The Assemblage of Airport Security Allows the State to Divide the Population Into Desirable

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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 experience 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 u ndermined 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, national 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. T he '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, free-floating 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 individual’s body into a witness against themselves’ (van der Ploeg, 1999a: 301). Or, to borrow Giorgio Agamben’s (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 Lash’s (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. 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. 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 Douglas’s (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 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.

A vital aspect of 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 which they provide data about people’s origin, age and movements makes them quicker than any previous forms of identification. They enable immediate action instead of time-consuming speech, negotiation and reflection. 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 individual s in question. Except, of course, for their 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 EU debates about biometric passports. 2 Here, we come to one of the vital aspects 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, 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 Las h (2002: 15) describes as culture at a distance and in which ‘forms of life become forms of life at-a-distance’. 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 person’s reality from the information that their body tells. 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.

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 persona l 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 individual’s 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. (I’m 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, President’s 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, Eric’s 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 by the postmortem removal of body parts, as with the partial decapitation in the case of Lauryn Paige and the dissection of Rashawn Brazell. 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 other’s 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 someone’s sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from the threat of queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans-panic 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 Mbembe’s 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 Mbembe’s 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 mom’s 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. Kelsay’s boyfriend, Christopher Gaines, had also been staying at their trailer along with his friend, Robert Porter. Weaver’s 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 night’s 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 time. 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. Let’s 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 Weaver’s ears, which according to the prosecutor was a sign that he was still alive. Unsure, Gaines kicked Weaver’s seemingly lifeless body to see if they had been successful. The details of what happened, and what actually ended Weaver’s 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. Weaver’s body was then, according to a jailhouse phone interview with Gaines, wrapped in a blanket (and his head in a towel), dragged into Weaver’s 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 Porter’s original plan was to throw Weaver’s body into a nearby river, and the three had even purchased cinder blocks to weigh him to the river’s 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 Arby’s for lunch, they went to Kelsay’s mother’s house to play some cards and relax. Later that evening Porter and Gaines returned to the trailer to dispose of Scotty Joe’s body. They stuffed the blanket-wrapped body into the trunk of Gaines’s 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 Weaver’s 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. Weaver’s 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 end—a generality that enables queers to be killed so easily and frequently—and 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 Joe’s older brother, Gaines had always had “issues” with Scotty Joe’s homosexuality. As in the majority of interpersonal antiqueer violence, the 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 roommate’s 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 Weaver’s 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 Weaver’s 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 state–society 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 Young’s 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 Wilcox’s 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 stranger’ , 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 that’s why I suspect most women know intuitively that full-body scans are the bridge too far: the privacy violation that simply can’t be tolerated. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve never been stripped or raped. And I don’t 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- man’s 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 Monahan’s (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 won’t save us—rather we must reject dominant policy constructions that enshrine binary gender as the condition for securitized violence. Beauchamp 09—Toby Beauchamp, Ph.D. assistant professor of gender and women’s 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, AR—AD: 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 NTAC’s 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 Identity Disorder – a diagnosis that itself turns on the language of correction and normalization. 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, 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 a ssimilatio n – “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 excluding those racially marked as potential terrorists, Volpp argues that “ American” identity and citizenship are in fact c onstructed 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 one’s trans status , or what I named earlier as “going stealth .” Instead, their primary advice is to reveal one’s trans status, to 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 one’s 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

╭ ╭ *** ( ರ_••́)Topicality ( ರ_••́)***

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 together. I aim to identify features shared by security checkpoints with the aim of building up a general sociological model of their operation.

╭ ╭ *** ( ರ_••́)A2: Terror DA/Body Scanners Good ( ರ_••́)***

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 c oncerned 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,

╭ ╭ *** ( ರ_••́)A2: Tech Bad ( ರ_••́)***

Body scanner tech bad – destroys any trust not based off the body 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. 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 ourselves to be, 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 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. Body Scanner Aff Case 1AC

We begin with Katherine Cross’ explanation of normalized transphobia in the airport: quoted in Currah and Mulqueen 11—Paisley, 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, AR—AD: 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, ma’am.” At that moment I knew . . . that I was safe. For now.

Cross continues… quoted in Currah and Mulqueen 11—Paisley, 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, AR—AD: 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 there’s 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 Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Tara, assistant professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, 2012, “Stripping for the State,” p. 111, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12) JS-D Backscatter and millimeter wave technologies have significant consequences for transgender bodies and mobilities. 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 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 Hall’s (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 state’s security apparatus. Particularly relevant is the way that 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 individual’s gender identity, helping to produce transgender bodies as suspect.

