Tester

quotas, but a “social relation among
people, mediated by images.” 2 The
Border Spectacle does not represent,
but in fact constitutes territorial
sovereignty and its relation to
populations moving across it. More
to the point, it is an assemblage of
images, practices and technologies
that produces and is produced by
the bordered space of the nation
and the exceptional status of the
migrant.
Spectacular regimes of power—e.g.,
capitalism, nationalism—are
necessarily dramaturgical
productions: they stage events according
to an ideological mis-enscène
and induce forms of spectatorship
in a process of making-(in)
visible. In this way, certain lived
experiences are erased from discourse,
while others are rendered
public monstrosities, thus enforcing
the hegemonic narrative.
Though certainly deployed by state
institutions, the border crisis narrative
gains momentum of its own,
percolating throughout discourse,
substantiating the nation and its
borders from diffuse and multiple
sources. Border porn registers the
operative, fantastical elements of
the Border Spectacle, conducting
bodies in a manner intended
to simulate the “harsh school of
reality.” These productions have
substantive impact. They are indistinguishable
from the practice of
bordering—not separate and prior,
but simultaneous and coterminous.
In the context of porn, these
fantastical elements are mobilized
to enter viewing subjects into what
queer theorist Paul Preciado terms
“excitation-frustration cycles,” 3 a
process of reorienting the “somatic
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