Surveillance of our bodies, colonialists technologies pre and post pandemic

Essay – Cirenia E. Esquivel

The culture of travelling itself appears to be a promise of freedom. However, in my experience, the technology used to maintain security between states, causes separation and control of our bodies. Essentially, it comes down to your religious beliefs, the color of your skin, or the color of your passport.

Technology used to maintain security between states, causes separation and control of our bodies. Photo: Dominik Scythe / Unsplash.

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

― M​arshall McLuhan: Understanding Media The Extensions of a Man, Chapter I: The Medium Is the Message

I fly like paper, get high like planes
By the end of July, I took a trip to Copenhagen to visit and work with a friend for a few days on a visual project. It was my first trip out of Norway after the Covid lockdown, the first trip after some borders opened. I have to accept that I was a bit scared of the outcome, not very much for the virus, to be honest. I was mostly scared for my migration status and for how uncertain things were and are with a pandemia “obligating” states to close themselves to any “foreign” subject.

When I arrived at Gardermoen airport the tension shared by us, the “travelers” as a collective, was present. Underneath it I could sense the calmness everybody tried to keep. The TSA agents in Gardermoen were excessively checking our belongings, everyone in line had to wait for an extra check.

I am a citizen of Mexico (even though I haven’t held a residence in Mexico for almost 7 years now), studying, working and living in Norway. My residence permit was only granted for a year with the permission of renewal in order to be able to finish the Master ́s program I was in. By this time my permit was about to expire, so every little nerve was triggered. Could the idea of wanting to visit my friend for a few days could mean losing the last two years of my life in Norway? All based on a decision taken by a migration agent that knows nothing about me but my name, the day I was born and the place I was born?.

When I arrived in Copenhagen Airport and went through the migration filter, I handed my passport to the agent. The first thing she said to me was that “someone with my passport is not supposed to be here”. I immediately (and even with some sort of fear and anger) told her to open the passport and check. I explained to her my situation and when she saw my Norwegian residence card, her body language changed completely. Although, of course all the interrogation about how long I’ve been in Norway, if I came directly from Mexico, and so on, had to take place.

Stripping for the State...
After the sournote, I thought a lot about an article one of my professors in the Screen Cultures Masters in UiO gave us to read in our second semester. The article is titled “Stripping for the State, Whole body imaging technologies and the surveillance of othered bodies”​ ​b​y S​hoshana Magnet​ & ​Tara Rodger​s (2011)​. I​ thought about how relevant it still is now and how I was lucky it was just a sour moment for me, but also how many people do not run with the same fortune.

What this reading emphasises to me, is the ways the state is violating our bodies by dehumanizing us through “security technologies”, using discourses of freedom and mobility. In addition, they use those same discourses to keep supporting a culture of consumerism that stratifies us based on gender, race and class.

The ones who decide if you look like a possible threat to the state are the machines together with the TSA agent behind the machine. Photo: Daniel Schludi / Unsplash

Have you noticed how many ads for airline tickets discounts and “holiday destinations” we are bombarded with now? That so-called freedom to travel is not for everybody in the world.

Magnet and Rodgers touch upon a subject that does not only target the product (whole body scanner technology industry) and its market (being this one airline industry), but they also expand upon this notion by explaining that the “market” and the one protecting these products, is the state. According to Magnet and Rodgers, the state's decisions are affecting us all by contributing to a situation that harms us physically and psychologically all over the world.

Magnet and Rodgers ́ approach illustrate how the state together with the companies that produce this technology use prisoners as their guinea pigs. This is because they are passive subjects that have no other option but to accept and follow. Magnet and Rodgers provoke us to place ourselves in the same position. TSA agents make subjects (especially the targeted ones based on race, gender and class) feel uncomfortable and helpless. Taking into account that when you travel, you really have no choice but to accept these violations, and no choice but to follow the same prison based atmosphere that the TSA agents put us under as part of their job. This naturalizes the stratification and lack of freedom, establishing mainly that people who meet certain characteristics are possible state enemies.