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 state–society 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 Young’s 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 Wilcox’s 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 stranger’, 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 that’s why I suspect most women know intuitively that full-body scans are the bridge too far : the privacy violation that simply can’t be tolerated. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve never been stripped or raped. And I don’t 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- man’s 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 Monahan’s (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 Government’s domestic surveillance. Policy is insufficient—state 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 09—Toby Beauchamp, Ph.D. assistant professor of gender and women’s 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, AR—AD: 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 NTAC’s 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 Identity Disorder – a diagnosis that itself turns on the language of correction and normalization. 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, 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 “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 excluding those racially marked as potential terrorists, 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 one’s trans status , or what I named earlier as “going stealth.” Instead, their primary advice is to reveal one’s trans status, to 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 one’s 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 (3) the world to gather knowledge: unpeeling the skin 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 way of `seeing' the body as layers and systems (Benthien, 2002, page 45; Cregan, 2007, pages 49, 54). Claudia Benthien argues that 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, then the confident burgeoning rationalist paradigms of 18th- century Enlightenment art and science understood dissection more broadly as a paradigm ``for any forced, artful, contrived, and violent study of depths'' (Stafford, 1993, page 47). 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 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 Even if objectivity is a myth, the valorization of traits associated with objectivity can have real—and dangerous—historical 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 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," we forget that 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.4 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 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 (2003, 27).5 Ultimately, 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, 77–8; Farmer 2003, 10, 17). "Objective" discourses facilitate this charade, as 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

Turn—the illusion of choice presented to travellers when passing through security is an essential self-defense mechanism of neoliberalism.

Magnet and Rodgers ’12 (Shoshana, assistant professor in the Institute of Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Tara, assistant professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, 2012, “Stripping for the State,” p. 110, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12) JS-D In this way, whole 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. 219–220). A rhetoric of consumerist choice and concomitant freedoms is everywhere in a US citizen/consumer’s experience of air travel, from Southwest Airlines’ 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 thank you for choosing our airline” (Southwest 2010). 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., “I’d rather not have a stranger’s hands on my body so I’ll choose the scanner”)—when in fact the subject can only “choose” between slightly different expressions of the state’s 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 state’s watchful monitoring; exercising one’s “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 one relinquishes the right to air travel. Even then, to opt out of the articulation of one’s 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.

Magnet and Rodgers ’12 (Shoshana, assistant professor in the Institute of Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Tara, assistant professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, 2012, “Stripping for the State,” p. 112, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12) Whole body imaging technologies may reveal a person’s religion affiliation by making visible the religious signifiers they may be wearing, such as crucifixes or stars of David. In addition, whole 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. Jama’s alleged getaway, in which he purportedly fled the UK by dressing in a niqab and using his sister’s 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 “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 history—from fingerprinting and phrenology (Cole 2001; Stephen Jay Gould 1996) to the development of photography specifically to visualize othered orientalized bodies (Lalvani 1996). The attempted implementation of whole body imaging technologies in Iraq demonstrates the ways that 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. A2: Ableism

Body scanners and related discourses increase stigma against disabled and differently sized bodies by constructing them as threats to travellers.

Magnet and Rodgers ’12 (Shoshana, assistant professor in the Institute of Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Tara, assistant professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, 2012, “Stripping for the State,” pp. 112-113, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12) It is important to note that whole 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 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 addition, 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

A2: Genital blurring

Images taken by scanners can be saved and genital-blurring software doesn’t work consistently

Magnet and Rodgers ’12 (Shoshana, assistant professor in the Institute of Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Tara, assistant professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, 2012, “Stripping for the State,” p. 109, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12) JS-D 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 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. 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 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 himself. Although Heathrow airport has denied Khan’s claims (Alastair Jamieson 2010), security documents made clear that this situation could have arisen when 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).

