Tester

tion, then reassembled and deployed
in the interests of massive
imperial power.” 5 Women appear
wherever boundary markers of empire
give way, often as a sexual force
to be violently subdued. The colonial
genealogy of porno-tropics
translates into contemporary hygienic
nationalism, configuring
the (gendered and racialized) caricatures
of the Border Spectacle,
such as the ritualized scenes of
submission in border porn. This
acute source of anxiety engenders a
state of protracted national crisis in
which scenes of exclusion proliferate
and are made as conspicuous
as possible, in order to render the
spectral presence of invading otherness
palpable.
Such scenes must show that
law is being violated, that there is
an existential threat to the national
body, and that enforcement is effective
and decisive in maintaining
peace and order by reversing this
transgression. Scenes of exclusion
are sites where the official, public
doctrine of exclusionary citizenship
is continually clarified. They
are always punitive. Their distinctive
feature is the denial of migrant
agency. Towards this end, deportation
is the most potent weapon.
It is important to recall that these
scenes are not merejust representations,
but also stagings in which
actual people, who have been systematically
vilified, are routinely
apprehended and expelled from
the country. What is visible is not
necessarily the expulsion itself (as
this typically occurs in an archipelago
of nondescript gulags), but the
migrant’s condition of deportability:
from stigmatizing narratives
to anti-immigration legislation,
migrants are visualized as simultaneously
threatening and vulnerable.
This visibility multiplies and
extends the individual devastation
of deportation to become a general
specter that plagues undocumented
people as a class.
From the perspective of an
undocumented migrant, the circulation
of scenes of exclusion—in
which detection, detention and deportation
are always possible—enforces
a state of ambient terror and
police impunity, exacting a disciplinary
psychological effect. Migrant
deportability is a tactic that
fits into an overall strategy of imposed
mass disposability and precarity
that confronts the working
class and people of color at almost
every junction. The “deportation
regime,” as de Genova terms it, operating
as a tool of labor discipline,
is the basis of the unseen terms of
migrants’ actual incorporation into
the state as labor for capital: the
“obscene of inclusion.” The scene
of exclusion is a repeated, public
denial of the existing “banality of
a continuous importation of ‘unauthorized’
migrant labor,” ensuring
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