Figuratively, an airport is a prison. The ones who decide if you look like a possible enemy are the machines together with the TSA agent behind the machine. The worst part is not the psychological and physical assault their position allows them to perform on you. It’s the ongoing development of these technologies and practices. So, no matter from what side you see the situation, assault is assault, and Magnet and Rodgers made their arguments perfectly, illuminating us with ​Are Prisons Obsolete?​  from Angela Davis.

To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.

― A​ngela Y. Davis, ​Are Prisons Obsolete?

These technologies automatically make all of us possible enemies, pointing fingers at the most vulnerable of us. This will result in the fear and oppression of anyone who has a strong religious belief, whoever looks “different”, such as transgender and disabled people, and even dark colored men and women. These actions make you feel that the state considers you the enemy no matter what, giving power over you and your body to a stranger disguised as a Security officer or element, taking you to a point of breakdown. If you were not resentful before, after experiencing an interview and/or a body search, you definitely will be feeling resentment towards this state that is supposedly trying to protect you.

The Magnet and Rodgers article mentions CAPPS, created by the White House Commission for Aviation Safety and Security. The Commission has stated that race, ethnicity, national origin, religion and gender should not be a factor in profiling. It still is, though. What shocks me the most, however, is the fact that indeed, after being selected and profiled, Magnet and Rodgers mention that “Individuals flagged as ‘selectees’” are often unable to regain an unmarked status on subsequent trips. So, if one of these TSA agents decides, based on your religious belief, gender, nationality or ethnicity that you are somehow a threat to the state, every airport in the world gets that information and you are cut off from that so called freedom of mobility that airports and aviation industry promises so much of.

One of the things I appreciate the most about the article is how Magnet and Rodgers called things for what they are, and how they give transparency to the negative practices that the state is performing on us. Using information from the National Center for Transgender Equality they touch on how we must decide between one type of violation or assault, mentioning how “(…) the deployment of whole body scanners through a rhetoric of choice manifests a logic of neoliberal governmentality.”

Terror Technologies
The ways that the state is taking as security measures to profile us and find the enemy within, were “implicated from the beginning in systemic inequalities”. These technologies and practices suggest that the colonial gaze keeps developing and acting in different parts of the world, and, as Magnet and Rordgers put it, “compelling security officers to penetrate behind the veil and invade the bodily privacy of Muslim women”. Not only that, but compelling them to assault and decide over the body of the “designated state enemy at the moment”.

If not us, what is the state protecting? Photo: Etienne Girardet / Unsplash.

So yes, these technologies create terror and humiliation to the majority of us. The effort to push these categorizing narratives not only over our mind and bodies, but also into these technologies that are now developed to have the last word is scarry. All of these makes me think about how much we still have to abolish and change as a collective.

The only way to stop this gaze and stratification of bodies that the state is pushing violently towards us, is to question it, talk about it and start acting together to eradicate this conduct. The state should be protecting us, not be acting against us. If not us, what is the state protecting, then?

Every time I cross a border, I become aware of the state of alarm my body experiences, the fear, non-belonging and somehow shame about my passport and the part of the world I was born in (“we’re not here to take nothing from nobody”). Feelings that the Migration Agents tend to push us towards, made me realize how violent it was before the world decided to close borders altogether. The thought of it becoming even worse now that the state has “rational, health related reasons” to veto certain passports from entering certain parts of the world (while letting others still move freely), chills me to my very core.

It should be about collectivism and not segregation. We have to protect each other.


Literature
“Stripping for the State, Whole body imaging technologies and the surveillance of othered bodies” by S​hoshana Magnet​ & ​Tara Rodger​s (2011)

Rodgers Tara & Magnet Shoshana, “Stripping for the State, Whole body imaging technologies and the surveillance of othered bodies”, (2011), https://com327fall2016ncsu.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/magnet_surveillanceairports.pdf