A2: Policy solves/topical version of aff

Policies can’t stop transphobia; this is a question of civil rights versus liberation—and 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 choices that the adolescent gay political movement faced decades ago that resulted in transgender people’s expulsion from the gay rights movement. 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 deeply- flawed “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 community’s highest promise to humanity is to 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 one’s anatomy at birth (or anatomy as shaped by the surgeon’s knife if one is intersex). While the women’s 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 11—Paisley, 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, AR—AD: 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, ma’am.” At that moment I knew . . . that I was safe. For now. Later, Cross continues… Currah and Mulqueen 11—Paisley, 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, AR—AD: 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 there’s 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 consumer’s genders to the FBI’s terrorist watch list. This is part and parcel of a broader “war on terror” turned “war on difference”—the result is an unending form of discursive and material transphobic violence —rejecting this securitization is a necessary precondition to disrupting the bureaucratic dysphoria that renders identities intelligible. Currah and Mulqueen 11—Paisley, 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, AR—AD: 7/13/15

Implemented in 2009, the TSA’s “Secure Flight” program requires consumers to provide the airline with their name, their date of birth, and their gender exactly as they appear 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 FBI’s 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 2006: 13). According to the TSA, 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 one’s 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 mechanism for the distribution of rights, obligations, and resources, including voting, registration for the draft, and eligility for pensions. States’ powers to classify individuals by gender is essential to much state- sponsored discrimination based on sexual orientation : for bans on same-sex marriage to work, officials need to know the gender of the parties applying for marriage licenses. In the United States, an individual’s 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 driver’s 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 individual’s 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 driver’s license, go to 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 people can and often does switch from male to female, or female to male. To complicate matters even more, almost every state agency—from federal to municipal—has 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 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 one’s new gender and so to house transgender women in women’s shelters, and transgender men in men’s shelters; the policy of corrections system, on the other hand, basically ensures that most trans-women are segregated with male prisoners and most trans-men 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 certificates they issue. 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 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 one’s body as well as the definition of societal membership” (2010: 2). When an individual’s 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 triggers higher levels of scrutiny. In the ominous moment when “identification threat” looms as transgender passengers approach the security area, 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 passenger’s 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 employee’s or TSA agent’s perception of their gender—in its embodied totality— risk facing humiliating interrogations, sexually assaultive pat downs, outing to colleagues, even denial of travel. Blogger Katherine Cross presents a phenomenological 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, ma’am.” 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 passenger’s nude body, including breasts, genitals, buttocks, prosthetics, binding materials and any objects on the person’s body, in an attempt to identify contraband” (NCTE 2009). The stated purpose of body scanning —or “enhanced genital pat downs” for those who refuse to walk through the scanner— is 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, the point of vulnerability is in the TSA agent’s 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” technologies—the 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 d’Halluin, of gender “veridiction,” a place where truth is sought (2005). To illustrate, let us return to Cross’s 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 there’s 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 there—male 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 which 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 man’s 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 that’s 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 physician’s 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 of the airplane before he could board. 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 clinical psychologist and member of the board of directors of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, The full-body scanners became news long before they were actually used in local airports and were a major topic in therapy. Patients anticipated that they would be publicly outed by screeners who saw that there was a mismatch between a person’s 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 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 victims of intensified surveillance and racial profiling) (Queers for Economic Justice 2010). Indeed, the proliferation of sites where individuals can be stopped, searched, and required to verify their identity—as part of the “war on terror” or as a consquence of federal and state initiatives to identify, locate, and deport “illegal aliens”—only amplifies the importance of examining the production and policing of legal identity. Nikolas Rose 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 Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa, and Tara, assistant professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, 2012, “Stripping for the State,” p. 111, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 12) JS-D

Backscatter and millimeter wave technologies have significant consequences for transgender bodies and mobilities. 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 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 Hall’s (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 state’s security apparatus. Particularly relevant is the way that 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 individual’s gender identity, helping to produce transgender bodies as suspect. 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 state–society 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 Young’s 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 Wilcox’s 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 stranger’, 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 that’s why I suspect most women know intuitively that full-body scans are the bridge too far: the privacy violation that simply can’t be tolerated. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve never been stripped or raped. And I don’t 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- man’s 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 Monahan’s (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 infinity—the 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. Currah and Mulqueen 11—Paisley, 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. 17-21, AR—AD: 7/16/15

