their legitimacy, the advocacy groups no longer rely on
the strategy of concealing ones trans status, or what I named earlier as
going stealth. Instead, their primary advice is to reveal ones trans status, to prove that trans travelers are good citizens
excluding those racially marked as potential terrorists,
who have nothing to hide. Particularly in the context of the War on Terror, we might reread the notion of going stealth to mean not
simply erasing the signs of ones trans status, but instead, maintaining legibility as a good citizen, a patriotic American erasing any
The concept of safety thus shifts: rather than

protecting trans people from state violence, the organizations now focus on
protecting the nation from the threatening figure of the terrorist, a figure that
transgender travelers must distinguish themselves from by demonstrating
their complicity in personal disclosure. Creating the figure of the safe transgender traveler necessarily
signs of similarity with the deviant, deceptive terrorist.
entails creating and maintaining the figure of the potential terrorist, and vice versa. Because some bodies are already marked as
the ability to embody the safe trans traveler is not only limited to
particular bodies, but in fact requires the scapegoating of other bodies.
national threats,
NEG STUFFS
CASE ARGUMENTS
The affs criticism of body scanners is outdatedthe TSA removed
photographic imaging in 2013, effectively solving their
transphobia impacts.
Nixon 13 (Ron, Washington correspondent for the New York Times who covers the impact of regulatory and legislative policy on the consumer, T.S.A. to Remove Invasive Body Scanners,
nytimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/us/tsa-to-remove-invasive-body-scanners.html)
After years of complaints by passengers and members of Congress, the Transportation Security Administration said Friday
it would begin removing the controversial full-body scanners that produce revealing images of airline
travelers beginning this summer. The agency said it canceled a contract, originally worth $40 million, with the
maker of the scanners, Rapiscan, after the company failed to meet a Congressional deadline for new software
that would protect passengers privacy. Since going into widespread use nearly three years ago, the scanners have been criticized by passengers for being too invasive and
WASHINGTON
that
are the subject of lawsuits from privacy groups. The T.S.A. began deploying the scanners in 2010, after an attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian citizen, to blow up a Detroit-bound
Northwest Airlines flight by setting off explosives hidden in his underwear. The T.S.A. said that 174 of the machines are currently being used at airport checkpoints around the country. Another 76 are
housed at a storage facility in Texas. Rapiscan will be required to pay for removing the scanners. In a statement, Deepak Chopra, the companys president, said the decision to cancel the contract and
he removal of the
Rapiscan scanners does not mean that all full-body scanners will be removed from airport security checkpoints.
A second type of full-body scanner does not produce revealing images. Instead, it makes an avatar-like
projection on security screens.
remove the scanners was a a mutually satisfactory agreement with the T.S.A. The company said that scanners would be used at other government agencies. T
Pat-downs are always an option and you will be accommodated according to your gender
identity. In addition private screening and a present witness checks any or all abuse the aff
claims is occurring.
National Center for Transgender Equality 2015 (http://transequality.org/know-your-rights/airport-security;
Know Your Rights |Airport Security;7/21/15;lmm)
At checkpoints using body scanners, a pat-down is the only alternative to being scanned . A pat-down may also be required if an
anomaly is identified by the machine, if your clothing is very loose, or on a random basis. TSA pat-downs can be very invasive. Children 12 and under should receive a
modified, less-intrusive pat-down under the observation and direction of their parents if necessary. If you choose a pat-down to avoid the AIT machines or if the TSA
agents require one for another reason, the pat-down must be performed by an officer of the same gender as the traveler. This is based
on your gender presentation. So, for instance, transgender women should be searched by female officers, and transgender
men should be searched by male officers. The gender listed on your identification documents and boarding passes should
not matter for pat-downs, and you should not be subjected to personal questions about your gender . If TSA officers are
unsure who should pat you down, they should ask you discreetly and respectfully . If you encounter any problem, ask to speak to a
supervisor and clearly and calmly state how you should be treated. Travelers may ask for a private screening at any time. You may take a
witness of your choosing with you when you are being privately screened.
If your gender identity or appearance does not match your ID it does not matter for TSA
National Center for Transgender Equality 2015 (http://transequality.org/know-your-rights/airport-security;
Know Your Rights |Airport Security;7/21/15;lmm)
All passengers 18 years of age or older are required to provide proof of identity at check-in and at the security checkpoint .
TSA rules require that you

provide your name, gender, and date of birth when making an airline reservation. The name, gender, and date of birth must match the
government-issued photo ID you will provide when passing through security. The Secure Flight program checks this information against government
watch lists, and gender information is used to eliminate false matches with the same or similar names not to evaluate a persons
gender. If you have different names or genders listed on different ID, you can choose which to provide, so long as
you bring photo ID that matches your reservation. TSA Travel Document Checkers will check as you enter security
to ensure that information on your ID matches your boarding pass. It does not matter whether your current gender
presentation matches the gender marker on your ID or your presentation in your ID photo, and TSA officers should not
comment on this. Sometimes travelers have their tickets booked for them by other people. When this happens, you should make sure that the person booking your
tickets uses the information on the government-issued ID you plan to use at the airport. The gender marker on your boarding pass must match the government-issued
photo ID you show the TSA Travel Document Checker.
No internal linkthe body scanners opposed by the aff are long gone; in 2013 the TSA replaced
them with new ones that only display a generic human-shaped image and therefore prevent
gendered discrimination.
Overton 13 (Gail, senior editor of Laser Focus World with 20 years of marketing and engineering experience in photonics and telecommunications, PHOTONICS APPLIED: DEFENSE AND SECURITY:
Will full-body scanners keep you safe and secure?, Laser Focus World. http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/print/volume-49/issue-03/features/photonics-applied--defense-and-security--will-full-body-scanners.html)
passengers being screened were also concerned about privacy issues, citing the
"revealing" nature of the images acquired by these scanners. As a result, the TSA has required that privacy algorithms be
applied to the images produced by commercial systems, or in the case of millimeter-wave systems, that images be
eliminated entirely for viewing and replaced by Automated Target Recognition (ATR) software that only indicates the
visual presence of a threat (see Fig. 1). FIGURE 1. To eliminate images that show physical human body detail, full-body scanners such
as this millimeter-wave example now use Automated Target Recognition (ATR) software that displays a generic image that either flags
the operator to the presence of a possible threat (a) or indicates no threat (b).(Courtesy of Transportation Security Administration) Just recently
(January 2013), a Bloomberg article reported that the TSA plans to remove x-ray backscatter-based Rapiscan units from
OSI Systems (Hawthorne, CA) because the company failed to write software to make passenger images less revealing. The TSA
plans to replace the systems with millimeter-wave scanners from L-3 Communications Holdings (New York, NY) that do
include adequate privacy software.
Elias adds that in addition to backscatter x-ray safety concerns,
Status quo solvesthe TSA has already recognized the affs concern and taken
steps to remedy the problem.
TSA 14 (Transport Security Administration, agency of US Department of Homeland Security, Transgender Travelers, tsa.gov, https://www.tsa.gov/traveler-information/transgendertravelers)
TSA recognizes the concerns members of the transgender community may have with undergoing the security
screening process at our Nations airports and is committed to conducting screening in a dignified and
respectful manner. These travel tips will explain the various screening processes and technologies travelers may encounter at security checkpoints. Making
Reservations: Secure Flight requires airlines to collect a travelers full name, date of birth, gender and Redress
Number (if applicable) to significantly decrease the likelihood of watch list misidentification . Travelers
are encouraged to use the same name, gender, and birth date when making the reservation that match the name, gender, and birth date indicated on the government-issued ID
that the traveler intends to use during travel. Packing a Carry-on: All carry-on baggage must go through the screening process. If a traveler has any medical equipment or
prosthetics in a carry-on bag, the items will be allowed through the checkpoint after completing the screening process. Travelers may ask that bags be screened in private if a bag
must be opened by an officer to resolve an alarm. Travelers should be aware that prosthetics worn under the clothing that alarm a walk through metal detector or appear as an
anomaly during Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) screening may result in additional screening, to include a thorough pat-down. Travelers may request a private screening at
any time during the security screening process. Contacting TSA in Advance of Travel: Travelers may contact TSA prior to a flight through the TSA Contact Center at 1-866-289-
Screening can be conducted in a private screening area with a witness or

companion of the travelers choosing. A traveler may request private screening or to speak with a supervisor at
any time during the screening process. Travel Document Checker: The traveler will show their government-issued identification and boarding pass to an
9673 and TSA-ContactCenter@dhs.gov. Private Screening:
officer to ensure the identification and boarding pass are authentic and match. Transgender travelers are encouraged to book their reservations such that they match the gender
and name data indicated on the government-issued ID. Walk Through Metal Detector: Metal detectors are in use at all airports. Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT): Screening
with advanced imaging technology is voluntary and travelers may opt out at any time. Travelers who opt out of the AIT screening are required to undergo a thorough pat-down
TSA has upgraded all millimeter wave

advanced imaging technology units with new software called Automated Target Recognition to further enhance
privacy protections by eliminating the image of an actual traveler and replacing it with a generic
outline of a person. Pat-Down: A pat-down may be performed if there is an alarm of the metal detector, if an anomaly is detected using advanced imaging
by an officer of the same gender as the traveler presents. New Advanced Imaging Technology Software:
technology, if an officer determines that the traveler is wearing non-form fitting clothing, or on a random basis. If a pat-down is chosen or otherwise necessary, private screening
may be requested. Pat-downs are conducted by an officer of the same gender as presented by the individual at the checkpoint. Prosthetics: A TSA Officer may ask you to lift/raise
your clothing to screen a prosthetic (only if doing so would not reveal a sensitive area).
Sensitive areas should not be exposed during the
screening process. Behavior Detection Program: Behavior Detection Officers screen travelers using non-intrusive behavior observation and analysis techniques to
identify potentially high-risk passengers. Officers are designated to detect individuals exhibiting behaviors that indicate they may be a threat to aviation and/or transportation
security. Individuals exhibiting specific observable behaviors may be referred for additional screening, which can include a pat-down and physical inspection of carry-on baggage
TSA recognizes that exhibiting some of these behaviors does not automatically mean a person has terrorist or
criminal intent. Referrals for additional screening are solely based on specific observed behaviors.
POLITICS STUFF
The plan sparks a political firestorm -- social conservatives
backlash, pits religious liberty against sexual freedom
Walters '15 Edgar, Texas Tribune - ""Bathroom Bills" Pit Transgender Texans Against GOP" 4/4
http://www.texastribune.org/2015/04/04/bathroom-bills-pit-transgender-community-against-g/
Social conservatives say the bills, which have been referred to the House State Affairs Committee, are designed
to protect people from assault in public restrooms. Ive got four granddaughters, and Im not
interested in anybody that has a question about their sexuality to be stepping in on them, said
state Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Canton, who co-authored Riddles bills. Neither Riddle nor Pea could be
reached for comment. There are roughly 700,000 transgender people in the United States, or less
than 1 percent of the population, according to estimates from the Williams Institute, a research
center at the UCLA School of Law. For Flynn and other conservatives, that means transgender
advocates are fighting a battle that would benefit only a small group of people over the concerns
of a majority. I think its unbecoming of anyone to want to make others uncomfortable, Flynn
said. Its unfortunate that there are those who want to push their agenda thats contrary to the
majority public position. The controversy is part of a larger fight over how states should meet
their obligation to protect both minority groups and religious liberty. The Florida Legislature is
considering a bathroom bill similar to Riddles. And in Indiana and Arkansas, public backlash over laws to
protect religious freedom forced the states' governors to sign amended versions that included protections for
gays and lesbians. Religious freedom proposals that lack such protections including Senate
Joint Resolution 10 by state Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels have been filed in
Texas.
TSA popular now -- only risk of link

Reed 12(Ted; worked for U.S. Airways, writing internal publications and covered the transportation industry for 20 years;
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tedreed/2012/08/09/surprise-gallup-poll-people-think-tsa-does-a-good-job/; Surprise Gallup Poll:

