Tester

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
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