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 transgender experience at the airport is more than just an exception. 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 defined in any particular context depends not on what one might think gender is, but on what it does in that context: 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 doctor’s 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 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, sometimes not. But instead of fixating on what gender “really” is, how it ought to be defined, 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 technologies and security strategies to bodies and social norms; it is, like the airport itself, “a messy system of systems, embedded within numerous networks and social spheres” (Salter 2008: xiii). The airport security assemblage prevents certain individuals and materials from reaching the plane, while it also allows 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 anomalies are cause for heightened suspicion and scrutiny. 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 of gender is doubly useful in conceptually grasping what happens to gender at the airport. Following Rose’s observations about the “securitization of identity,” 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 power —barriers, bans, prohibitions, punishments, searches by uniformed personnel, interrogations. But identity in general and gender in particular are also securitized in another sense—as a form of risk management, as techniques for “governing the future” (Valverde 2007: 163). 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 Administration, the disparate identities/bodies/documents that fall under the rubric of gender are provisionally stabilized into objects that will hold steady over time—a promise of identity as future sameness. The TSA recommends that transgender people, especially transgender people “in transition”, carry letters from their doctors. These letters generally affirm the genuineness of the individual’s 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 document—typically affidavits from physicians—attest 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 individual’s 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 narrative, as process, is a temporal category, the body—in our case the gendered body—is figured as spatial, something that can be known by the presence or the lack of certain configurations of flesh. To pass through airport security without issue, an individual’s 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 people —with their incongruous and unexpected histories, documents, and bodies— often 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. Another policy won’t save us—rather we must reject dominant policy constructions that enshrine binary gender as the condition for securitized violence. Beauchamp 09—Toby Beauchamp, Ph.D. assistant professor of gender and women’s 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, AR—AD: 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 NTAC’s 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 Identity Disorder – a diagnosis that itself turns on the language of correction and normalization. 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, 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 “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 excluding those racially marked as potential terrorists, 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 one’s trans status , or what I named earlier as “going stealth.” Instead, their primary advice is to reveal one’s trans status, to 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 one’s 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. NEG STUFFS CASE ARGUMENTS

The aff’s criticism of body scanners is outdated—the 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) WASHINGTON — After years of complaints by passengers and members of Congress, the Transportation Security Administration said Friday that 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 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 company’s president, said the decision to cancel the contract and 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. The 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.

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 person’s 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 link—the 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) Elias adds that in addition to backscatter x-ray safety concerns, 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. Status quo solves—the TSA has already recognized the aff’s 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/transgender- travelers) TSA recognizes the concerns members of the transgender community may have with undergoing the security screening process at our Nation’s 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 traveler’s 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 1-866-289-9673 and [email protected]. Private Screening: Screening can be conducted in a private screening area with a witness or companion of the traveler’s 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 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 by an officer of the same gender as the traveler presents. New Advanced Imaging Technology Software: 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 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. “I’ve got four granddaughters, and I’m 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 Riddle’s bills. Neither Riddle nor Peña 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 it’s unbecoming of anyone to want to make others uncomfortable,” Flynn said. “It’s unfortunate that there are those who want to push their agenda that’s 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 Riddle’s. 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 Don’t 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-why- governments-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 ain’t 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 year’s 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.” That’s nice. But say you have a specific concern — like a prosthetic. You probably don’t 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 what’s left of her back to the family plot in Sheboygan? Do not pull a Weekend at Bernie’s. 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 aren’t 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-privatizing- tsa

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. It’s 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 America’s 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 piece’s author, Dylan Matthews, abolishing the TSA isn’t a tough call – rather, it’s 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. “It’s worth remembering that the inconvenience and injustice of the TSA’s 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 TSA’s 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 agency’s 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 “didn’t 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, that’s not what Lum and Kennedy conclude. I know this because I emailed them and asked. Here’s what Kennedy had to say about Matthews’s 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 isn’t 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. It’s mind- boggling 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 doesn’t 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 1970’s, 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 it’d 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 fi cation 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 guide––an ethic––for 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 contract––marriage, 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 fi ctitious’. While capitalism cannot function without such fi ctions, 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 man’s 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 de fi led, 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 fl oods 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 Polanyi’s 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