People Think TSA Does A Good Job; 7/22/15; lmm)
Surprisingly, despite all of the negative Internet commentary and Congressional complaining about the
Transportation Security Administration, the majority of U.S. travelers have a positive opinion of the agency . Not only that, but
people who fly, and who are exposed to TSA screening, have an even more positive opinion than people who rarely or never fly. According to a
Gallup poll released Wednesday, 54% of Americans think the TSA is doing either an excellent or a good job of
handling security screening at airports. Moreover, among Americans who have flown at least once in the past year,
57% have an excellent or good opinion of the agency . As far as TSA effectiveness at preventing acts of terrorism on U.S. airplanes,
41% think the screening procedures are extremely or very effective. Another 44% think the procedures are
somewhat effective. That number varies little for people who fly somewhat regularly and people who rarely or
never fly. The poll was conducted with telephone interviews July 9th through July 12. Gallup interviewed 1,014
adults living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia . Interestingly, younger Americans have significantly more positive
opinions of the TSA than those who are older, Gallup said, noting that 67% of people between 18 and 29 rate the agency as excellent or good. This may
be because young people fly more frequently, or it may be because that for young people TSA screening, first implemented in 2001, has been part of their
flying experience for the majority of their lives.
Link Turns
Absent a specific threat, security measures cost rather than save PC
Somin '9 Ilya, blogger for Volokh - "Public Ignorance and the Political Economy of Airport Security: Why
Governments Dont Take Enough Precautions Before Attacks and Engage in Security Theater Afterwards"
http://volokh.com/2009/12/29/public-ignorance-and-the-political-economy-of-airport-security-whygovernments-dont-take-enough-precautions-before-attacks-and-engage-in-security-theater-afterwards/
Before an attack occurs, or when a long period of time has passed between attacks, politicians have
little incentive to enact good security measures. They have limited time and political capital,
and the incentive is to spend it on measures that are popular with the general public or that
benefit powerful interest groups. Neither the public nor interest groups are likely to push hard
for effective security measures when there is no immediate fear of attack.
Powerful lobbies will fight for the plan -- intrusive TSA screenings interfere with travel and
tourism
Levinthal '10 Dave, Center for Responsive Politics - "The Airport Security Lobby Squad, Whistleblower Bill
Axed and More in Capital Eye Opener: December 23"
12/23 " http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/12/ceo-12-23-2010/
TIS THE SEASON TO LOBBY THE GATEKEEPERS: Going Grinch on the Transportation Security
Administration is most en vogue, as grumpy travelers quietly, but sincerely consider chucking their removed
shoes at unwitting agents inspecting their semi-naked photos taken by a newfangled millimeter wave machines
into which these folks may have accidentally dumped 3.4 ounces of shampoo just to see if, oh, the wiring shorts
out. Of course, we exaggerate (slightly), although travel this time of year aint exactly a bowl of noses like
cherries. Fear not, however: Several companies and organizations are rushing a small army of
federally registered lobbyists to your aid in a bid to make your airport security experience less
harried, a Center for Responsive Politics review of lobbying disclosure filings indicates. Among
them is the U.S. Travel Association, a relatively new group composed of dozens of hospitality
companies, tourism entities, travel agencies and the like. Through the years first nine months,
the U.S. Travel Association has spent more than $1.1 million lobbying the federal government
including the TSA on a variety of issues, including TSA screening, TSA airport operations
and international and domestic registered traveler programs. Thats nice. But say you have a
specific concern like a prosthetic. You probably dont want some wiseacre asking you to
remove your belt, your coat and your metallic fibula. Take heart in knowing that the Amputee
Coalition of America has this year lobbied the TSA regarding transportation issues for persons
with limb loss. Grandma get run over by a reindeer? Need to get whats left of her back to the
family plot in Sheboygan? Do not pull a Weekend at Bernies. Do thank the National Funeral
Directors Association for lobbying the TSA this year on the issue of transportation of human
remains on commercial passenger aircraft. And take heed in knowing that wherever the friendly skies
may take you for the holidays, lobbyists arent far away. This humble blogger, for example, will today
travel from Washington Reagan National Airport (the Metropolitan Washington Airports
Authority has spent $150,000 on lobbying this year) on American Airlines (parent company
AMR Corp. has spent $4.52 million) to the city of San Antonio ($149,600 in lobbying) via
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport ($200,000 in lobbying).
CORPORATISM 1NC
Demands to abolish airport security are part and parcel of the logic of neoliberal privatization
Jilani '14 Zaid, writer for Alternet, "Why Is Ezra Klein's Vox Parroting Right-Wing Talking Points About
Privatizing the TSA?" 5/29
http://www.alternet.org/media/why-ezra-kleins-vox-parroting-right-wing-talking-points-about-privatizingtsa
Between 2011 and 2012, despite aggressive and sustained opposition from right-wing
politicians and pundits, 45,000 transportation security officers at the Transportation Security
Administration won their first-ever labor contract, thanks to a hardened organizing drve by the
American Federation of Government Employees. Its no surprise that the agency soon came
under intense attack from Republicans and D.C. lobbyists who normally utter nary a word
about civil liberties. These Republicans, like Rep. John Mica (R-FL), whose campaign coffers are lined with
cash from private security contractors who want to displace the TSA, made clear that their goal was to privatize
the agency meaning they were okay with security procedures some viewed as intrusive, but they wanted
profit-making, non-unionized corporations to be the ones doing these searches, not one of Americas newest
unionized public workforces. Earlier this week, Vox.com a new website run by wunderkind Ezra
Klein that promises to explain the news in an objective manner setting itself apart from
supposedly more ideological media on the left and right piled onto this campaign by
publishing an article called The Case for Abolishing The TSA. To the pieces author, Dylan
Matthews, abolishing the TSA isnt a tough call rather, its just a matter of objective data that shows the
agency is virtually a waste of resources, and that the responsibility of airline security should be privatized and
carried out by the airlines themselves. Its worth remembering that the inconvenience and injustice of the
TSAs activities exists for literally no reason, he writes. Airline security is, so far as we can tell, totally useless.
To defend reaching this conclusion, Matthews cites a variety of sources. First, he points to Bruce Schneier, a
cryptographer who he refers to as a security expert. The source Matthews links to is not a peer-reviewed paper
or journal article, but rather a statement Schneier made in a debate. The debate is not over abolishing the TSA,
persay, but rather about TSAs post-9/11 security measures. While Schneier argues that the TSA has not
apprehended any terrorists since 9/11, he does not argue for the agencys abolition. On the contrary, he writes
that aircraft require a special level of security for several reasons: they are a favoured terrorist target; their
failure characteristics mean more deaths than a comparable bomb on a bus or train; they tend ot be national
symbols; and they often fly to foreign countries where terrorists can operate with more impunity. But all that
can be handled with pre-9/11 security. The next set of sources Matthews uses is a literature review by
professors Cynthia Lum and Leslie Kennedy, of George Mason University and Rutgers, respectively. Matthews
writes that these professors studied the research on airport security and found that while the TSA has
prevented hijackings, it didnt reduce attacks, but encouraged would-be hijackers to attack through other
means. He concludes, Additional research done after the review has similarly concluded that the screenings
are, in effect, a wash. Actually, thats not what Lum and Kennedy conclude. I know this because I emailed
them and asked. Heres what Kennedy had to say about Matthewss article: "We did not argue for abolishing
the TSA. That is the reporter's conclusion not ours. We simply reported on the effectiveness of airport
screening which we found, based on the research, was quite high. Our research was not focused on the TSA per
se but, obviously, based on our findings, it would make no sense to get rid of airport screening." And here is
what Lum had to say: I agree with Prof Kennedy. This is an incorrect interpretation of our research. In other
words, none of the researchers Matthews cited actually agree with him that the TSA is useless or
should be abolished even as he is basing his conclusion almost entirely on the idea that the
research shows that he is right. Well, not entirely. Towards the end of his piece, Matthews cites
some odd political figures to validate his idea that abolishing the TSA isnt outside of
mainstream political thought: What to do, then? Simple: just abolish the agency. This is hardly
an extreme proposal; members of Congress, including influential figures like Senator Rand
Paul (R-Kentucky) and Congressman John Mica (R-Florida), have endorsed it. The Cato
Institute's Chris Edwards wants to privatize the TSA and devolve its responsibilities to airports,
but that preserves far too much of the status quo. Better would be to make security the
responsibility of individual airlines, so as to allow competition on that dimension. Its mindboggling how Matthews can view a proposal as not extreme because the Cato Institute which
publishes tracts opposing child labor laws endorses it. The same goes for Sen. Rand Paul (R-
KY), a right-libertarian who once questioned the Civil Rights Act on national television. And as
was noted above, Mica is a close ally of private security firms whose behavior is just as intrusive
as any government agency, and is hardly a champion of civil liberties (he recently voted for an
NSA bill that liberties proponents decried as fake reform). Lastly, asking that individual
airlines compete to provide security runs afoul of the basic history of private corporations and
public safety. Yes, competition is a powerful motivation that has driven real innovation in the
market firms want business, and will often seek better products in order to win over the
public. The problem is, this incentive doesnt really work out with respect to safety. Private
firms see their top motivation as making the most money as possible even if that means
compromising safety. Yes, a bomb exploded on an airplane can be very bad for business. But corporate
accountants have often been caught weighing the odds of a public safety disaster versus the cost of making
safety improvements. In the 1970s, it was revealed that Ford Motor Company was
aware of a design flaw in its Ford Pinto cars that could result in people
burning to death. It refused to pay for a redesign of the cars, deciding that
itd be cheaper to pay off lawsuits that resulted from potential deaths. This
cost-benefit analysis is completely different from what the TSA and other
public safety agencies do their goal is zero deaths, not whatever is
cheaper for shareholders.
This impulse to regulate optimum societal outcomes through market-based approaches
terminates in the absolute demolition of social value
Harvey '5 David, David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "A Brief History of Neoliberalism"
http://messhall.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/A-Brief-History-of-Neoliberalism.pdf, xdi
To presume that markets and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions is to
presume that everything can in principle be treated as a commodity. Commodi fication
presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relations, that a
price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract. The market is
presumed to work as an appropriate guidean ethicfor all human action. In practice, of course, every
society sets some bounds on where commodification begins and ends. Where the boundaries lie is a matter of
contention. Certain drugs are deemed illegal. The buying and selling of sexual favours is outlawed in most US
states, though elsewhere it may be legalized, decriminalized, and even state-regulated as an industry.
Pornography is broadly protected as a form of free speech under US law although here, too, there are certain
forms (mainly concerning children) that are considered beyond the pale. In the US, conscience and honour are
supposedly not for sale, and there exists a curious penchant to pursue corruption as if it is easily
distinguishable from the normal practices of influence-peddling and making money in the marketplace. The
commodification of sexuality, culture, history, heritage; of nature as spectacle or as rest cure; the extraction of
monopoly rents from originality, authenticity, and uniqueness (of works or art, for example)these all
amount to putting a price on things that were never actually produced as commodities.17 There is often
disagreement as to the appropriateness of commodification (of religious events and symbols, for example) or of
who should exercise the property rights and derive the rents (over access to Aztec ruins or marketing of
Aboriginal art, for example). Neoliberalization has unquestionably rolled back the bounds of commodification
and greatly extended the reach of legal contracts. It typically celebrates (as does much of postmodern theory)
ephemerality and the short-term contractmarriage, for example, is understood as a short-term contractual
arrangement rather than as a sacred and unbreakable bond. The divide between neoliberals and
neoconservatives partially reflects a difference as to where the lines are drawn. The neoconservatives typically
blame liberals, Hollywood, or even postmodernists for what they see as the dissolution and immorality of
the social order, rather than the corporate capitalists (like Rupert Murdoch) who actually do most of the
damage by foisting all manner of sexually charged if not salacious material upon the world and who continually
flaunt their pervasive preference for short-term over long-term commitments in their endless pursuit of profit.
But there are far more serious issues here than merely trying to protect some treasured object, some particular
ritual or a preferred corner of social life from the monetary calculus and the short-term contract. For at the
heart of liberal and neoliberal theory lies the necessity of constructing coherent markets for
land, labour, and money, and these, as Karl Polanyi pointed out, are obviously not
commodities . . . the commodity description of labour, land, and money is entirely fictitious.
While capitalism cannot function without such fictions, it does untold damage if it fails to
acknowledge the complex realities behind them. Polanyi, in one of his more famous passages, puts it
this way: To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of
human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount
and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For
the alleged commodity labour power cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused,
without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In
disposing of mans labour power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and
moral entity man attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings
would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through
vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and
landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and
raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would
periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as
disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society.18 The damage wrought through
the floods and droughts of fictitious capitals within the global credit system, be it in Indonesia, Argentina,
Mexico, or even within the US, testifies all too well to Polanyis final point. But his theses on labour and land
deserve further elaboration.
Only a decision-making calculus that privileges working class LIFE OVER neoliberal
valorization of CAPITAL can DE-LINK economic growth from environmental destruction -failure to articulate this political calculus results in planetary devastation
http://messhall.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/A-Brief-History-of-Neoliberalism.pdf, xdi
The imposition of short-term contractual logic on environmental uses has disastrous
consequences. Fortunately, views within the neoliberal camp are somewhat divided on this issue. While
Reagan cared nothing for the environment, at one point characterizing trees as a major source of air pollution,
Thatcher took the problem seriously. She played a major role in negotiating the Montreal Protocol to limit the
use of the CFCs that were responsible for the growing ozone hole around Antarctica. She took the threat of
global warming from rising carbon dioxide emissions seriously. Her environmental commitments were not
entirely disinterested, of course, since the closure of the coalmines and the destruction of the miners union
could be partially legitimized on environmental grounds. Neoliberal state policies with respect to the
environment have therefore been geographically uneven and temporally unstable (depending on who holds the
reins of state power, with the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations being particularly retrograde in the
US). The environmental movement, furthermore, has grown in significance since the 1970s. It has often
exerted a restraining influence, depending on time and place. And in some instances capitalist firms
have discovered that increasing efficiency and improved environmental performance can go
hand in hand. Nevertheless, the general balance sheet on the environmental consequences of
neoliberalization is almost certainly negative. Serious though controversial efforts to create
indices of human well-being including the costs of environmental degradations suggest an
accelerating negative trend since 1970 or so. And there are enough speci fic examples of
environmental losses resulting from the unrestrained application of neoliberal principles to
give sustenance to such a general account. The accelerating destruction of tropical rain forests
since 1970 is a well-known example that has serious implications for climate change and the
loss of biodiversity. The era of neoliberalization also happens to be the era of
the fastest mass extinction of species in the Earths recent history .27 If we
are entering the danger zone of so transforming the global environment,

