The recent flap over the TSA security measures –both manual pat-downs and backscatter x-ray and millimeter wave scanners—has been painted as presenting a conflict between personal privacy and national security.
We might more accurately call it a conflict over boundaries, personal and national. Who has the right to cross what borders? What is the proper boundary between my body and the state?
This trope, which is also present in other conflicts, like that over abortion, is particularly apt in a battle against terrorism. Boundaries, after all, are precisely what terrorists violate. Violent actors’ capacity to terrorize originates in their readiness to transgress both physical and moral boundaries. The more flagrant the violation, the more terrified we become. Terrorists do not obey the agreed on boundaries of sovereign states, nor those that we—the global community—have sanctioned to regulate war: we draw boundaries between just causes for war and unreasonable ones and, crucially, between combatants and civilians. The line between combatant and civilian in war is sacrosanct to most of us; on one side, we go toward injury, on the other, we are to be protected from it.
Perhaps it is the nature of this particular conflict that has led to a peculiar focus by the United States on bodies and boundaries, an intersection that is often shadowed by the erotic, whether for good or ill.
There is the ongoing confusion over whether others are combatants are civilians. We do not know where to draw the line. If you were an Afghan, or even a non-Afghan, in the orbit of Al Qaeda in 2001, did that make you a terrorist? Continue reading