Tester

agent said in one video, “You cross
my fucking border? You take my
fucking dick.”
This citation of the “erotics
of ravishment,” taking place in a
different historical moment and
porno-tropic space, can be referred
to as an “erotics of disposability.”
It depends on the absolute removal
of agency from the women
migrating and the reinstatement
of total control into the hands of
the law, rendering them sexually
subordinate and physically pliable
to the will of the agents. Scenes
of exclusion often operate with
the erotics of disposability as an
emotive force, casting migration
as a menace to national (masculinized)
potency whose only solution
is a muscular, overbearing reaction.
This porno-tropic lineage is mobilized
in border porn to stimulate
excitation-frustration cycles
almost to an excess that threatens
to destabilize the optic order of
the Border Spectacle. The ritualized
rape of migrant women as a
mechanism of reconstructing the
dominance of law and the state
looks too much like the obscene
inclusion of migrant life as abject
labor-power.
The leverage point of both, of
course, is the imposition of deportability.
The climax of border
porn videos, almost simultaneous
with the agent’s ejaculation, is the
women’s deportation. In one video,
the agent finishes off onto the actress’
body inside the back of the
police van, promptly hops out and
shuts the gate behind him before
she even sits up. He gets on the
radio to his partner: “I’m done
here. Let’s take her in.” These are
moments where the deportation
regime is briefly visible. Such moments,
however, are mainly seen, as
a structural feature of border porn,
from the vantage point of the oppressor.
The colonial gaze inherent
in porno-tropics dissimulates the
obscene.
Border porn is a site where
the relationship between scene
and obscene comes close to the
surface, where the “disavowed
desirability” of migrants is harnessed
to build erotic tension in
a manner that disavows it further.
The videos are nodes in a diffuse
and contradictory array of spectacular
productions, all contributing
material to the biopolitical
management of different ethnic
populations, primarily for purposes
of capital accumulation. Just as
the border is pornographic, border
porn is a part of the border. It’s
specific violence adds to the specific
violence of the border itself.
1. Nicholas de Genova, “Spectacles of migrant
‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of
inclusion 2. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
3. Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs
and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic
Era 4. Linda Williams, Porn Studies: Proliferating
Pornographies On/Scene 5. Anne McClintock,
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in
the Colonial Contest
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