particularly its climate, as to make the earth unfit for human habitation,
then further embrace of the neoliberal ethic and of neoliberalizing
practices will surely prove nothing short of deadly. The Bush administrations
approach to environmental issues is usually to question the scientific evidence and do nothing (except cut back
on the resources for relevant scientific research). But his own research team reports that the human
contribution to global warming soared after 1970. The Pentagon also argues that global warming might well in
the long run be a more serious threat to the security of the US than terrorism.28 Interestingly, the two main
culprits in the growth of carbon dioxide emissions these last few years have been the
powerhouses of the global economy, the US and China (which increased its emissions by 45 per cent
over the past decade). In the US, substantial progress has been made in increasing energy efficiency in industry
and residential construction. The profligacy in this case largely derives from the kind of consumerism that
continues to encourage high-energy-consuming suburban and ex-urban sprawl and a culture that opts to
purchase gas-guzzling SUVs rather than the more energy-efficient cars that are available. Increasing US
dependency on imported oil has obvious geopolitical ramifications. In the case of China, the rapidity of
industrialization and of the growth of car ownership doubles the pressure on energy consumption. China has
moved from selfsufficiency in oil production in the late 1980s to being the second largest global importer after
the US. Here, too, the geopolitical implications are rife as China scrambles to gain a foothold in the Sudan,
central Asia, and the Middle East to secure its oil supplies. But China also has vast rather low-grade coal
supplies with a high sulphur content. The use of these for power generation is creating major environmental
problems, particularly those that contribute to global warming. Furthermore, given the acute power shortages
that now bedevil the Chinese economy, with brownouts and blackouts common, there is no incentive
whatsoever for local government to follow central government mandates to close down inefficient and dirty
power stations. The astonishing increase in car ownership and use, largely replacing the bicycle in large cities
like Beijing in ten years, has brought China the negative distinction of having sixteen of the twenty worst cities
in the world with respect to air quality.29 The cognate effects on global warming are obvious. As usually
happens in phases of rapid industrialization, the failure to pay any mind to the environmental
consequences is having deleterious effects everywhere. The rivers are highly polluted, water
supplies are full of dangerous cancer-inducing chemicals, public health provision is weak (as
illustrated by the problems of SARS and the avian flu), and the rapid conversion of land resources to
urban uses or to create massive hydroelectric projects (as in the Yangtze valley) all add up to a
significant bundle of environmental problems that the central government is only now
beginning to address. China is not alone in this, for the rapid burst of growth in India is also being
accompanied by stressful environmental changes deriving from the expansion of consumption as well as the
increased pressure on natural resource exploitation. Neoliberalization has a rather dismal record when
it comes to the exploitation of natural resources. The reasons are not far to seek. The
preference for short-term contractual relations puts pressure on all producers to extract
everything they can while the contract lasts. Even though contracts and options may be
renewed there is always uncertainty because other sources may be found. The longest possible
time-horizon for natural resource exploitation is that of the discount rate (i.e. about twenty- five
years) but most contracts are now far shorter. Depletion is usually assumed to be linear, when
it is now evident that many ecological systems crash suddenly after they have hit some tipping
point beyond which their natural reproduction capacity cannot function. Fish stockssardines off
California, cod off Newfoundland, and Chilean sea bassare classic examples of a resource exploited at an
optimal rate that suddenly crashes without any seeming warning. 30 Less dramatic but equally insidious is the
case of forestry.
Our alternative is to call for a paradigm shift in social relations towards a more equitable
distribution of resources. This is a decision-making framework that recognizes a material
foundation for autonomy as a prerequisite to democratic communication.
Briscoe '12 Felicia, Professor of Education at UTSA, "Anarchist, Neoliberal, & Democratic Decision-Making:
Deepening the Joy in Learning and Teaching" Education Studies, Vol. 48, Issue 1
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00131946.2011.637257#preview, xdi
A More Equal Distribution of Resources Emma Goldman describes anarchism as an order that will
guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of
life (1907, 68). Rocker (1938) describes the effects of acute inequality in the distribution of resources: Our
present economic system, leading to a mighty accumulation of social wealth in the hands of a
privileged minority and to a continuous impoverishment of the great masses of the people . . .
sacrificed the general interests of human society to the private interests of individuals and thus
systematically undermined the relationship between man and man [sic]. People forgot that industry is not an
end in itself, but should be only a means to insure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to
him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the
realm of ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than political despotism. (2)19
Although Rocker wrote in 1938, the polarization of wealth20 and the elevation of industry (or
business/corporate interests) over human interests remain true.21 An equal distribution of
economic power or resources is fundamental to equalizing power

relationships. One anarchist, Fotopoulos (2008), describes this necessary economic democracy . . . as
the authority of the people demos in the economic sphere, implying the existence of economic equality in the
sense of an equal distribution of economic power (442). Without equal power relations brought about by a
fairly equal distribution of wealth, the individual autonomy advocated by deep democracy and anarchism
cannot be operationalized. Each Person Directly Participates in Decisions Affecting Her or His Life (Autonomy)
Anarchisms and deep democracys call for a more equal distribution of resources helps to create the conditions
necessary for autonomy. Perhaps the single most important foundation of anarchist thought is autonomy, as
described by Anna Goldman (2010): [Anarchism is] based in the understanding that we are best qualified
tomake decisions about our own lives.Anarchists believe that we must all control our own lives,making
decisions collectively about matters, which affect us. Anarchists believe and engage in direct action. (para 7)
Several scholars have analyzed the importance of autonomy to human experience. Although Paulo Freire
(1970) does not describe himself as an anarchist, his analysis of autonomy in regards to determining ones own
thoughts and actions is often quoted by anarchists such as Spring (2008). Freire (1970) discusses the death
that occurs without autonomy: Overwhelming controlis necrophilic; it is nourished by love of
death, not life. Based on a mechanistic, static, naturalistic, spatialized view of consciousness; it
transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, leads
men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power. (64) Freires description of
overwhelming control resonates with Mr. Jacksons description of his experience in an urban school, with
students being tested to death under the current policies. A number of scholars22 note that without equal
power relationships, there is little autonomy; without autonomy, authentic communication
becomes impossible.
We are not a critique of capitalism but rather the hegemony of neoclassical economics which
places profit-motive above human well-being. Our alternative embraces a form of cooperative
economics to drive an economy for the people by the people with a proven track-record of
success. Our alternative empowers the autonomy of the many to end the stranglehold of power
by the few. Our approach understand the fundamental prerequisite of democratizing the
workplace to altering material relations of power
Stone and Bowman '11 Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone, scholar-activists and co-founders of the Center for
Global Justice "Cooperativization on the Mondragn Model As Alternative to Globalizing Capitalism" 11/15
http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/2011/11/15/cooperativization-on/, xdi
Globalization has failed humanity. In the sixty years since the launching of its main
instruments, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, global trade has expanded twelvefold and economic growth fivefold, yet the gap between rich and poor also widened and the number of
poor is greater than ever. To question globalization is to question capitalism, the former being a
deepening of the latter. As a contribution to the ongoing debate we propose transforming
globalizing capitalism into something much better by directly altering

production relations, primarily by democratizing workplaces . Many critics of
globalization who disagree on other matters endorse some form of workplace democracy as part of any viable
alternative. Among available models of alternatives to capitalism, we have borrowed much from David
Schweickarts economic democracy and Michael Albert and Robin Hahnels participatory planning. We
put a Schweickart-like democratization before processes like participatory planning. What may also set us
apart is our claim that cooperativization can eliminate globalizing capitalisms
worst features. We shall not defend all aspects of Mondragn. By the Mondragn model we
mean the network of co-ops associated with the town of Mondragn in the Basque country of
Northern Spain. Model for us primarily refers to its framers principles, which have made the
network worth emulating. As it happens, deviations from some of these principles have also long been
underway. Mondragn can be sustainably generalized only if restored to its principles, well hold. Invoking this
rectified model as vanguard, well argue such a democratizing movement can transform for the better the
production relations underpining globalization. To liberate co-operative labor from capitalism itself, some
options opened by cooperativization must be engaged in a second stage of de-marketization. After sketching
it well consider some objections. 1. Mondragn and the Degeneration Problem Since the beginnings of
capitalism worker co-ops have haunted it as its own built-in opposite, bearing hopes for a non-capitalist future.
Relative to such hopes, they have inevitably degenerated by failing or by becoming capitalist. Mondragn is
itself on the latter trajectory. The paradigm degeneration occurred in the Rochdale co-operative founded in
England in 1844 when, to finance purchase of a new mill in 1859, it took on investor members. They outvoted
worker members and in three years converted the co-op to a conventional firm. Carefully avoiding that form of
degeneration, a more recent co-op fell into yet another. In 1921, 125 dedicated Scandinavian cooperativists put
up $1,000 for equal numbers of stock shares and started Olympia Veneer Company, the first of many plywood
co-ops in the Pacific northwest. (Berman; Lutz & Lux, Ch. 8; Pencavel) Thanks to the efficiency of co-operative
labor, share values skyrocketed. Instead of taking in new owner-members, however, they hired wage workers to
work their individual shares. In 1954 the 23 remaining members voted to sell out, at around $625,000 gain
each, to the U.S. Plywood Corporation, a conventional firm. A capitalist success, Olympia failed as a co-op,
because of wage labor (violating the one-worker-one-vote rule) and because ownership was of individually
sellable stock shares. So, despite its egalitarian impulse, Olympias self-destruction was present at the start.
The Mondragn co-ops avoid this degeneration by separating ownership, which varies in value,
from voting, which is strictly equal. Instead of buying stock, new applicants advance labor to
pay the membership fee. Roughly a years salary, this loan by members starts an individual
capital account (ICA) to which monthly and year-end profits and losses are credited or
debited. (Thomas & Logan 1982, p. 136) Unlike stock shares, ICAs are neither accumulable nor
sellable and carry only one vote. Being both individually recoupable upon leaving yet available meanwhile
for collective investment, they constitute a sort of bank inside each co-op. Rights attach solely to membership
and terminate when members retire or leave. There being no non-worker owners, co-ops remain whole solely
in the hands of their active workforces, avoiding the Rochdale error. A co-op could be sold, but only by a hardto-muster two-thirds of a general assembly vote, and this has never happened. The salary spread from
lowest to highest, currently 1 to 6, is based on an agreed job rating index. Salary is in scare
quotes since members, not being employees, receive no wages or salaries. Rather, they have the
following rights of owners and managers: 1) monthly and annual profit distributions; 2) 6%
annual interest on their loans to the co-op; 3) a vote on undistributed funds; 4) access to all
records; and 5) a vote on policy and managers. Mondragn has outlasted Olympia as a co-op by 20
years, due partly to separating voting rights from ownership rights. The network started in 1956 with a small
stove factory built by five former students of a vocational teacher, a priest named Jos Mara Arizmendiarrieta.
Unions were banned but agricultural co-op laws allowed workers to own their workplaces. Basque solidarity
facilitated fund-raising. The movement faced a crisis in 1958 when Madrid declared members to be selfemployed, hence ineligible for state health and unemployment benefits. Turning adversity around they created
their own cheaper system. (Huet) In 1959, with this systems reserves, founders started the Caja Laboral
Popular to give banking, entrepreneurial and health services to the four then-existing co-ops. (Since postFranco Spain offered state health coverage, the network no longer provides its own health services.) Focusing
on domestic appliances and machine tools for the protected Spanish market, the network steadily expanded.
The network has repeatedly proved its value. In the 1980-83 recession, the Basque country lost 20% of its jobs.
Nearby firms laid off massively or closed. Many co-ops took pay cuts up to 11%, and five co-ops closed. Yet,
thanks to job transfers in the network, virtually no layoffs were made in the co-ops, stabilizing the regions
economy. (Clamp) The costly network-underwritten re-tooling was quite beyond the individual co-ops. Then a
one-two punch hit with opening of Spains market to Europe in 1986 and to the world in 1989. We visited in
1989. It was a decisive moment. Network appliances were suddenly up against major German and French
brands. This presented a fateful choice: directly compete with multinationals or follow the Italian co-ops into
niche markets? Re-tooling this time was judged too costly so in 1991 over 100 co-ops, organized up to then by
regions and linked through the Caja, re-organized in three sectors as Mondragn Co-operative Corporation.
This allowed speedy, centralized decisions typical of the multinational competition. As of 2003, MCC had
over 66,000 employees operating over 160 co-ops in three sectors: 135 industrial, 6 financial,
and 14 distribution. In both sales and workforce, MCC is the Basque countrys largest business
corporation and Spains seventh largest. The three sectors are backed by the Caja, housing,
service, research, education and training co-ops. Mondragn University, founded in 1997,
integrates technology with cooperativism in a multi-lingual environment for over 4,000
students. As a second degree co-op like the Caja its board is partly nominated by its own
members (students and faculty), partly by the co-ops is serves. Other second degree co-ops
include technology and management schools, and research institutes. Core industrial co-ops
make an array of high-tech and durable goods for world markets including robots, machinetools, appliances, auto parts, buses, and elevators. The networks supermarket, Eroski,
partnering with a French chain, has become Spains third largest grocery retailer and largest
domestically owned one. Eroskis hybrid equity structure joins employees with customers as
co-investors. (MCC 2002) Typical of worker co-ops, and unlike most capitalist firms, all
Mondragn co-ops devote 10% of all profits to community needs. With a few
exceptions the Fagor group with some 5,000 members most successful co-ops hive off related progeny
after reaching 500 or so members. Beyond that number economies of scale do not make up for weakening of
face-to-face production. Progeny take their own collective risk but infra-network competition is foreclosed by
contracts with MCC committing all new co-ops to uniform principles of job creation, shared capital, and
democratic structure. Usually profit is income after all costs, including labor costs. But in a worker co-op,
profit is income after all non-labor costs. For labor is not a cost but a mutual sharing of each members
capital. Since labor time is neither bought nor sold, a co-ops workers together share all profit and losses. Not
more than 30% of losses may be debited to a co-ops undivided account. Democracy is central and turns on
membership. Ultimate control of production, income spread, and board seats lies in the yearly
general assembly. It elects the board of directors ( consejo rectoral) which appoints
management. The assembly elects a watchdog council ( consejo de vigilencia) to monitor
management and a social council (consejo social). Subject to board and management approval,
the social council indexes jobs within the 1 to 6 spread based on demands for experience,
training, responsibility, and hardship. In individual grievances over pay scale and social
welfare its decisions are binding. A Mondragn-like co-op re-unites in one person the functions
of worker, manager and owner. Capitalism consigns these functions to three separate persons.
To personify these functions is to impose on the three groups thus constituted an imperative
that pits them against the other two. Re-uniting these functions in each member abolishes the
conflict among the three groups. In this re-combination, however, one typical function does not reappear when a firm becomes a co-operative: that of capitalist itself. Their only function is to furnish capital.
But this is not a distinct contribution to production. Workers can exercise entrepreneurship
and either hire capital or capitalize a Mondragn-like co-op with their own
labor. Capitalists as such make no irreplaceable contribution, Schweickart notes (2002, p. 33), and since
profits should go only to those who do, he concludes they deserve none. Thus while workers assume manager
and owner functions, the capitalist side of the owner function vestigial under capitalism drops out
altogether with cooperativization. Finally Mondragn works better at the capitalists
own game than do capitalist firms! Concluding his two-factor comparative

