Post-9/11 Discourses Of Threat And Constructions of Terror In the Age of Obama

We argue elsewhere (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo, 2010) that the G.W. Bush years displayed a consistent merger of discourse surrounding otherwise unrelated issues (for example, terrorism, Saddam Hussein, September 11, 2001, immigration, same-sex marriage). This discourse served to construct and intertwine conceived international and domestic “terrorist” threats. During Barack Obama’s campaign for the U.S presidency, post-9/11 American anxieties worked to render Obama himself into a threatening body through questions concerning his middle name (Hussein), his perceived religious affiliation, and his patriotism and citizenship. In the present paper, we argue that the post-9/11 language of “us versus them” (“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” [Bush 2001]), delivered to the American public and international community to garner consent in the wake of the September 11, 2001 events, and transformed into public policy for the remainder of the G.W. Bush presidency, provided a lens through which Americans would continue to construct and perceive the world beyond the Bush administration. Ideology surrounding “the War on Terror,” in particular, has either been resisted or co-opted and deployed by social agents in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. We claim that in the age of Obama, Bush-generated discourse and ideology has been activated to continue and advance policies and practices aimed at identifying and containing “terrorist” threats

The Essential Crowd: Service Workers and Social Death in Pandemic Times

During the spring of 2020, public messaging in the United States regarding COVID-19 conveyed the idea that pandemics and viral infections strike people from ‘all walks of life’ and that ‘diseases know no borders’. Corporations and media outlets disseminated the message that ‘we are all in this together’. While there might be some truth in these messages, they have also been challenged as existing social inequalities have been exposed by the impacts of COVID-19. The slogan ‘we are all in this together’—which apportions risk equally—is undermined when we consider the ‘social apparatus’ that informs people’s everyday lives. While people from some walks of life have been afforded the opportunity to telework, for instance, others have been required to report physically to workplaces. Given the tag ‘essential workers’, these people often work in places that carry greater risk of infection, partly because these spaces are some of the few remaining in which crowds continue to gather during the global pandemic. We use Lisa Marie Cacho’s (2012) formulation of the concept of ‘social death’ to offer a working theoretical model of essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We engage with Cacho’s model of ‘social death’ to highlight the blurred lines, in times of crisis, between those rendered valuable and valueless (or disposable)