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al relationship to their condition of deportability) as a patriarchal erotic fantasy, border porn refracts the state’s desire for migrant bodies through the lens of sexualized domination. Media is never neutral; it necessarily frames events in a manner that demands to be viewed and perceived a certain way. Though the obscene of inclusion is placed potentially in view, the visual techniques that porn deploys construct a certain gaze within the viewing subject, here a heteropatriarchal perspective. As embodied images that have particular capacity to reach, so to speak, into the physiology of the viewer through the induction of excitation-frustration cycles, porn is powerfully interpellative, doing the work of gazing for the viewer and positioning them in a given relation with the subjects onscreen. Border porn, despite momentarily revealing the structure of coercion behind the images, ultimately dissimulates this coercion by identifying the viewer with the state. The migrants’ “desirability” is avowed, but any threads of solidarity between viewer and subject that might unsettle the conditions of desire are obscured by the scopophilic fixation on sexual subjection. The deportation regime is in plain sight, but only as a cipher. An analysis of how the videos make use of actors’ bodies will aid in deciphering the entangled and encoded discourses that they index. Border porn first seeks to establish a recognizable scene of exclusion. The border agents are invariably dressed in green fatigues and bulletproof vests. They are carrying sidearms, emphasizing both the ostensible danger they face and their mastery over the situation at hand. In nearly every video, the agents wear dark aviator sunglasses, which they never remove for any reason. By hiding their eyes and facial expressions, these sunglasses impose a one-way exchange of information, transposing the panoptic gaze of the state apparatus onto the actors’ bodies, which, along with the tactical uniforms and equipment, establishes them as an appendage of state power. The migrant women are typically found just walking down a dusty desert road or encamped behind a bush. Their motives for migrating are rarely referenced. They are imaged as ahistorical ambulating bodies, spontaneously sprouting from the landscape itself and disembedded from any prior conditions that might prefigure their decision to migrate. Their being is further truncated by the frequent use of the sole term “border-hopper” to name them in the video titles. As soon as the women are ap- 37
prehended, their bodies are handled. They are pressed up against walls, trees, trucks or down to the ground. Their hands are always within the the orbit of the agent's’ grasp, whether placed behind their back or raised in the air. They are instructed where to look, when to stand and where to move. In other words, as soon as they are seen, these women are in the sphere of a carceral bodily order. One agent says to another, “You got her?” He nods. “Alright, contain her.” This strategy of containment is only ramped up from this point forward. In scenes of exclusion, the fetishization of identifiable transgressions serves to retroactively justify the heavy enforcement and the stigmatization of migration. Thus, the women are usually not merely traveling but have some tokenized contraband, a joint, for example, hidden somewhere in their clothes. This is discovered at some point in “the search,” the point at which the manipulation of the women’s bodies crosses over into overt sexual assault. Under the guise of routine police procedure, the agent subjects the woman to aggressive fondling. The agent’s stoic expression is unbroken here: the impunity he knows he has is immanent to the certainty with which he touches her body. The videos tend to make a show of the women consenting to this, giving the impression that a deliberate, if unspoken, transaction is taking place: if the women perform for their captors, they will be released. In spite of these gestures, what is being portrayed is rape. The conflation of rape with willing sex has a long history in the iconography of porno-tropics. As McClintock describes, the erotics of imperial conquest was often also an “erotics of ravishment,” presenting the colonial hinterland simultaneously as an unassuming virgin to be taken by force and a seductress, full of sexual excess, to be contained and “civilized.” As the geography of colonialism has metastasized into the nation-state form, borders remain as liminal spaces where conquest and manifest destiny have been recoded as defense and crisis. In border porn, just as in Victorian porno-tropics, “women [serve] as mediating and threshold figures by means of which men [orient] themselves in space, as agents of power.” As such, instances of boundary loss are ameliorated through an “excess of boundary order and fantasies of unlimited power” exacted onto the bodies of women. The autonomy exhibited by the women’s migration is intolerable and the breach is recovered through the reassertion of gender hierarchy: women as object, men as subject. As an 38
Page 1 and 2: haptic A Zine of Distituent Works
Page 3 and 4: :bodies November 2015 Editorial Col
Page 5 and 6: 27 Anna Montgomery Notes on Running
Page 7 and 8: tographer Donald Graham wrote a cea
Page 9 and 10: about a sexual Instagram photo post
Page 11 and 12: ers and artists pour their energy i
Page 13 and 14: am an outcropping. Body Composition
Page 15 and 16: although way the sound away from me
Page 17 and 18: It Was a Pleasure Having You in my
Page 19 and 20: I found Horacio Olivera’s Kibbutz
Page 21 and 22: I always act (act) like I can’t h
Page 23 and 24: I don’t remember when they turned
Page 25 and 26: “your son tells the most wonderfu
Page 27 and 28: moments; I imagine myself in the te
Page 29: or in ever growing sedative labor.
Page 32 and 33: Notes on Running Anna Montgomery I.
Page 34 and 35: Historicity Grace Covill-Grennan be
Page 36 and 37: Border Porn Nathan Eisenberg CW: Ra
Page 38 and 39: mechanism” for the management of
Page 40 and 41: tion, then reassembled and deployed
Page 44 and 45: agent said in one video, “You cro
Page 46 and 47: Selected Poems Anastacia Tolbert Th
Page 48 and 49: Sing(ing) you used to serenade the
Page 50 and 51: Q&A Anastacia Tolbert Haptic: You t
Page 52 and 53: Visual Stimulation is a Substitute

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