study, Henk Thomas writes: Productivity and profitability are higher for
co-operatives than for capitalist firms. It makes little difference whether
the Mondragn group is compared with the largest 500 companies, or with
small-and medium-scale industries; in both comparisons the Mondragn
group is more productive and more profitable. (Thomas 1982, p. 149) Studies of job
creation, worker compensation, and job security yield similar results. (Thomas & Logan; Bradley & Gelb)
Central to our argument for cooperativization, is the persistant indication in available research
that the closer workplaces get to Mondragn-like co-operative labor, the more productive and
profitable they are. Summarizing forty-three economic studies of self-management, Levine and
Tyson conclude worker participation in management usually boosts productivity, but especially
when combined with other elements of self-managed cooperative labor, such as: 1) profitsharing; 2) guaranteed long-term job security; 3) small wage spread; and 4) guaranteed worker
rights. (pp. 205-214) To these Mondragn adds the potent element of worker ownership. So, instead of
tapping the power of liberated co-operative labor with one or two such elements, Mondragn unites all of them
at once. Such co-ops outstrip all types of capitalist firms in productivity not in spite of being democratic but to
the extent that they are. But Mondragn has not been true to its impetus. Is it a model? Three sets of
degenerative practices make it less worth emulating and endanger its economic superiority. The practices, and
remedies, are: (1) When demand increases, the co-ops often hire non-member wage labor. MCC recently
persuaded local legislators to raise the ceiling on contract labor to 30%. (Khler) And if a co-op applies, MCC
may allow it up to 40% non-member workers. (Huet) Illegal eventuales or temporaries mostly female
are not counted in the 30% quota for contract labor, and make up a substantial percent of workforces. In
some co-ops over 40% of work may be done by non-members. The overall percentage is unknown since MCC
no longer gives out membership figures. Collective exploitation of wage labor encourages more of it,
membership limits, and sell-outs. Ruling out the false benefits of wage labor will in the long run be a benefit.
(2) MCC is using women as a reserve army of labor. True, on the gender division of labor women do slightly
better at MCC than in capitalist firms (Hacker & Elcorobairutia) and have a major presence in management.
But blue collar work remains largely male. This second-class labor pool is incompatible with cooperativism.
Solutions include: observing the one-worker-one-vote rule, gender integration of all co-ops and jobs; and childcare in workplaces. (Ferguson, pp. 94-99) These practices would probably boost productivity by fully engaging
womens talents. (3) There are unnecessary sacrifices of cooperativism. In 1999 external non-voting capital
stakes were 13% of MCC equity. (Khler) This is due to joint ventures and acquisition (or start-up) of many
capitalist enterprises abroad, mostly in Latin America. Vague assurances that cooperativization is on the
agenda are extended to such workers. (Logue) This perilous mixing of co-op with external investor capital
contravenes co-operative principles. Worker alienation is rampant. (Kasmir) Social councils are underutilized.
(Clamp) Unionization is under discussion. (Huet) Work-floor democracy is a complex issue. In the mid-1960s
the network studied Scandinavian work groups to replace Taylors scientific management up to then
dominant on the work-floor. Ironically Ulgor workers voted down the innovation in favor of the assembly line!
(Thomas & Logan) In in89 Total Quality Management was introduced with other disempowering practices:
just-in-time inventorying, work-movement monitors, and swing shifts. Studying effects, George Cheney
concluded that the changes threaten Mondragns organizational integrity as a value-based rather than
market-based firm. This neo-cooperativism trend privileges an externally driven form of participation, in
marked contrast with [one]in which workplace democracy is justified primarily or significantly in terms of
the benefits for the employees and the organization as a whole. Yet while members may not often exercise
their powers over their work-lives and managers, they have them. In 2001 although the social council at Fagor
the largest and oldest co-operative issued a blistering critique of MCCs evolution, it continued.
Centralized decision-making has made meaningful consideration of alternatives harder. An observer sadly
concluded that the Fagor dissidents were not confident [they] can provide an alternative they worry MCC is
correct that survival in the global market requires compromises of critical co-operative principles. (Huet)
True, islands of cooperativization will be gradually re-absorbed. (Khler) But global competitiveness does not
demand wage workers or marginalizing women or preempting opposition. On the contrary, the more elements
of liberated (self-managed) cooperative labor, the more productivity and profitability. MCC managers faith in
the economic value of cooperativism waned, yet the evidence still suggests that the network could both compete
globally and: stop all wage labor; introduce gender democracy; cease joint ventures with external capital;
resume start-ups (e.g. by co-operativizing foreign subsidiaries); encourage unions for the external solidarity
they provide; and allow social councils equal say with management in setting all work-floor regimes. Long-term
competitive advantage would likely result. And the network would re-emerge as a model. This model is for
now salvageable. Worker co-ops survive as such longer than comparable capitalist firms, and Mondragns
innovations have vastly lengthened their life-expectancy. But cooperativization will have enough time to
construct a better world only if it is a part of building an alternative economy. For such co-ops usually
become capitalist not because they are co-operative, but because, in isolation, they are not co-operative
enough. 2. Unravelling Capitalism by Liberating Cooperative Labor Mondragn leads three sets of
movements that are already building the cooperative production part of that economy despite being under
siege and lacking in coordination. In the vanguard with Mondragn are three other networks of co-operatives
that engage all elements of co-operative production. In Italys Emiglia-Romagna region three networks
represent some 2,700 co-ops of all kinds employing 150,000 worker-owners. (Rosen & Young 1991, p. 172;
Melman p. 370) Europe generally is having a worker co-op boom: 83,000 such enterprises in 42 countries now
employ 1.3 million people, well over double those so employed in 1982. (CECOP) Growing in Canadas
maritime provinces since fishing co-operatives were started in 1927, the Co-op Atlantic federation of 166
purchasing, retailing, producer, housing and fishing co-ops employs about 5,850 workers. (GEO #16 & #17)
Japans Seikatsu network of consumer and producer cooperatives now includes 225,000 households. (GEO
#12) National federations including the new U.S. federation are linking in a single body to facilitate global
inter-co-operation. (CICOPA; GEO #60, 62) A much larger set of movements engages some but not all
elements of liberated co-operative labor. A growing number of trade unions demand worker
participation in decision-making; Germanys mitbestimmung laws require board

representation of workforces. (Melman, Ch. 9 & 11) The vigorous ESOP movement, though U.S.based, is now international. Since 1974, tax breaks go to U.S. firms that loan workers money to
buy company stock, re-paying with earnings. Participants in ESOPs or other employer stock
plans number 20.3 million or 15.8% of private-sector employees. (Kruse) There are related
movements to open books and share profits, equity, and decision-making with workers. Much
larger still, a third tier embraces much of humanitys rural half. Village-based agricultural and light-industrial
production use social property. (Bayat) In a sample of Indian villages, 14 to 23 percent of all income came from
use of common property resources, rising to 84 to 100 percent of the income of the poor. (Jodha) Also in this
tier are: consumer, marketing, agricultural, electrical and housing, co-ops; community economic
development initiatives; the community banking movement; the non-governmental organization sector; and
the social and solidarity economy movement. This last-named movement called the peoples
economy in Asia unites the others. It aims to democratize not only production, but
distribution, and investment. Some advocates envision living in networks

of solidarity economy, in effect, leaving capitalism by: earning a living in a
worker co-op, buying food in a fair-trade food co-op, saving and investing
through a credit union, etc. At the 2004 World Social Forum at Mumbai,
the movement declared the solidarity economy is not a sector of the
economybut should be instead the subject and main agent of a social,
economic, political and cultural transformation. (www.alliance21.org) Direct
economic attacks against this movement are underway, especially in the campaign to dissolve socially-owned
non-governmental property into exclusive private property. Indivisible joint property is the main resource for a
range of associations from poor villages to wealthy first-world worker co-ops. But such resources threaten
globalization by keeping cheap labor out of reach of multi-nationals, themselves offering autonomous
alternatives to them. Typical of the attack was Mexicos president Salinas de Gortaris 1992 abolition of
protection of ejidos, a communal land tenure form. In 1994 NAFTAs opening of Mexicos vast corn market to
cheap, subsidized corn added the second pincer that has since been squeezing farmers off the land and into
urban poverty. Mexicos struggle to restore the patrimony of communal lands stolen in the conquest continues.
Other weapons against social property include: biopiracy of genetic material, theft-by-patenting of indigenous
medicine, and commodifying culture. Such accumulation by dispossession. (Harvey pp. 145-149) is being
resisted in Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Nepal and elsewhere. By cooperativization we
mean not only intercooperation within and among the three tiers of the
cooperative labor movement, nor only restoration of social property, but
everywhere replacing the hierarchical and coercive relations typical of
capitalist production and consumption by voluntary cooperative
associations. Cooperativization also advances from the consumer side.
Conscientious consumers are drawn to buy co-op. The fair trade
movements demand for democratically produced goods will in time elicit
profitable production of them. Naomi Klein cautions however, that unless the fair trade
movement demands improved labor conditions, it merely sanitizes the existing system. Supported by
conscientious consumers the democratic economy can displace capitalist
firms. And as it becomes obvious to workers that their own labor, not
capital, creates profit. Subjection to capital will no longer be seen as a
necessary condition for making a living. The spreading production
relations, by directly meeting needs, will undo capitalisms worst aspects.
This productivity advantage is likely due to harmonizing of conflicting imperatives. Absent rewards, workers in
capitalist firms withhold their skills. By contrast workers in democratic firms, no longer pitted against each
other, have strong incentives to share skills. And since effectively exercising collective creativity is pleasurable
(Graeber p. 260), management supervision is less necessary, a big savings. (Fitzroy & Kraft) Also lifted is the
even greater burden of supporting absentee shareholders. Co-ops thus have a flexibility, financial buoyancy,
and re-investment potential lacking capitalist firms. (Jones & Svejnar, pp. 449-465) Members are not
resentfully slow, care for equipment, avoid waste, and reduce downtime and absenteeism. Large-scale
production still needs skilled managers, but direct market feedback, freed of noise from managers with
inimical interests, allows faster remedy of management errors. (Estrin, Jones, Svejnar, pp. 40-61; Levin, p. 28)
If productivity increases along with greater workplace democracy, an important corollary follows: firms
tapping more of the power of liberated co-operative labor will have advantage over those tapping less. The
more elements of the rectified Mondragn model in workers hands, relative to non-co-ops, the greater their
advantage, other factors equal. Less democratic firms will be compelled to democratize. Thus just by
pursuing profit, capitalist relations of production will tend to unravel.

