Biometrics AFF

1AC
Biometric technologies are used as a means of controlling and
disciplining populations.
Wong 13 [Jessica Chantelle Wong; Risk-Management Approaches in the Post 9/11
Era: A Case Study of Security Provisions within the Context of the US, Submitted as
requirement for Master Thesis to Lund University, Department of Political Science
Global Studies Program, Spring 2013, 34]
Charlotte Epstein (2007, p. 153) argues that, the site of identification has shifted to the
body; in turn, this indicates that documents in which individuals carry are not the subjects of verification, but
their bodies. As a result, control is seen as exercised upon the individual body, at the
point of entry into the secured space, whether physical or logical (Epstein 2007, p. 153).
Epstein (2007, p. 153) connects this idea to Foucaults notion of power in which at this point, power passes

This is important in relation to US security

policies implemented after 9/11 to securitize migration. In this case, the concept of biometric
power can be seen as the regulation of mobilities through the function of statistics
for the purpose of normalizing the population. Biometric power can therefore be
interpreted as an operation of surveillance focused on the body. Epstein (2007)
argues that this raises important questions in terms of the type of surveillance that
is involved. For instance whether it is surveillance utilized to keep individuals in line
or on the contrary, surveillance to protect (Epstein 2007, p. 153). Although both exert
forms of control, the first relates between the individual and the governing
authority, while the latter focuses on the security of the people. The biometric
system appears to integrate both forms of surveillance. The concept of biometric
borders can be understood as the process of regulating the population between the
undesirable from the desirable. These biometric databases act as a mechanism to differentiate
through individuals rather than is applied to them.

between what is termed as, positive enrollment, which accounts for individuals that willingly give personal
information and fall into the category of trusted subjects; conversely, negative enrollment, is not voluntary and
occurs when an individual violates the law accounting for questionable subjects (Bolle, R. M., Connell, J. H.,

if an individual
must first be screened against the available data of questionable subjects before
being considered a trusted subject, this organization relies on a, fully operational
disciplinary power. This idea suggests that undisciplined individuals, that have
been deemed questionable, have been filtered out by the process of negative
enrollment, and assumes that trusted individuals are fully disciplined. Epstein (2007,
154) argues that, A biometric system controls the movement of disciplined bodies in
and out of a space, to protect both the space and the bodies within it. This
suggests biometric power as seen to promote both forms of surveillance. As Epstein
Pankanti, S., Ratha, N. K., & Senior, A.W. 2004, p.159). Epstein (2007, p. 154) claims that

(2007, p. 154) reasons, it ultimately subsumes the punishing aspect of surveillance under the security objective,

this demonstrates the

development of discipline into biopower where the technology of power, does not
exclude disciplinary technology, but it does...use it by sort of infiltrating it,
embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques (Foucault 2003, p. 242).
all the while relying centrally on the successful operation of discipline. As a result,

The use of Biometrics assumes a self-same subject, whereby ones singular identity
is authentic and unique. Simultaneously, the permanence and digitization of the
subject disrupts the human by creating the idea of the physical body not only as a
physical existence, but also as a digital comparison to the normative subject.
Puliese 5
[Joseph Pugliese; In Silico Race and The Heteronomy of Biometric Proxies:
Biometrics in the Context of Civilian Life, Border Security and Counter-Terrorism
Laws, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2005, 25-26]
the authenticating and identificatory logic of biometric systems is
predicated on generating a template proxy of the subject. Encoded in this logic ,
however, is a series of contradictory, if not altogether aporetic, effects that problematise liberalhumanist conceptualisations of both identity and the subject. The aporetic logic of citationality
that I drew attention to above, whereby the veridicality of a subject's re-enrolling template is
adjudicated precisely by its failure exactly to coincide with the original enrolment
template, inscribes univocal conceptualisations of identity and the subject with a
heteronomous law of the self-same-as-other. Indeed, the very status of the key signifiers of
biometric identification and verification - uniqueness, authenticity and veridicity - are predicated on
an unacknowledged dependence on the other: the self-same subject must generate
a micrological series of citations- as -differentiations that de-totalise her/his identity, even as
these citations-as-differentiations function to affirm the seeming
univocality of identity. Operative here, in effect, is an aporetic logic within which a 'true' and 'authentic'
identity must simultaneously be, at the time of re-enrolment, non-identical to itself - in other words,
at some minimal level, the re-enrolling scan must appear as a'fraud' in relation to the
'original' enrolment template. The western legal category of the subject is
founded precisely on the Enlightenment conceptualisation of identity as
univocally self-same. As Stuart Hall argues, the Enlightenment subject is founded on the
notion of a centred and unified individual 'whose "centre" consist[s] of an inner core
which first emerged when the subject was born, and unfold[s] with it, while remaining essentially the same continuous or "identical" with itself- throughout the individual's existence . The essential
87
centre of the self was a person's identity.'
Biometric systems of identification and verification are
predicated on this Enlightenment understanding of the subject : the authorising logic of these
As I demonstrate above,

systems is driven by the notion that, despite micro permutations, the empiricity of flesh (the iris, the face or the finger print)
encodes an identity that is continuous or 'identical' with itself throughout the subject's existence. Yet, within biometric systems,

this logic must be underpinned, simultaneously, by a dissemination and decentring

of self-same identity. This other, heteronomous logic is perfectly encapsulated in the
following biometric formula: 'Identification is often referred to as 1: N (one-to-N or one-to-many),
88
because a person's biometric information is compared against multiple (N) records.'
One-to-N or one-to- many names the manner in which the unitary identity of the subject is already invested with the law of the other
(signatory citation as different in every instance); it is this heteronomy that guarantees the conditions of possibility for the selfsame to be constituted as an identifiably unique identity, even as it opens up the same to a movement of discontinuity and
dissemination (across various institutional sites and biometric systems with every instance of re-enrolment). I want to pursue this
movement of discontinuity and dissemination of identity in the context of biometric technologies by attempting to theorise biometric

