Taking people apart: digitised dissection and the body at the border

被引:107
作者
Amoore, Louise [1 ]
Hall, Alexandra [1 ]
机构
[1] Univ Durham, Dept Geog, Durham DH1 3LE, England
基金
英国经济与社会研究理事会;
关键词
D O I
10.1068/d1208
中图分类号
X [环境科学、安全科学];
学科分类号
08 ; 0830 ;
摘要
The UK Home Office and the US Transportation Security Administration have made substantial recent investment in new Backscatter X-ray scanners to screen bodies at securitised border checkpoints. Promising to make the invisible visualisable, these devices project an image of a naked body onto a screen to identify concealed 'risk'. Contemporary security practices which seek to fix identity at the border through biometrics, datamining, and profiling-of which the 'whole body scanner' is part-have their genealogy in efforts in aesthetics and medical science to mine the body for certainties and reveal something of the unknown future. The scan is revealed as a simultaneous partitioning and projection, the body 'digitally dissected' into its component parts, from which a specific, securitised visualisation is shaped. Drawing on the entangled histories of 'body knowledge' in art, science, and anatomy-their techniques of abstraction and technologies of visualisation-we explore what light may be shed on the Backscatter scan and, more importantly, what ramifications this may have for a critical response. Challenges to the biometric border have tended to centre on surveillance, making appeals to privacy and bodily integrity. However, if border disclosures which 'take apart' the body are more precisely understood as visualisations, then there are more fundamental issues than recourse to rights of privacy can counteract.
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页码:444 / 464
页数:21
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