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

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 fi rms have discovered that increasing e ffi ciency 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 e ff orts 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 fi c 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 Earth’s recent history .27 If we are entering the danger zone of so transforming the global environment, particularly its climate, as to make the earth un fi t for human habitation, then further embrace of the neoliberal ethic and of neoliberalizing practices will surely prove nothing short of deadly. The Bush administration’s 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 e ff ects 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 signi fi cant 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- fi ve 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 stocks––sardines off California, cod off Newfoundland, and Chilean sea bass––are 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) Anarchism’s and deep democracy’s 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 one’s own thoughts and actions is often quoted by anarchists such as Spring (2008). Freire (1970) discusses the death that occurs without autonomy: Overwhelming control—is 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) Freire’s description of overwhelming control resonates with Mr. Jackson’s 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 Mondragón 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 twelve- fold 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 Schweickart’s “economic democracy” and Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel’s “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 capitalism’s worst features. We shall not defend all aspects of Mondragón. By “the Mondragón model” we mean the network of co-ops associated with the town of Mondragón 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. Mondragón can be sustainably generalized only if restored to its principles, we’ll hold. Invoking this rectified model as vanguard, we’ll 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 we’ll consider some objections. 1. Mondragón 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. Mondragón 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, Olympia’s self-destruction was present at the start. The Mondragón 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 year’s 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 hard- to-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 un distributed funds; 4) access to all records; and 5) a vote on policy and managers. Mondragón 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 José María 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 self- employed, hence ineligible for state health and unemployment benefits. Turning adversity around they created their own cheaper system. (Huet) In 1959, with this system’s reserves, founders started the Caja Laboral Popular to give banking, entrepreneurial and health services to the four then-existing co-ops. (Since post- Franco 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 region’s economy. (Clamp) The costly network-underwritten re-tooling was quite beyond the individual co-ops. Then a one-two punch hit with opening of Spain’s 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 Mondragón 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 country’s largest business corporation and Spain’s seventh largest. The three sectors are backed by the Caja, housing, service, research, education and training co-ops. Mondragón 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, machine- tools, appliances, auto parts, buses, and elevators. The network’s supermarket, Eroski, partnering with a French chain, has become Spain’s third largest grocery retailer and largest domestically owned one. Eroski’s hybrid equity structure joins employees with customers as co-investors. (MCC 2002) Typical of worker co-ops, and unlike most capitalist firms, all Mondragón 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 member’s capital. Since labor time is neither bought nor sold, a co-op’s workers together share all profit and losses. Not more than 30% of losses may be debited to a co-op’s 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 Mondragón-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 re- appear 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 Mondragón-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 Mondragón 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 Mondragón group is compared with the largest 500 companies, or with small-and medium-scale industries; in both comparisons the Mondragón 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 Mondragón-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) profit- sharing; 2) guaranteed long-term job security; 3) small wage spread; and 4) guaranteed worker rights. (pp. 205-214) To these Mondragón adds the potent element of worker ownership. So, instead of tapping the power of liberated co-operative labor with one or two such elements, Mondragón 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 Mondragón 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%. (Köhler) 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 child- care in workplaces. (Ferguson, pp. 94-99) These practices would probably boost productivity by fully engaging women’s talents. (3) There are unnecessary sacrifices of cooperativism. In 1999 external non-voting capital stakes were 13% of MCC equity. (Köhler) 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 Taylor’s “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 Mondragón’s “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 MCC’s 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. (Köhler) 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 Mondragón’s 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 Mondragón 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 Mondragón are three other networks of co-operatives that engage all elements of co-operative production. In Italy’s 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 Canada’s 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) Japan’s 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; Germany’s 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 humanity’s 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 people’s 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 economy…but 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 Mexico’s president Salinas de Gortari’s 1992 abolition of protection of ejidos, a communal land tenure form. In 1994 NAFTA’s opening of Mexico’s vast corn market to cheap, subsidized corn added the second pincer that has since been squeezing farmers off the land and into urban poverty. Mexico’s 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” movement’s 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 capitalism’s 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 Mondragón 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 09—Toby Beauchamp, Ph.D. assistant professor of gender and women’s 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, AR—AD: 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 advisory’s 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 discourage scrutiny” (Department of Homeland Security 2003). 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 driver’s 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 transgender-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 enforcement of normatively gendered bodies, behaviors and identities. I argue here that transgender and gender-nonconforming 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.

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

Currah and Mulqueen 11—Paisley, 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. 10-11, AR—AD: 7/13/15

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 large-scale state intervention, targeted governance focuses the resources of the neoliberal state—concerned not with welfare but with risk management—in 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 doesn’t mean that these political projects are in league with the ideological project of neoliberalism (in David Harvey’s 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 history’s 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 this—but 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; it’s 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 let’s imagine that there’s 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 don’t. But don’t 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. Japan’s 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 Buchanan’s heuristic -- that energy use grows by 70 percent whenever output doubles -- hasn't held for Japan and the U.S. in recent decades. That’s 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 there’s 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, we’ll 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-than- capitalist 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

