2009 volume 27(2) pages 274 – 295
doi:10.1068/d0208

Cite as:
Adey P, 2009, "Facing airport security: affect, biopolitics, and the preemptive securitisation of the mobile body" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(2) 274 – 295
Download citation data in RIS format

Facing airport security: affect, biopolitics, and the preemptive securitisation of the mobile body

Peter Adey

Received 5 January 2008; in revised form 1 September 2008; published online 23 February 2009

Abstract. This paper explores how the mobile body and, specifically, the face have become a site of observation, calculation, prediction, and action in the process of moving across borders. The paper explores how in the circulatory space of the airport/border, the body’s circulatory systems, biological rhythms, and affective expressions have become objects of suspicion—mobile surfaces from which inner thoughts and potentially hostile intentions are scrunitized, read, and given threatening meaning by the newest modes of airport security and surveillance. Examined according to the vectoral modes of historicity and virtual possibility, as well as the internal and external play of intention and feeling, the paper uncovers an increased attention to differential axes of mobility—of past and future, surface and interior. The paper situates these techniques within the preemptive biopolitical securitisation of mobility across borders which, it is argued, has found its referent object in the primal realm of affective capacities.

Restricted material:

PDF Full-text PDF size: 215 Kb

HTML References  147 references, 40 with DOI links (Crossref)

Your computer (IP address: 23.20.196.179) has not been recognised as being on a network authorised to view the full text or references of this article. If you are a member of a university library that has a subscription to the journal, please contact your serials librarian (subscriptions information).