Capitalists may be powerless to end such threats to their hegemony.
Even if there is no concrete alternative to plutocracy, using the debate space to criticize
inequality incentivizes research practices that are more attuned to everyday human life
and the impact of economics on ecological systems -- only this move can prioritize the
solidarity of vulnerable communities
Nixon 11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 14-16)
How do we bring home-and bring emotionally to life-threats that take time to wreak their havoc, threats that
never materialize in one spectacular, explosive, cinematic scene? Apprehension is a critical word here, a
crossover term that draws together the domains of perception, emotion, and action. To engage slow violence is
to confront layered predicaments of apprehension: to apprehend-to arrest, or at least mitigate-often
imperceptible threats requires rendering them apprehensible to the senses through the work of scientific and
imaginative testimony. An influential lineage of environmental thought gives primacy to immediate sensory
apprehension, to sight above all, as foundational for any environmental ethics of place. George Perkins Marsh,
the mid-nineteenth-century environmental pioneer, argued in Man and Nature that "the power most
important to cultivate and at the same time, hardest to acquire, is that of seeing what is before him." Aldo
Leopold similarly insisted that "we can be ethical only toward what we can see.'?' But what happens when we
are unsighted, when what extends before us-in the space and time that we most deeply inhabit-remains
invisible? How, indeed, are we to act ethically toward human and biotic communities that lie beyond our
sensory ken? What then, in the fullest sense of the phrase, is the place of seeing in the world that we now
inhabit? What, moreover, is the place of the other senses? How do we both make slow violence visible yet also
challenge the privileging of the visible? Such questions have profound consequences for the apprehension of
slow violence, whether on a cellular or a transnational scale. Planetary consciousness (a notion that has
undergone a host of theoretical formulations) becomes pertinent here, perhaps most usefully in the sense in
which Mary Louise Pratt elaborates it, linking questions of power and perspective, keeping front and center the
often latent, often invisible violence in the view. Who gets to see, and from where? When and how does such
empowered seeing become normative? And what perspectives-not least those of the poor or women or the
colonized-do hegemonic sight conventions of visuality obscure? Pratt's formulation of planetary consciousness
remains invaluable because it allows us to connect forms of apprehension to forms of imperial violence."
Against this backdrop, 1want to introduce the third central concern of this book. Alongside slow violence and
the environmentalism of the poor, the chapters that follow are critically concerned with the political,
imaginative, and strategic role of environmental writer-activists. Writer-activists can help us apprehend threats
imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses, either because they are geographically remote, too vast
or too minute in scale, or are played out across a time span that exceeds the instance of observation or even the
physiological life of the human observer. In a world permeated by insidious, yet unseen or imperceptible
violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible by
humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses. Writing can challenge perceptual habits
that downplay the damage slow violence inflicts and bring into imaginative focus apprehensions that elude
sensory corroboration. The narrative imaginings of writer-activists may thus offer us a different kind of
witnessing: of sights unseen. To allay states of apprehension-trepidations, forebodings, shadows cast by the
invisible-entails facing the challenge, at once imaginative and scientific, of giving the unapparent a
materiality upon which we can act. Yet poor communities, often disproportionately exposed to the force fields
of slow violence-be they military residues or imported e-waste or the rising tides of climate change-are the
communities least likely to attract sustained scientific inquiry into causes, effects, and potential redress. Such
poor communities are abandoned to sporadic science at best and usually no science at all; they are also
disproportionately subjected to involuntary pharmaceutical experiments. Indeed, when such communities
raise concerns, they often become targets of well-funded antiscience by forces that have a legal or commercial
interest in manufacturing and disseminating doubt." Such embattled communities, beset by officially
unacknowledged hazards, must find ways to broadcast their inhabited fears, their lived sense of a corroded
environment, within the broader global struggles over apprehension. It is here that writers, filmmakers, and
digital activists may play a mediating role in helping counter the layered invisibility that results from insidious
threats, from temporal protractedness, and from the fact that the afflicted are people whose quality of life-and
often whose very existence-is of indifferent interest to the corporate media.
2AC MATERIALS
Statist securitization is worse than corporate -- their link is backwards -- nationalist
securitization re-entrenches us/them dichotomies and centralizes networks of control
Beauchamp 09Toby Beauchamp, Ph.D. assistant professor of gender and womens studies at the University of Illinois,
Urbana Champaign, Artful Concealment and Strategic Visibility: Transgender Bodies and U.S. State Surveillance After 9/11, 2009,
Surveillance & Society 6(4): 356-366, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org, ISSN: 1477-7487, pg. 356-357, ARAD: 7/17/15
On September 4, 2003, shortly before the two-year anniversary of the attacks

on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the U.S. Department of Homeland
Security released an official Advisory to security personnel. Citing ongoing concerns about potential
attacks by Al-Qaeda operatives, the advisorys final paragraph emphasizes that terrorism is everywhere in
disguise: Terrorists will employ novel methods to artfully conceal suicide devices. Male bombers may dress as females in order to
Two years later, the Real ID Act was

signed into law, proposing a major restructuring of identification documents
and travel within and across U.S. borders. Central components of this process
include a new national database linked through federally standardized drivers
licenses, and stricter standards of proof for asylum applications. In response
to both the Advisory and the Real ID Act, transgender activist and advocacy
organizations in the U.S. quickly pointed to the ways trans populations would
be targeted as suspicious and subjected to new levels of scrutiny. Criticizing what they
read as instances of transphobia or anti-trans discrimination, many of these organizations offer both
transgender individuals and government agencies strategies for reducing or
eliminating that discrimination. While attending to the very real dangers and
damages experienced by many trans people in relation to government policies,
in many cases the organizations approaches leave intact the broader
regulation of gender, particularly as it is mediated and enforced by the state.
Moreover, they tend to address concerns about anti-trans discrimination in ways
that are disconnected from questions of citizenship, racialization or
nationalism. Nevertheless, by illuminating the ways that new security measures interact with and affect transgenderdiscourage scrutiny (Department of Homeland Security 2003).
identified people and gender-nonconforming bodies, transgender activist practices and the field of transgender studies are poised to
make a significant contribution to the ways state surveillance tactics are understood and interpreted. The monitoring of transgender
and gender-nonconforming populations is inextricable from questions of national security and regulatory practices of the state, and
state surveillance policies that may first appear unrelated to transgender people are in fact deeply rooted in the maintenance and
transgender and gendernonconforming bodies are bound up in surveillance practices that are
intimately tied to state security, nationalism and the us/them, either/or
rhetoric that underpins U.S. military and government constructions of safety.
At the same time, the primary strategies and responses offered by
transgender advocacy organizations tend to reconsolidate U.S. nationalism
and support the increased policing of deviant bodies.
enforcement of normatively gendered bodies, behaviors and identities. I argue here that
None of their impact claims are intrinsic to Capital -- they would exist under any form of social
organization -- Capital is empirically the most harm minimizing -- It is resilient and sustainable
Ormerod '15 Paul, Paul Ormerod is an economist at Volterra Partners, a visiting professor at the UCL Centre
for the Study of Decision Making Uncertainty, and author of Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and
Economics. "Paul Ormerod: Capitalism is both stable and resilient" 4/10
http://beta.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/paul-ormerod-capitalism-is-both-stable-and-resilient
The financial crisis did succeed in creating at least one dynamic new industry. Since the late
2000s, there has been a massive upsurge in op-ed pieces, books and even artistic performances
offering a critique of capitalism. A founder member of the Monty Python team, Terry Jones, is the latest
to get in on the act with his documentary Boom, Bust, Boom. The film makes use of puppetry and animation to
argue that market-based economies are inherently unstable. In the opening scene, Jones appears on Wall
Street. "This film is about the Achilles' heel of capitalism," the ex-Python solemnly proclaims, "how human
nature drives the economy to crisis after crisis, time and time again." The intellectual underpinnings of the
movie are the theories of the American economist Hyman Minsky. He argued that a key mechanism that
pushes an economy towards a crisis is the accumulation of debt by the private sector. Although he never
constructed a formal model, Minsky's ideas are clearly relevant to the run-up to the crash in 2008. They at least
deserve to be taken seriously. But does life really imitate art? Is capitalism genuinely unstable in the
way in which Jones alleges in the film? An immediate problem for this view is that there have
only been two global financial crashes in the past 150 years. The early 1930s and the late 2000s
are the only periods in which these were experienced. So an event which takes place
approximately once every 75 years is hardly sufficient evidence to indict an entire system with
the charge of instability. One way of looking at the stability of capitalism is through the labour market. If
the system experiences frequent crises, the average rate of unemployment will be high. But this does not seem
to be the case. From the end of the Second World War until the oil price crisis of the mid-1970s, unemployment
averaged just under 5 per cent in America and was less than 3 per cent in the UK and Germany. Even during
the more turbulent times since the 1970s, the unemployment rate averaged 6 to 7 per cent in the three
economies prior to the 2008-09 crisis. So higher but by no means catastrophic given that John Maynard
Keynes himself thought it was very unlikely that the rate could be much less than 3 per cent over long periods
of time. It could be argued that, since 1945, the state has intervened much more in the economy, and it is this
which has kept unemployment low. But over the period between 1870 and 1938, the numbers are very similar
to those seen post-war. Unemployment averaged 7 per cent in the United States, 5.5 per cent in Britain, and
under 4 per cent in Germany. Most recessions are in fact very short-lived. Since the late nineteenth
century, 70 per cent of all recessions lasted just a single year. The distinguishing feature of
capitalism is not its instability, but its resilience. Markets are not perfect, but unemployment is
usually low. Crises happen, but the system bounces back.
And there is no reason that the trans body should be sacrificed on the alter to struggles against
Capital first -- the notion that the 1ac is an opportunity cost of the alternative locks gendered
bodies within circuits of statist control
Rose coined the phrase securitization
of identity to describe how subjects are locked

into circuits of control through the multiplication of sites where the exercise of
freedom requires proof of legitimate identity (Rose 1999: 240). The linking of identity
with security does not depend on a single entity collecting all possible information; it depends, instead, on
particular entities in particular contexts collecting only the information most
useful for the particular risks being assessed. Thus, the securitization of identity is dispersed and
disorganized across a variety of sites and practices (243, 242). The securitization of identity is an
example of what Mariana Valverde and Michael Mopas call targeted
governance (2004). While state entities once operated with the belief that social problems could be solved through largescale state intervention, targeted governance focuses the resources of the neoliberal
stateconcerned not with welfare but with risk managementin as efficient a
manner as possible. In practice, this has meant an ever greater reliance on
information and surveillance technologies which allow the now more limited
activities of governance to be carried out, it is believed, with more precision:
a smart, specific side-effects free, information-driven utopia of governance
(239). Because the security calculus of state actors holds that more identifying information about individuals means less risk, the
development of presumably infallible techniques for identity verification has been enrolled in the quest for perfect information.
In
the United States, the airport has become one of most intensely securitized
sites of identity verification (Lyon 2007).
Their link is a logical fallacy -- neoliberalism would continue with or without the plan -- and
market mechanisms can be used to achieve positive social goods, such as preventing the impact
of our advantages -- Perm - do both, remain open to the possibility that the plan is consistent
with their alternative
Ferguson 10 Professor of Anthropology @ Stanford