Onkwehón '13 "Settler-Imperialism and Stolen Lands: Radical Interpretations of United States History" http://onkwehonwerising.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/settler-imperialism-and-stolen-lands-radical- interpretations-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 it’s 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 high- priced 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 de- emphasizes 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 consumer’s 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 continues—in indirect and mediated rather than direct, hands-on form—to be critical in this high-technology apparatus. This subjective element is variously termed “mass intellect,” “immaterial labour,” or, in Franco Berardi’s formulation, “the cognitariat.”41 These terms designate the human “know-how”—technical, 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 Net—or, 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 entertain—as Marx did—the conceit that the world market constitutes an enormous capitalist “metabolism,” then capital’s 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” world—so 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

Stone and Bowman '11 Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone, scholar-activists and co-founders of the Center for Global Justice "Cooperativization on the Mondragón Model As Alternative to Globalizing Capitalism" 11/15 http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/2011/11/15/cooperativization-on/

Struggle should start at the site of labor’s original alienation and cooperativization can empower workers now. Waiting for capitalism’s 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 world’s vast majority. Cooperativization, then, is first on the agenda.

Our alternative is a prerequisite -- starting points are mutually exclusive

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

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 fi rst need to initiate a political process that can lead us to a point where feasible alternatives, real possibilities, become identi fi able. 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 fi ndings are irrelevant to their cause. The task is to initiate dialogue between those taking each path and thereby to deepen collective understandings and de fi ne 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 decision- making 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 public–private 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 administration’s energy policy document of 2002; it almost certainly included Kenneth Lay, the head of Enron––a 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 speci fi c interests such as energy, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness, etc. In many of the instances of public–private 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

Stone and Bowman '11 Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone, scholar-activists and co-founders of the Center for Global Justice "Cooperativization on the Mondragón Model As Alternative to Globalizing Capitalism" 11/15 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, co- optation, bribery, and threat to maintain the climate of consent necessary to perpetuate its power. This was Thatcher’s and Reagan’s 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 capital’s 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 people’s 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 mis- formulation 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 11—Eric 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, AR—AD: 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, changed clothing, removed or applied makeup, and got ready. The police entered, began examining everyone’s 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 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 the vice squad to know who to bribe in order to keep the bar raids at a minimum and the cash flowing. 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 bar’s 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/gender-non-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 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 enough —these 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 11—Eric 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, AR—AD: 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 Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966 and at Los Angeles’s Cooper’s Doughnuts in 1959 remind us that the history of resistance is as long as the history of oppression. However, 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 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 person’s 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 contemporary ways that the legal system itself works to deaden trans and queer lives. As antidote, 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 and one’s 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, and nonexistent medical care, coupled with other forms of violence. 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 studies—while 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 working in trans/queer studies to attend—in a way that centers the experiences of those most directly impacted—to 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 have in common is that they suggest that gender, ability, and sexuality as written through race, class, and nationality must figure into any and all accounts of incarceration, 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. Stanley 11—Eric 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, AR—AD: 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, abolition—and specifically a trans/queer abolition—is one example of this vital defiance. 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 world—one 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 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 not enough, 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, abolition must also include at its center a reworking of gender and sexuality that displaces both heterosexuality and gender normativity as measures of worth.12 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 history, we strategize for a world without the multiple ways that our bodies, genders, and sexualities are disciplined. Captive Genders is also a telling of a rich history of trans/queer struggle against the PIC, still in the making. 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. a2: permutation

We must question the foundation of all political processes—if 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. Stanley 11—Eric A. Stanley, Ph.D. in History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz, UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD, “Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture,” Social Text 107 s Vol. 29, No. 2 Summer 2011, pg. 13-15, AR—AD: 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 nonexistence. For Fanon, violence is bound to the question of recognition (which is also the im/possibility of subjectivity) 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 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 Kojève and Jean- Paul Sartre, Fanon makes visible the absent figure of Enlightenment assumed by the Hegelian dialectic. For Fanon, 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 Hegel’s dialectic that, through labor, offers the possibility of self- consciousness, for the colonized is frozen in a state of domination and nonreciprocity.35 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 Fanon’s texts. Indeed, Fanon’s intervention offers a space of nonexistence, neither master nor slave, written through the vicious work of epistemic force imprisoned in the cold cell of ontological capture. This space of nonexistence, or near life, forged in the territory of inescapable violence, allows us to understand the murders of queers against the logics of aberration. 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?