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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 39
Visual Stimulation is a Substitute for Thought (#2) Grace McMicken
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Page 3 and 4: :bodies November 2015 Editorial Col
Page 5 and 6: 27 Anna Montgomery Notes on Running
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Page 50 and 51: Q&A Anastacia Tolbert Haptic: You t
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