(James, The Uses of Neoliberalism, Antipode, 41.1, 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00721.x)
Let me emphasize that to say that certain political initiatives and programs borrow from the neoliberal bag
of tricks doesnt mean that these political projects are in league with the ideological project of
neoliberalism (in David Harveys sense)only that they appropriate certain characteristic neoliberal
moves (and I think of these discursive and programmatic moves as analogous to the moves one might
make in a game). These moves are recognizable enough to look neoliberal, but they can, I suggest, be used
for quite different purposes than that term usually implies. In this connection, one might think of statistical
techniques for calculating the probabilities of workplace injuries. These were originally developed in the
nineteenth century by large employers to control costs (Ewald 1986), but they eventually became the
technical basis for social insurance, and ultimately for the welfare state (which brought unprecedented gains
to the working class across much of the world). Techniques, that is to say, can migrate across strategic
camps, and devices of government that were invented to serve one purpose have often enough ended up,
though historys irony, being harnessed to another. Might we see a similar re-appropriation of market
techniques of government (which were, like workplace statistics, undoubtedly conservative in their original
uses) for different, and more progressive sorts of ends? Maybe not one should remain
genuinely open-minded about thisbut it is perhaps worth at least considering. Let me
present two empirical examples from southern Africa as a way of making this proposition perhaps a bit
more plausible.
There are no limits to growth -- innovation outpaces carrying capacity and abundance is more
likely than scarcity
Smith, Asst. Prof Finance @ Stony Brook, 10-15-14
(Noah, http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-15/energy-limits-won-t-hold-back-growth)
Gross domestic product isn't about how much physical stuff we have; its about how
much well-being we create for
ourselves with our productive activity. Dollars are just a convenient yardstick to measure how much well-being we get from the economy.
GDP isn't a perfect metric, of course, so GDP growth doesn't measure the true gain in our standard of living. But lets imagine that theres some true
standard of living out there, of which GDP is only a noisy and biased measure. Does this true standard of living require increasing
energy to keep growing? No. As Krugman points out, we can grow our standard of living simply by increasing
the efficiency with which we use resources, including energy. Buchanan concedes that this is true, but argues that even if we can
grow without increasing energy use, in practice we dont. But dont we? As writer Ramez Naam points out, Americans use no more energy
per person than we did in the 1970s. Our per-capita water and oil consumption have fallen substantially . But
since the 1970s, our real GDP per capita has doubled. The only reason the U.S.s total energy use has increased
is that our population has grown. But population growth isn't necessary for per-capita GDP growth . Japans total
energy use has fallen by about 13 percent since 2000, while its total GDP has grown by more than 7 percent. In other words, Japan has done what
Buchanan claims to be impossible -- and the U.S. almost certainly would have, had we not had a large amount of immigration and a fairly high fertility
rate. Now, it is true that the U.S. and Japanese trade deficits grew over this time, meaning that the energy we consume (as opposed to the energy we use
to produce things) probably did increase a bit, since we trade with countries that are more energy-intensive than us. But this trade deficit is only a small
percent of the U.S. economy -- no more than 3 percent -- and an even smaller percent of the Japanese economy. So Buchanans heuristic --
that energy use grows by 70 percent whenever output doubles -- hasn't held for Japan and the U.S. in recent
decades. Thats not surprising, given that the rule of thumb was drawn from only 23 years of data . The period from
1980 to 2003 isn't necessarily representative of the grand sweep of human history, and theres no reason to think it represents a fundamental physical
constraint on human possibilities. As fertility continues to decline and poor countries continue to catch up with rich ones in technological capability, we
may see a dramatic slowing in energy use. Meanwhile, there is a lot of untapped energy out there for us to use -- the sun, for
example. Solar power is getting cheaper at a stupendous rate. It may be that in the coming decades, well see
the exact opposite of limits to growth -- a new age of abundance.
Their all-or-nothing framing of the alternative re-entrenches capitalist power relations. Only
our incremental resistance of solidarity solves
Carole Biewener, Professor and Director of Gender/Cultural Studies at Simmons College, 99 (A Postmodern
Encounter: Poststructuralist Feminism and the Decentering of Marxism, Socialist Review, Volume 27, Issue
1/2, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via ProQuest)
Marxism has produced a discourse of Capitalism that ostensibly identifies and defines an object of
transformative class politics but that operates more powerfully to discourage and marginalize projects of class
transformation. In a sense, marxism has contributed to the socialist absence through the very way in which it
has theorized the capitalist presence.33 Capitalism has generally been theorized as a unified, singular, and
totalizing entity. While this vision of Capitalism as ubiquitous, penetrating, systemic, and hegemonic has
enabled certain kinds of radical left political projects and movements, it has also disabled and marginalized
others. Gibson-Graham, along with others in the postmodern materialist tradition, questions the inevitability
of such a vision of "Capitalism" and has begun to investigate the political possibilities that are enabled by an
alternative notion of capitalist exploitation built upon the thin notion of class discussed above. One exciting
and fertile possibility is that of being able to envision class in a myriad of new sites and in a multitude of forms.
Class processes are recognized as occurring not only in capitalist industrial enterprises, but also in households
and communities, in recreational facilities and religious institutions. Thus, by theorizing the other-thancapitalist modalities of class processes, social formations are understood as having a multiple class character,
rather than simply being "capitalist" or "noncapitalist"; and, the other- than-capitalist class processes are not
theorized as being subservient to, or shaped by capitalist class processes in any essential or dominant
manner.34 This understanding of class as local, plural, dispersed, and uncentered enables a radical politics in
which class processes are always being negotiated, constituted, and contested. It allows a sense of being
actively involved in creating or constituting class processes in new ways in our immediate, daily lives. To the
extent that we address the performance of surplus labor, our conversations, explorations, positionings, and
actions in our households, communities, and workplaces can now be understood as part of an active project of
social transformation in a class sense. If "capitalism" is not conceived of as a systemic, totalizing entity, but
rather as local, dispersed, partial, and uncentered, then many spaces are opened up for creating and enacting
noncapitalist and even communal or communist class processes. Further, with such a fragmentation and
multiplicity of class processes, Leftists do not have to insist that effective class politics is linked to the agency of
any one well-defined group, such as "the working class." Struggle over class is not seen, therefore, as the
privileged domain of the proletariat. Rather, a variety of class modalities and sites can be used and struggled
over to change class relations and many different social actors may be understood as engaging in struggles over
class. Collective production and appropriation of surplus labor can be fostered and enacted in a factory or
office, in the production of a journal or in a household, without having to have wait for cataclysmic, systemic,
all encompassing, revolutionary change.
Capitalism is resilient and adaptive -- it will crush their alternative and is terminally
sustainable
Serwetman 97 JD Suffolk Law
Will, http://www.ninjalawyer.com/writing/marx.html
Marx utilizes the Hegelian dialectic in his attempt to prove that capitalism will inevitably collapse from the
crisis of overproduction and the class conflict caused by enmiseration and alienation. Capitalism, he felt, would
inevitably be replaced by socialism. Marx died waiting for this revolution to come about, and it never has. Even
the Russian and Chinese revolutions cannot be viewed as results of capitalism collapsing, nor can they be seen
as socialist states because they retain post-revolution ary class structures and are not radical democracies.
While Rosa Luxemberg wrote that while the capitalism will inevitably consume itself and that socialism is a
possible option, I go so far as to question the Marxist logic that capitalism is doomed to collapse. The capitalist
that Marx evokes in his work is only a caricature of the behavior of capitalists and does not reflect reality as
history has shown it to be. Successful capitalists are smart enough to plan for long-term profits in addition to
the short-term. Like anyone else, they will make mistakes and learn from them. There is a Darwinian process to
capitalism, and those unable to account for factors beyond their short-term profits will be replaced by those
who can. How many buffalo-fur coat business es do we see? Despite the various crises of the past century,
capitalism thrives and shows no major signs of strain. Despite Marx's predictions, capitalism is perfectly
capable of inventing new markets to replace saturated ones. If stereo manufacturers can no longer find a
market for their goods, they close down and invest their money in a new industry, such as cable television or
computers. The crisis of overproduction will never happen because capitalism is flexible and will sacrifice it's
short t rm goals to achieve its long term ones. Marx also never took into account the effect government
regulation and welfare would have on the capitalist system. Any business naturally desires monopolies over its
markets, but when that is achieved, the consequences are disastrous. The final stage of capitalism, in which
trusts and monopolies prevent the economy from running naturally and efficiently, has been prevented by
legislation and unionization. None of the problems Marx predicted are unavoidable as long as we do not sink to
the level of sharks.
The US working class is so thoroughly invested in the benefits of the global imperialist system
that they would never go for the alternative -- it is pure academic posturing
Onkwehn '13 "Settler-Imperialism and Stolen Lands: Radical Interpretations of United States History"
http://onkwehonwerising.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/settler-imperialism-and-stolen-lands-radicalinterpretations-of-united-states-history/
This left-wing White patriotism most clearly manifests itself in apologism for the complicity of
the working class of the parasitic settler nation in colonialist and imperialist crimes. It
attempts to present them as duped by ideologies like racism, which are supposedly imported
by the bourgeoisie to divide the proletariat. However, as revolutionary philosophical materialists we are
forced to ask ourselves even if it was imported, why would it work so well in the first place? Thinkers and
writers like J. Sakai have been showing as far back the 1970s that the White working class is not
simply duped, but in fact has a serious material interest in perpetuating

and expanding imperialism, not just within the border of the north
amerikan settler empire, but outside of them as well, in Anawak,
Tawantinsuyu, the Asia-Pacific region, Afrika and the rest of the exploited
Third World. This is because of the very real benefits they have obtained
through colonialist-imperialist parasitism. This is why the settler working class is
historically reactionary, pro-imperialist and pro-colonialist, even within its supposedly most radical
movements and formations (The IWW, CIO, CPUSA, and New Left/New Communist Movements). This is
why participation in colonial terror lynching Afrikans, removing Indians or becoming
modern-day Minute Men is one of the chief national past times of the bourgeois White
nation. Such a position though is beyond the pale of acceptability for 99% of so-called
Marxists. Rather than be dialectical and historical materialists, as they claim to be, these Marxists
uphold idealist positions on class, especially re: the White working class.
2NC MATERIALS
2nc overview
Neoliberalist re-structuring of TSA turns the aff -- causes plan rollback and worse intrusion in
the future
Atkins '14 Dante, writer for DailyKos, "No, Vox, let's not abolish the TSA 6/1
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/01/1303006/-No-Vox-let-s-not-abolish-the-TSA#
Let's game this scenario out a little bit. Matthews envisions a scenario where more carefree travelers
like himself who have less regard for their own personal safety will have airlines that choose to
offer no security screenings so people like him can show up to a flight 20 minutes beforehand
and walk right onto the plane. Will it actually turn out that way? Probably not. Because safety is
paramount, the far likelier result is a scenario where this hypothetical free-market system
actually results in airlines competing against each other to outdo each other on security
protocols. So the likelihood is that the free-market-competition scenario wouldn't result in less security
anyway, especially in a litigious society where low-level security protocols would likely result in very highpriced lawsuits. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that there were an airline out there that specifically
chose to appeal to customers who believed that the security theater of the TSA is all hogwash and were
desperate for a security-free experience. Theoretically, there might be an economic opportunity there
until the first incident of hijacking or terrorism aboard a low-security airline. When that
happens, airlines would once again start falling all over themselves to offer even more stringent
security procedures to appeal to a very scared public. And perhaps, after a decade or more,
when the memory of the most recent devastating tragedy fades away, the cycle would begin
again. The bottom line is that Matthews' suggestion for how we should run security at airports
would not create the paradise he desires. Instead, it would leave us with a privatized hellscape
where mass casualty incidents cyclically alter the free-market selling points that airlines use to
attract customers. Perhaps that's an ideal libertarian paradise. But given the choice between
that and the scanner? I take the scanner.
The 1AC is corporate pseudoscience used to distort the risks of market controls that deemphasizes the risks created by corporations treat with skepticism
Perelman 5 Michael, Professor of Economics at CSU-Chico, Manufacturing Discontent: The Trap of
Individualism in Corporate Society Pluto Press p.1 xdi
The corporate sector has also been enormously successful in using pseudoscience to distort the
nature of the risks that corporations impose on society . Chapter 7 explains how such tactics are
destroying what is left of the already-frayed regulatory system. The distortion of risk assessment is
particularly clear when comparing the regulations imposed to protect people from terrorism
with the regulations used to protect us from corporate-imposed risk, which has taken many,
many times more lives than terrorism. The corporate sector has succeeded in hobbling the
consumers right to know about the dangers posed by pollution or by unsafe products, such as a
large part of the food supply. If the consumer is king, he is a beggarly sort of king. I close this discussion by
considering the precautionary principle as an antidote to the corporate attack on regulation.
Try or die -- the current global economic order that relies on mass unemployment treats
production as an end, placing the accumulation of wealth above the material necessities of
living that abstracts finance from the vital process of living -- this guarantees extinction
Dyer-Witheford 1 Nick, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the
University of Western Ontario, The New Combinations: Revolt of the Global Value-Subjects The New
Centennial Review, Volume 1, Number 3, Winter 2001, pp. 155-200 (Article) [muse], xdi
Negri, Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt, and Maurizio Lazaratto and others suggest that in the consideration of
general intellect it is not enough to focus on the accumulation of the fixed capital of advanced machines.40
The critical factor is rather the variable possibilities of the human subjectivity that continuesin indirect and
mediated rather than direct, hands-on formto be critical in this high-technology apparatus. This subjective
element is variously termed mass intellect, immaterial labour, or, in Franco Berardis formulation, the
cognitariat.41 These terms designate the human know-howtechnical, cultural, linguistic, and ethical
that supports the operation of the high-tech economy, especially evident in the informational,
communicational, and aesthetic aspects of contemporary high-tech commodity production. The question
thus becomes how far capital can contain what Jean-Marie Vincent calls this plural, multiform
constantly mutating intelligence within the structures of the world market.42 One crucial arena
in which these issues focus is the Netor, more generally, the digital information systems indispensable to
globalized capital. As Vincent puts it, general intellect is in fact a labour of networks and communicative
discourse. In effect, it is not possible to have a general intellect without a great variety of polymorphous
communications, sequences of communication in the teams and collectivities work, communications to use in a
creative fashion the knowledge already accumulated, communications to elaborate and record new
knowledge.43 If we for a moment entertainas Marx didthe conceit that the world market constitutes an
enormous capitalist metabolism, then capitals communication network already constitutes a sort
of primitive nervous system. If we had to identify a main site for this ganglion we would name
first the digital networks of the international financial system. This system only
responds to money signals: it does not receive and cannot process

information about life destruction, biosphere hazard, or social
degradation except as investment risk or opportunity. It thus operates on the
basis of an extremely simple set of signal inputs, which although efficient for
operations of accumulation are potentially lethal to the life-fabric of the
planet. The information transmitted from this reptilian system then cascades down through a
whole series of workplace and consumer information systems, to constitute the operating
intelligence of the world market as a whole. A critical role is played by the commercial media, which
translate the signals received from this primary level into a series of representations comprehensible at an
everyday level by individual subjects. Thus corporate media, acting through mundane and well-known
responses to marketing demographic and advertising revenues, construct matrix-like simulations that convert
the abstract valuations of capital back into a series of sensuously apprehensible stories,
narratives, characters, and news stories, so that it indeed seems as if the world as ordered,
identified, and prioritized by global money is the real worldso that, for example, television and
journalism show a planet almost solely inhabited by affluent value subjects with a lively interest
in stock market fluctuations and constant traumatic lifestyle and household design choices .
Neoliberal thinkers control the framing of policy discussions you should be highly skeptical of
their defenses of this ideology
Ross Prof of Education U British Columbia 2010 E. Wayne Resisting the Common-nonsense of
Neoliberalism: A Report from British Columbia Workplace #17 http://firgoa.usc.es/drupal/files/ross.pdf
Public debates in the corporate media about education (and other social goods) are framed in ways that serve
the interests of elites. For example, in BC free market neoliberals in think tanks such as the Fraser Institute
and in the dominant media outlets (particularly Canwest Global Communications, Inc.) have been successful
in framing discussions on education in terms of accountability, efficiency, and market competition. 1 A frame
is the central narrative, the organizer, for making sense of particular issues or problems (e.g., problem
definition, origin, responsible parties) and solutions (e.g., policy). The frame is presented as common sense,
thus the assumptions underlying the frame are typically unquestioned or at least under-analyzed.
a2: permutation
Sites of political alignment are mutually exclusive -- they chose the state, we choose the
workplace -- the alternative is the collapse of growth impulse into fascism
http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/2011/11/15/cooperativization-on/
Struggle should start at the site of labors original alienation and cooperativization can
empower workers now. Waiting for capitalisms final collapse in order to abolish all markets
has failed and absent grassroots democracy may well invite chaos or fascism. (Schweickart
2003, p. 177) While such networks cannot guarantee a global democracy, it seems certain that without them
there is little hope of replacing markets with inter-communication among workers and farmers who together
constitute the worlds vast majority. Cooperativization, then, is first on the agenda.
Our alternative is a prerequisite -- starting points are mutually exclusive
http://messhall.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/A-Brief-History-of-Neoliberalism.pdf
There is a tendency to take up the issue of alternatives as if it is about describing some
blueprint for a future society and an outline of the way to get there. Much can be gained from
such exercises. But we first need to initiate a political process that can lead us
to a point where feasible alternatives, real possibilities, become

