Thank You for Participating in Security

Abstract

Airport security procedures enact a performative repertoire of security policies and procedures that govern airport security. Using my own body to register the affective modes of airport security, I engage participatory critical rhetoric as a method to assess airport security’s repertoire of rhetorical performances. Affect is a particularly valuable concept for understanding the ways travelers are conditioned to comply with Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) directives as they move through security checkpoints. The screening processes perform acts of security that stand in tension with the resistive politics they enable. In this essay, I argue that security and resistance are performative modes ( security performative and resistance performative) enacted in TSA’s airport security checkpoints. These modes produce a secured airport and a defiant public. Bodies that TSA “secures” enact affective states of security (and anxiety).