Taking People Apart: Digitised Dissection and the Body at the Border

Abstract

The UK Home Office and the US Transportation Security Administration have made substantial recent investment in new Backscatter X-ray scanners to screen bodies at securitised border checkpoints. Promising to make the invisible visualisable, these devices project an image of a naked body onto a screen to identify concealed ‘risk’. Contemporary security practices which seek to fix identity at the border through biometrics, datamining, and profiling—of which the ‘whole body scanner’ is part—have their genealogy in efforts in aesthetics and medical science to mine the body for certainties and reveal something of the unknown future. The scan is revealed as a simultaneous partitioning and projection, the body ‘digitally dissected’ into its component parts, from which a specific, securitised visualisation is shaped. Drawing on the entangled histories of ‘body knowledge’ in art, science, and anatomy—their techniques of abstraction and technologies of visualisation—we explore what light may be shed on the Backscatter scan and, more importantly, what ramifications this may have for a critical response. Challenges to the biometric border have tended to centre on surveillance, making appeals to privacy and bodily integrity. However, if border disclosures which ‘take apart’ the body are more precisely understood as visualisations, then there are more fundamental issues than recourse to rights of privacy can counteract.

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