identifiable. There are two main paths to take. We can engage with the plethora of oppositional
movements actually existing and seek to distil from and through their activism the essence of a broad-based
oppositional programme. Or we can resort to theoretical and practical enquiries into our existing
condition (of the sort I have engaged in here) and seek to derive alternatives through critical
analysis. To take the latter path in no way presumes that existing oppositional movements are wrong or
somehow defective in their understandings. By the same token, oppositional movements cannot
presume that analytical findings are irrelevant to their cause. The task is to initiate dialogue
between those taking each path and thereby to deepen collective understandings and de fine
more adequate lines of action.
The federal policy PROCESS of implementing business-as-usual change to transit policy is
ideologically mired in neoliberal decision-making to advantage corporate interests -- the
permuation hijacks the alternative
Behind these major shifts in social policy lie important structural changes in the nature of
governance. Given the neoliberal suspicion of democracy, a way has to be found to integrate state decisionmaking into the dynamics of capital accumulation and the networks of class power that are in the process of
restoration, or, as in China and Russia, in formation. Neoliberalization has entailed, for example, increasing
reliance on publicprivate partnerships (this was one of the strong ideas pushed by Margaret Thatcher as she
set up quasi-governmental institutions such as urban development corporations to pursue economic
development). Businesses and corporations not only collaborate intimately
with state actors but even acquire a strong role in writing legislation,
determining public policies, and setting regulatory frameworks (which are
mainly advantageous to themselves). Patterns of negotiation arise that
incorporate business and sometimes professional interests into

governance through close and sometimes secretive consultation. The most
blatant example of this was the persistent refusal of Vice-President Cheney to release the names of the
consultative group that formulated the Bush administrations energy policy document of 2002; it almost
certainly included Kenneth Lay, the head of Enrona company accused of profiteering by deliberately
fostering an energy crisis in California and which then collapsed in the midst of a huge accounting scandal. The
shift from government (state power on its own) to governance (a broader configuration of state and key
elements in civil society) has therefore been marked under neoliberalism.11 In this respect the practices of the
neoliberal and developmental state broadly converge. The state typically produces
legislation and regulatory frameworks that advantage corporations, and in

some instances specific interests such as energy, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, etc. In many of
the instances of publicprivate partnerships, particularly at the municipal level, the state assumes much of the
risk while the private sector takes most of the profits. If necessary, furthermore, the neoliberal state will resort
to coercive legislation and policing tactics (anti-picketing rules, for example) to disperse or repress collective
forms of opposition to corporate power. Forms of surveillance and policing multiply: in the US, incarceration
became a key state strategy to deal with problems arising among discarded workers and marginalized
populations. The coercive arm of the state is augmented to protect corporate interests and, if necessary, to
repress dissent. None of this seems consistent with neoliberal theory. The neoliberal fear that special-interest
groups would pervert and subvert the state is nowhere better realized than in Washington, where armies of
corporate lobbyists (many of whom have taken advantage of the revolving door between state employment
and far more lucrative employment by the corporations) effectively dictate legislation to match their special
interests. While some states continue to respect the traditional independence of the Civil Service, this condition
has everywhere been under threat in the course of neoliberalization. The boundary between the state and
corporate power has become more and more porous. What remains of representative
democracy is overwhelmed, if not totally though legally corrupted by money power.
a2: no alternative
Past resistance to capital have rested on flawed suppositions -- our 1nc Stone and Bowman
evidence indicates that the Mondragon model for democratizing workplaces represents a
fundamental paradigm shift from classical Marxist tactics -- their evidence assuming abstract
political radicalism doesn't apply, and even if the alternative isn't utopia it's the best first step
http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/2011/11/15/cooperativization-on/
Apocalyptic revolutionism that followed laws of history to state power proved a
disappointment. Cooperativization breaks our present impasse yet avoids the old errors. No
utopia is before us and no reversal of gains is ruled out. But it seems to us there is a clear first step.
The notion that there is no alternative to neoliberalism is an ideological smokescreen of
neoliberalism -- it disguises the political question of possibility through the lens of cultural
preference
How was neoliberalization accomplished, and by whom? The answer in countries such as Chile and Argentina
in the 1970s was as simple as it was swift, brutal, and sure: a military coup backed by the traditional upper
classes (as well as by the US government), followed by the fi erce repression of all solidarities created within the
labour and urban social movements which had so threatened their power. But the neoliberal revolution usually
attributed to Thatcher and Reagan after 1979 had to be accomplished by democratic means. For a shift of this
magnitude to occur required the prior construction of political consent across a su ffi ciently large spectrum of
the population to win elections. What Gramsci calls common sense (de fi ned as the sense held in common)
typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of longstanding practices of cultural socialization
often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as the good sense that can be
constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly
misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. 1 Cultural and traditional values
(such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists,
immigrants, strangers, or others) can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political slogans can be invoked
that mask speci fi c strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word freedom resonates so widely
within the common-sense understanding of Americans that it becomes a button that elites can
press to open the door to the masses to justify almost anything. 2 Thus could Bush
retrospectively justify the Iraq war. Gramsci therefore concluded that political questions
become insoluble when disguised as cultural ones. 3 In seeking to understand the construction of
political consent, we must learn to extract political meanings from their cultural integuments. So how, then,
was su ffi cient popular consent generated to legitimize the neoliberal turn? The channels through which this
was done were diverse. Powerful ideological in fl uences circulated through the corporations, the media, and
the numerous institutions that constitute civil society such as the universities, schools, churches, and
professional associations. The long march of neoliberal ideas through these institutions that Hayek had
envisaged back in 1947, the organization of think-tanks (with corporate backing and funding), the capture of
certain segments of the media, and the conversion of many intellectuals to neoliberal ways of thinking, created
a climate of opinion in support of neoliberalism as the exclusive guarantor of freedom. These movements were
later consolidated through the capture of political parties and, ultimately, state power. Appeals to traditions
and cultural values bulked large in all of this. An open project around the restoration of economic power to a
small elite would probably not gain much popular support. But a programmatic attempt to advance the cause
of individual freedoms could appeal to a mass base and so disguise the drive to restore class power.
Furthermore, once the state apparatus made the neoliberal turn it could use its powers of persuasion, cooptation, bribery, and threat to maintain the climate of consent necessary to perpetuate its power. This was
Thatchers and Reagans particular forte, as we shall see. How, then, did neoliberalism negotiate the
turn to so comprehensively displace embedded liberalism? In some instances, the answer
largely lies in the use of force (either military, as in Chile, or fi nancial, as through the
operations of the IMF in Mozambique or the Philippines). Coercion can produce a fatalistic,
even abject, acceptance of the idea that there was and is, as Margaret Thatcher kept insisting,
no alternative. The active construction of consent has also varied from place to place. Furthermore, as
numerous oppositional movements attest, consent has often wilted or failed in di ff erent places. But we must
look beyond these in fi nitely varied ideological and cultural mechanisms no matter how important they are
to the qualities of everyday experience in order to better identify the material grounding for the
construction of consent. And it is at that level through the experience of daily life under capitalism in the
1970s that we begin to see how neoliberalism penetrated common-sense understandings. The e ff ect in
many parts of the world has increasingly been to see it as a necessary, even wholly natural, way for the social
order to be regulated. Any political movement that holds individual freedoms to
be sacrosanct is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold. The
worldwide political upheavals of 1968, for example, were strongly in fl ected with the desire for greater
personal freedoms. This was certainly true for students, such as those animated by the Berkeley free speech
movement of the 1960s or who took to the streets in Paris, Berlin, and Bangkok and were so mercilessly shot
down in Mexico City shortly before the 1968 Olympic Games. They demanded freedom from parental,
educational, corporate, bureaucratic, and state constraints. But the 68 movement also had social justice as a
primary political objective.
Micro-level labor conflict resulting from fewer people doing more work breeds micro-level
backlash against the primacy of future capital accumulation over present everyday life, opening
up space for coalition-building and macropolitical restructuring
Dyer-Witheford 1 Nick, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the
University of Western Ontario, The New Combinations: Revolt of the Global Value-Subjects The New
Centennial Review, Volume 1, Number 3, Winter
2001, pp. 155-200 (Article) [muse]
Marxian crisis theory shows how difficulties in synchronizing activities around this circuit make
capital liable to continuous breakdown and restructuring. The autonomist perspective emphasizes
how these crises are, at root, problems in capitals control over human subjects, both cause and
effect of contested social relations. Thus, for example, we can add to the work struggles at the
point of production poor peoples movements that challenge the exclusion from consumption
of the un- and underemployed, the multifarious mobilizations against the underfunding and
degradation of the welfare state, and the green challenges to corporate environmental
destruction. These contestations can link and interact with each other, producing a circulation
of struggles that both mirrors and subverts the circulation of capital. These combinations can occur
in sequences that start at different points and run in different directions. Indeed, in one sense it is a misformulation to speak of the linking of these movements as if each were external to the other, for in some ways
the relation is more a Russian doll affair in which each conflict discovers others nested within
it. So, for example, every crisis in the sphere of social reproduction reveals within itself a crisis of
productive relations (stressed and exploited teachers, graduate students, doctors, nurses), and
every workplace is discovered as a site of environmental issues, and all of these in turn contain
an issue of the public consumption of mis- and dis-information generated by a commercial
media.
Framing micropolitical networks as actants of power is crucial to understand how political
events become historically constructed through the accumulation of common sense about
what is and is not possible
Bleiker 3 Roland, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland Discourse and Human
Agency Contemporary Political Theory. Avenel: Mar 2003.Vol. 2, Iss. 1; pg. 25
Confronting the difficulties that arise with this dualistic dilemma, I have sought to advance a positive concept
of human agency that is neither grounded in a stable essence nor dependent upon a presupposed notion of the
subject. The ensuing journey has taken me, painted in very broad strokes, along the following circular
trajectory of revealing and concealing: discourses are powerful forms of domination. They frame the
parameters of thinking processes. They shape political and social interactions. Yet, discourses are not
invincible. They may be thin. They may contain cracks. By moving the gaze from epistemological to ontological
spheres, one can explore ways in which individuals use these cracks to escape aspects of the discursive order.
To recognize the potential for human agency that opens up as a result of this process, one needs to shift foci
again, this time from concerns with Being to an inquiry into tactical behaviours. Moving between various
hyphenated identities, individuals use ensuing mobile subjectivities to engage in daily acts of dissent, which
gradually transform societal values. Over an extended period of time, such tactical expressions of human
agency gradually transform societal values. By returning to epistemological levels, one can then conceptualize
how these transformed discursive practices engender processes of social change. I have used everyday
forms of resistance to illustrate how discourses not only frame and subjugate our thoughts and
behaviour, but also offer possibilities for human agency. Needless to say, discursive dissent is
not the only practice of resistance that can exert human agency. There are many political
actions that seek immediate changes in policy or institutional structures, rather than 'mere'
shifts in societal consciousness. Although some of these actions undoubtedly achieve results,
they are often not as potent as they seem. Or, rather, their enduring effect may well be
primarily discursive, rather than institutional. Nietzsche (1982b, 243) already knew that the greatest
events 'are not our loudest but our stillest hours.' This is why he stressed that the world
revolves 'not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values.' And
this is why, for Foucault too, the crucial site for political investigations are not institutions,
even though they are often the place where power is inscribed and crystallized. The
fundamental point of anchorage of power relations, Foucault claims, is always located outside
institutions, deeply entrenched within the social nexus. Hence, instead of looking at power
from the vantage point of institutions, one must analyse institutions from the standpoint of
power relations (Foucault, 1982, 219-222).
Captive Gender
Eric Stanley explains two historical examples of anti-queer violence
Stanley 11Eric A. Stanley, Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz, UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD, Captive
Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, AK Press, pg. 1-2, ARAD:
7/20/15
We always felt that the police were the real enemy. Sylvia Rivera Bright lights shattered the dark
anonymity of the dance floor. The flicker warned of the danger of the coming raid. Well experienced, people stopped dancing,
The police entered, began examining

everyones IDs, and lined up the trans/gender-non-conforming folks to be
checked by an officer in the restroom to ensure that they were wearing the
legally mandated three pieces of gender appropriate clothing. Simultaneously the
cops started roughing up people, dragging them out front to the awaiting
paddy wagon. In other words, it was a regular June night out on the town for
trans and queer folks in 1969 New York City. As the legend goes, that night the cops did not receive
changed clothing, removed or applied makeup, and got ready.
their payoff or they wanted to remind the patrons of their precarious existence. In the shadows of New York nightlife, the Stonewall
Inn, like most other gay bars, was owned and run by the mafia, which tended to have the connections within local government and
As the first few

captured queers were forced into the paddy wagon, people hanging around
outside the bar began throwing pocket change at the arresting officers; then
the bottles started flying and then the bricks. With the majority of the patrons
now outside the bar, a crowd of angry trans/queer folks had gathered and
forced the police to retreat back into the Stonewall. As their collective fury grew, a few
people uprooted a parking meter and used it as a battering ram in hopes of
knocking down the bars door and escalating the physical confrontation with
the cops. A tactical team was called to rescue the vice squad now barricaded inside the Stonewall. They eventually arrived, and
the street battle raged for two more nights. In a blast of radical collectivity, trans/gendernon-conforming folks, queers of color, butches, drag queens, hair-fairies,
homeless street youth, sex workers, and others took up arms and fought back
against the generations of oppression that they were forced to survive. 1 Forty
years later, on a similarly muggy June night in 2009, history repeated itself. At the Rainbow
Lounge, a newly opened gay bar in Fort Worth, Texas, the police staged a raid, verbally harassing
patrons, calling them faggots and beating a number of customers. One
patron was slammed against the floor, sending him to the hospital with brain
injuries, while seven others were arrested. These instances of brutal force and
the administrative surveillance that trans and queer folks face today are not
significantly less prevalent nor less traumatic than those experienced by the
Stonewall rioters of 1969, however the ways this violence is currently understood is quite different. While
community vigils and public forums were held in the wake of the Rainbow
Lounge raid, the immediate response was not to fight back, nor has there been
much attempt to understand the raid in the broader context of the systematic
violence trans and queer people face under the relentless force of the prison
industrial complex (PIC).2
the vice squad to know who to bribe in order to keep the bar raids at a minimum and the cash flowing.
We do not understand these narratives as two separate temporal categories,

rather we recognize that these unjustified acts of anti-queer violence are part
of a society anti-queerness. The 1AC does not go far enoughthese forms of
violence are not derived from airport security, but the prison industrial
complex. Their affirmation is not radical and falls prey to the motivation of
status quo queer political organizations.
Stanley 11Eric A. Stanley, Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz, UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD,
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, AK Press, pg. 3-4,
ARAD: 7/20/15
I start with the Stonewall riot not because it was the first, most important, or
last instance of radical refusal of the police state. Indeed, the riots at San Franciscos Comptons
Cafeteria in 1966 and at Los Angeless Coopers Doughnuts in 1959 remind us that the history of resistance is as long as the history
what is unique about the Stonewall uprising is that, within the

