Body Scanners, Scanned Bodies: Turning Subjects into Objects of Security
(2011) International Studies Association (ISA)’s 52nd Annual Convention — Location: Montréal, Quebec, Canada (16.March.2011)
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- Authors
Bellanova, Rocco 
- Abstract
- The use of body scanners for border security purposes allows for their conceptualization as security objects. But body scanners are not only material objects of security per se: they are also instruments enabling the transformation of human subjects into ‘immaterial security objects’, i.e. anonymized digital body images. This objectivation can be explained as a reaction to legal frameworks for the protection of privacy and personal data that grant a special status to any data relating to identifiable subjects. By breaking the formal links between digitized images and individuals to which they relate, the legal operation at the heart of privacy and personal data protection is radically obstructed. This paper critically discusses this practice, describing how the use of body scanners reduces subjects to mere bodies, virtualizes them and renders them non-identifiable to facilitate their treatment as security objects. Furthermore, it analyses how control over such practice becomes a legal and technological battlefield in which different programs and settings tend to hijack each other. The paper draws on, and questions, Latour’s insights, and reviews other theoretical attempts to conceptualize politics of security’s focus and action on individuals, mainly the (post)foucaldian and deleuzian approaches adopted by Agamben, Bigo, Haggerty and Ericson.
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Citations
Bellanova, R., & González Fuster, G. (2011). Body Scanners, Scanned Bodies: Turning Subjects into Objects of Security. International Studies Association (ISA)’s 52nd Annual Convention, Montréal, Quebec, Canada. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/194059