Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationhis dissertation examines the affective rhetoric of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). After the events of September 11, 2001 airport security was transitioned from a private enterprise to a federal agency. TSA screens millions of passengers daily and costs taxpayers billions of dollars annually. This dissertation argues that the affective dimensions of airport security make resisting TSA difficult in airports and that online resistance to TSA often uses violent and counterproductive discourses. This dissertation is grounded in practices of rhetorical criticism and argues for a materialist orientation to rhetoric. Specifically, it argues that rhetorical criticism has been bifurcated between systems of representation (rhetoric is an approximation of the material world) and materialist rhetoric (rhetoric has force and consequence in the world). This project draws from critical/cultural studies and performance studies to investigate the ways material rhetorics articulate with force to bodies. Additionally, the affective dimensions of rhetoric are explored. This approach to rhetoric forms the method of criticism used to study TSA. A variety of artifacts are mapped and critiqued in this dissertation including airport security checkpoints, images produced by TSA whole body imagers, enhanced pat downs conducted by TSA, TSA training materials, videos of TSA conducting security screenings and online comments reacting to those videos, and field notes from travels through airport security checkpoints. Specific attention is paid for the ways these artifacts evince the impossibility of politics at airports and the fraught relationship between TSA and TSA detractors in online discussions about TSA. This study also examines the relationship among these artifacts. Finally, this dissertation attends to the intense embodied relationship between TSA and passengers. It argues that airport (in)security includes controlling the affective dimensions of air travel. TSA performs routines of security that establish appropriate affect for passengers and when those affects fail TSA fails to secure airports. Failures by TSA encourage violent rhetoric by TSA detractors who advocate dismantling the administration

The Re(d)active Force of the Transportation Security Administration

This essay’s central critique is that TSA’s discourse reveals its reactive posture. TSA procedures are predicated on what it thinks terrorists might do and its privacy protections are based on outrage from passengers. The essay consists in critiques of two sets of artifacts; the first is a leaked TSA training manual that was improperly redacted and spread online. The second set of artifacts I critique are images produced by TSA’s whole body imagers, which see just beneath passenger’s clothes. I argue TSA uses re(d)active force to withhold information and blur images in the name of stopping terrorists and protecting passenger privacy, but in doing so they ignore active terrorist threats and that current passenger concerns provide constraints that limit their activities without resolving concerns posed by their techniques of observation and surveillance