United States context, it is made to symbolize the birth of the gay rights
movement. Furthermore, dominant lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) political
organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) attempt
to build an arc of progress starting with the oppression of the Stonewall
moment and ending in the current time of equality evidenced by campaigns
for gay marriage, hate crimes legislation, and gays in the military. Captive
Genders works to undo this narrative of progress, assimilation, and police
cooperation by building an analysis that highlights the historical and
contemporary antagonisms between trans/queer folks and the police state. 4 This
collection argues that prison abolition must be one of the centers of trans and queer
liberation struggles. Starting with abolition we open questions often
disappeared by both mainstream LGBT and antiprison movements. Among these many
of oppression. However,
silences are the radical trans/queer arguments against the proliferation of hate crimes enhancements. Mainstream LGBT
organizations, in collaboration with the state, have been working hard to make us believe that hate crimes enhancements are a
necessary and useful way to make trans and queer people safer. Hate crimes enhancements are used to add time to a persons
sentence if the offense is deemed to target a group of people. However, hate crimes enhancements ignore the roots of harm, do not
act as deterrents, and reproduce the force of the PIC, which produces more, not less harm. Not surprisingly, in October 2009, when
President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law, extending existing hate
crimes enhancements to include gender and sexuality, there was no mention by the LGBT mainstream of the historical and
this collection
works to understand how gender, sexuality, race, ability, class, nationality, and
other markers of difference are constricted, often to the point of liquidation, in
the name of a normative carceral state. Among the most volatile points of contact between state violence
contemporary ways that the legal system itself works to deaden trans and queer lives. As antidote,
and ones body is the domain of gender. An understanding of these connections has produced much important activism and research
that explores how non-trans women are uniquely harmed through disproportionate prison sentences, sexual assault while in custody,
This work was and continues to be a

necessary intervention in the ways that prison studies and activism have
historically imagined the prisoner as always male and have until recently
rarely attended to the ways that gendered difference produces carceral
differences. Similarly, queer studies and political organizing, along with the growing body of work
that might be called trans studieswhile attending to the work of gender, sexuality, and more recently to race and nationality has
(with important exceptions) had little to say about the force of imprisonment
or about trans/queer prisoners. Productively, we see this as both an absence and an opening for those of us
and nonexistent medical care, coupled with other forms of violence.
working in trans/queer studies to attendin a way that centers the experiences of those most directly impactedto the ways that
the prison must emerge as one of the major sites of trans/queer scholarship
and political organizing.5 In moments of frustration, excitement, isolation, and solidarity, Captive Genders grew out
of this friction as a rogue text, a necessarily unstable collection of voices, stories, analysis, and plans for action. What these pieces all
gender, ability, and sexuality as written through race,

class, and nationality must figure into any and all accounts of incarceration,
have in common is that they suggest that
even when they seem to be nonexistent. Indeed, the oftentimes ghosted ways that gender and
heteronormativity function most forcefully are in their presumed absence. In collaboration and sometimes in contestation, this
project offers vital ways of understanding not only the specific experience of
trans and queer prisoners, but also more broadly the ways that regimes of
normative sexuality and gender are organizing structures of the prison
industrial complex. To be clear, Captive Genders is not offered as a definitive collection. Our hope is that it will work as a
space where conversations and connections can multiply with the aim of making abolition flourish.
The alternative is trans-prison abolitionism. We use the example of the

Stonewall Riots to catalyze a radical movement against the prison industrial
complex which structures the surveillance state today.
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, AK Press, pg. 3-4,
ARAD: 7/20/15
Living through these forms of domination are also moments of devastating

resistance where people working together are building joy, tearing down the
walls of normative culture, and opening space for a more beautiful, more
lively, safer place for all. Captive Genders remembers these radical histories and movements as evidence that our
legacies are fiercely imaginative and that our collective abilities can, and have, offered freedom even in the most destitute of
times.11 In the face of the overwhelming violence of the PIC, abolitionand specifically a trans/queer abolitionis one example of
An abolitionist politic does not believe that the prison system is

broken and in need of reform; indeed, it is, according to its own logic,
working quite well. Abolition necessarily moves us away from attempting to
fix the PIC and helps us imagine an entirely different worldone that is not
built upon the historical and contemporary legacies of the racial and gendered
brutality that maintain the power of the PIC. What this means is that abolition is not a response to the
this vital defiance.
belief that the PIC is so horrible that reform would not be enough. Although we do believe that the PIC is horrible and that reform is
abolition radically restages our conversations and our ways of living

and understanding as to undo our reliance on the PIC and its cultural logics. For
us, abolition is not simply a reaction to the PIC but a political commitment that
makes the PIC impossible. To this end, the time of abolition is both yet to come
and already here. In other words, while we hold on to abolition as a politics for
doing anti-PIC work, we also acknowledge there are countless ways that
abolition has been and continues to be here now. As a project dedicated to radical deconstruction,
not enough,
abolition must also include at its center a reworking of gender and sexuality that displaces both heterosexuality and gender
The Stonewall uprising itself must be remembered and

celebrated as a moment of a radical trans/queer abolitionist politic that built,
in those three nights, the materiality of this vision. As both a dream of the future and a practice of
normativity as measures of worth.12
history, we strategize for a world without the multiple ways that our bodies, genders, and sexualities are disciplined. Captive Genders
This is an invitation to
remember these radical legacies of abolition and to continue the struggle to
make this dream of the future, lived today.
is also a telling of a rich history of trans/queer struggle against the PIC, still in the making.
a2: permutation
We must question the foundation of all political processesif the 1AC truly
changes the politic, then they have become complicit with a system that
subjects queer subjects to an operation of violence that underlies every
decision. The result is a near life position that frames queer populations as
nonexistent and legitimates unending discursive colonization and war which
always renders subjects abject.
Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture, Social Text 107 s Vol. 29, No. 2 Summer 2011, pg. 13-15, ARAD: 7/20/15
If for Agamben bare life expresses a kind of stripped- down sociality or a

liminal space at the cusp of death, then near life names the figuration and
feeling of nonexistence, as Fanon suggests, which comes before the question
of life might be posed. Near life is a kind of ontocorporal (non) sociality that
necessarily throws into crisis the category of life by orientation and iteration.
This might better comprehend not only the incomprehensible murders of Brazell, Paige, and Weaver, but also the terror of the dark
cell inhabited by the queer survivor of the Holocaust who perished under liberation.33 Struggling with the phenomenology of black
life under colonization, Fanon opens up critical ground for understanding a kind of near life that is made through violence to exist as
violence is bound to the question of recognition (which is also the

that apprehends the relationship between relentless
structural violence and instances of personal attacks evidenced by the
traumatic afterlives left in their wake. For Fanon, the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, as theoretical
nonexistence. For Fanon,
im/possibility of subjectivity)
instrument for thinking about recognition, must be reconsidered through the experience of blackness in the French colonies. For
Fanon, Hegel positions the terms of the dialectic (master/slave) outside history and thus does not account for the work of the psyche
and the historicity of domination like racialized colonization and the epidermalization of that power. In other words, for Fanon, when
the encounter is staged and the drama of negation unfolds, Hegel assumes a pure battle. Moreover, by understanding the dialectic
singularly through the question of self- consciousness, Hegel, for Fanon, misrecognizes the battle as always and only for recognition.
Informed by Alexandre Kojve and Jean- Paul Sartre, Fanon makes visible the absent figure of Enlightenment assumed by the Hegelian
colonization is not a system of recognition but a state of raw force

and total war. The dialect cannot in the instance of colonization swing forward
and offer the self- consciousness of its promise. According to Fanon, For
Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the
slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. 34 Hegels dialectic
dialectic. For Fanon,
that, through labor, offers the possibility of self- consciousness, for the colonized is frozen in a state of domination and
What is at stake for Fanon, which is also why this articulation is

helpful for thinking near life, is not only the bodily terror of force; ontological
sovereignty also falls into peril under foundational violence. This state of total
war, not unlike the attacks that left Brazell, Paige, and Weaver dead, is at once
from without the everyday cultural, legal, economic practices and at the
same time from within, by a consciousness that itself has been occupied by
domination. For Fanon, the white imago holds captive the ontology of the colonized. The self/Other apparatus is dismantled,
thus leaving the colonized as an object in the midst of other objects, embodied as a feeling of nonexistence.36 While
thinking alongside Fanon on the question of racialized difference, violence,
and ontology, how might we comprehend a phenomenology of antiqueer
violence expressed as nonexistence? It is not that we can take the specific structuring of blackness in
the French colonies and assume it would function the same today, under U.S. regimes of antiqueer violence. However, if both
desire and antiqueer violence are embrocated by the histories of colonization,
then such a reading might help to make more capacious our understanding of
antiqueer violence today as well as afford a rereading of sexuality in Fanons
texts. Indeed, Fanons intervention offers a space of nonexistence, neither master nor slave, written through the vicious work of
nonreciprocity.35
epistemic force imprisoned in the cold cell of ontological capture. This space of nonexistence, or near life, forged in the territory of
This structure of
antiqueer violence as irreducible antagonism crystallizes the ontocorporal,
discursive, and material inscriptions that render specific bodies in specific
times as the place of the nothing. The figuration of near life should be
understood not as the antihuman but as that which emerges in the place of
the question of humanity. In other words, this is not simply an oppositional category equally embodied by anyone or
anything. This line of limitless inhabitation, phantasmatically understood outside
the intersections of power, often articulated as equality, leads us back
toward rights discourse that seeks to further extend (momentarily) the badge
of personhood. The nothing, or those made to live the death of a near life, is a
break whose structure is produced by, and not remedied through, legal
intervention or state mobilizations. For those who are overkilled yet not quite
alive, what form might redress take, if any at all?
inescapable violence, allows us to understand the murders of queers against the logics of aberration.

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TRANSPOLITICS 1AC

The assemblage of airport security allows the State to divide the

before they reach the physical bor-der. " Secure

Flight matches this information with the FBI's Terrorism Screening

This promotes the body binary as truth while the infinite

When the body becomes a password, it must be either true or

With these technologies,

These systems are part of what Lash (2002: 15)

These body binary ignores the personal truth, distancing a persons

The combination of a binary of the body alongside the binary of

The creation of the abnormal body leads to overkilling, in which

see a particular way in which the security state

to make sure they do not intend evil actions. The

gendered roots and implications of these observations

connections between these technologies and a hege- monic

of power are rendered invisible by nature of the

Thus, Our Advocacy: We Advocate to the abolishment of the secure

again we might ask how ideals of compliance are

Moreover, none of these

current political climate of us vs. them leads to the

Volpp argues that

concept of safety thus shifts: rather than

security . My central argument is that

*** (_)A2: Terror DA/Body Scanners Good (_)***

the first layer of interaction takes

Ben Gurion International Airport only uses X-ray machines

*** (_)A2: Tech Bad (_)***

Body Scanner Aff Case

We begin with Katherine Cross explanation of normalized

The modern U.S. airport is a site of policing and subjugation of

Whole body imaging technologies can reveal

these technologies are deployed to

see a particular way in which the security state

gendered roots and implications of these observations

connections between these technologies and a hege- monic

of power are rendered invisible by nature of the

Thus: We advocate for the end of the Secure Flight program to

again we might ask how ideals of compliance are

Moreover, none of these

current political climate of us vs. them leads to the

Volpp argues that

concept of safety thus shifts: rather than

Under the guise of objectivity, airport backscatter machines

we still operate with the

As `life' became the object of epistemological conquest in models of

Valorization of faux-objectivity lays the groundwork for institutional

A2: Cap K/Neolib

Turnthe illusion of choice presented to travellers when passing

In airport security contexts, such neoliberal discourses position individual

Scanners reinforce perceptions Muslims as terrorists and threats to

these technologies are deployed to further the colonial

A2: Genital blurring

The TSA also asserts that these images have

A2: Policy solves/topical version of aff

Policies cant stop transphobia; this is a question of civil rights

Variant, and Intersex Alternative Sentence Project, lefturn.com, http://www.leftturn.org/lessons-left-radical-transgender-movement) JS-D

The transgender community

Body Scanners Affirmative

As I engaged in the ritual striptease meant to appease the airline gods at

I escorted my belongings, the worn leather boots that could theoretically

the TSAs Secure Flight program requires consumers to provide

adding date of birth and gender to the pieces of

States powers to classify individuals by gender is essential to much

* (_)A2: Terror DA/Body Scanners Good (_)*

* (_)A2: Tech Bad (_)*