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This article explores the ways the foreign emerges as a fantasy of mobility in the Cybermarriage Industry uniting Mexican and Colombian women with U.S. men. While some women use the marketing of their bodies as passionate and erotic to attract opportunities such as marriage with U.S. men, Internet scholars during the 1990s celebrated the Internet as a utopian space for enacting oneself outside the limitations of the physical body. These theories, I argue, lack an analysis of the state and the political economy in their post-body analysis of Internet exchanges.

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The global movement of people around the world for new economic opportunities, business, trade, and travel has been fueled by, and creates, new sexual intimacies and economies. These contact zones rely heavily on sexualized imaginaries that reproduce colonial fantasies. These fantasies are produced by states to attract commerce, capital, and labor, while many in the global South rely on the sexualized fantasies produced in Euro‐America to eek out a living, or to imagine more rewarding futures.

Il existe plus de deux cents sites d’agences matrimoniales spécialisées dans les rencontres internationales entre hommes états-uniens et femmes latino-américaines. Sur ces sites, les femmes d’Amérique latine sont présentées comme naturellement plus féminines, plus belles, plus chaleureuses et plus attachées à l’idée de famille que les femmes aux États-Unis. Pourtant les Mexicaines de Guadalajara et les Colombiennes de Cali mettent en avant des arguments différents pour justifier leur choix d’épouser des Américains : cet article explore les raisons expliquant ces disparités de discours, en posant notamment la question de l’impact des dynamiques de classe sur les imaginaires nationaux de ces femmes.  1

The excavations at Minet el Beida and Ras Shamra, begun in 1929 and continued in 1930,were undertaken at the suggestion of M. Rene Dussaud, Member of the Institute and Conservator at the Louvre. The natural harbour of Minet el Beida (the White Bayy lies facing Cyprus; and it was this fact which gave M. Dussaud the idea of a Mycenaean colony from Cyprus importing thither the copper which had to be disembarked for transport to the interior and to Mesopotamia. This theory was supported by the fact that 1000 metres from the bay is a huge tell (mound), called by the natives Ras Shamra (Cape Samphire), which might well hide the ruins of this assumed sea-port.

I argue that we are entering an automated era of border control that I label a border-biosecurity industrial complex. Funded in great part by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), scientific research and automated surveillance technologies promise the state innovative and supposedly unbiased solutions to the challenge of border control and security. This article spotlights a border surveillance technology called AVATAR (Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessment in Real-Time). Analyzing this technology, which was funded by the DHS and developed by faculty at the University of Arizona’s National Center for Border Security and Immigration (BORDERS), allows me to assess how the emphasis on novel technologies to detect terrorists unleashes the search for ubiquitous surveillance devices programmed to detect deviant behavioral and physiological movements. I offer a wider view of this technology-in-the-making by analyzing how university research in aerial defense, the psychology of deception, the life sciences, and computer engineering influences the development of surveillance devices and techniques. I explore how, during a posthuman era, automated technologies detect and racialize “suspect life” under the guise of scientific neutrality and supposedly free from human interference. Suspect life refers to the racial bias preprogrammed into algorithms that compute danger or risk into certain human movements and regions such as border zones. As these technologies turn the body into matter, they present biological life as a more scientifically verifiable truth than human verbal testimony, moving border control from the adjudication of law through the subjective interview to the automated body that speaks a truth more powerful than a complex story can tell.