Biometric enrolment templates are not, effectively, 'body

bits' at all: they contain no biological material; rather, they algorithmically transmute
corporeal features into digital data. However, this digital data is nothing if not a tropological
version of a subject's body bits: no fleshly body, no biometric template; decorporealised body bits
are predicated on the corporeality of the subject's 'distinctive physiological
enrolment templates in terms of scattered 'body bits.'

characteristics.'

89

The very movement of translation from one to the other produces the rhetorical turn of tropology:
biometric templates are tropic proxies of the body, specifically, as I discussed above, they are synecdoches of the subject. This
tropic turn must be seen as instantiating what Emmanuel Levinas terms 'a denucleation of the very atomicity of the one.' 90

This

process of denucleation of the atomicity of one-as-self-same has far reaching

consequences in its effective solicitation of the Enlightenment conceptualisation of
the legal category of subject. Not only does it disrupt the unique identity of the selfsame subject by disclosing an 'irreducible category of difference at the heart of the Same'91; it
opens up a fundamental scission between the subject and the exercise of agency over
their very body and their identity. I discuss the ramifications of this scission elsewhere, in an analysis of the
biometrics of racial profiling and the global search for terrorists. I want, however, to reproduce some of the key arguments pertinent
to this analysis.

Biometric classification infringes upon the autonomy of many

by sorting them into categories of terrorist, criminal,
unreliable or untrustworthy individual. The drive for
categorization allows ones appearance to over-determine
their will or intent.
Laas-Mikko and Sutrop 12
[Margit Sutrop is a professor of Practical Philosophy, University of Tarty, Tartu,
Estonia, and Katrin Laas-Mikko is a Graduate student, University of Tartu, "How Do
Violations of Privacy and Moral Autonomy Threaten the Basis of Our Democracy?,"
Trames, 2012, 376-378]
biometrics in security contexts is intended usually for massive
surveillance (or dataveillance); this means not only the monitoring of specific suspects, but placing all people
who happen to be in public places under surveillance and scrutiny . It can be argued, that activities performed
Implementation of second-generation

in public are explicitly being made public by the individual performing them, because the person would have the choice of doing
something different and knows that he or she can generally be observed by others in public places (ADABTS 2010). On the one

these kinds of
technologies are more powerful than old (men-powered) systems and are
accompanied by many new risks. As INDECT and ADABTS projects show, second-generation biometrics is
integrated into larger surveillance systems, which make it easy to mine the data, to
profile or match it by combining different data sources, and in this way to obtain
additional information about the person. The biometrical data enables the creation
of a profile of an identified person and to link other data to this profile. According to Helen
hand it seems to be true that people can adapt their behavior under social control. But we have to admit that

Nissenbaum (1997; 2010), privacy in public places has to be protected, since in these kinds of cases of surveillance it is easy to
transfer data from the context in which it was collected to another context and thus cause function creep. The main ethical concerns
about the application of second-generation biometrics are related to issues of privacy, autonomy, and equal treatment. Since this
technology is used to survey persons behavior in secured areas and detect abnormal behavior and events, as a result

huge

amounts of personal data are processed and collected into databases . Thus there are risks of
data leakage or access by unauthorized persons, which means overriding the data subjects will about access and use of his or her
data and therefore violating his or her privacy. How can privacy be violated if data is collected anonymously? Although in most cases
the data collected will indeed be anonymous (the focus is not on Who you are but on the question Which kind of person you are), the

it will still be possible to identify persons on the basis of comparing their

video pictures with those in large databases , already existing in several countries (e.g. in Estonia there are
problem is that

large databases of e-passport pictures). Is this a reason for concern? On the one hand we might indeed feel more secure if new
methods are available for detecting criminals and terrorists and thus proactively prevent attacks on our lives. On the other hand,

there is an increased possibility of stigmatization and discrimination on the basis of

false interpretation of biometric characteristics. Behavior prediction based on
the collection of biometrics and identification may lead to the social
classification and stigmatization of the person, placing him or her

automatically in some category such as terrorist, criminal, unreliable or

untrustworthy individual, etc. In the case of second-generation biometrics, profiles are to be
created about persons, and some people will be sorted out on the basis of different
measurements of bodily behavior. Measurements form the set of the data that are mined to detect the unique
patterns for a particular person. Behavioral biometrics is the result of profiling , in which a certain kind of
image is created and attached to the person, and then matched against data that can be used to provide more complete profiles

it contains a stereotype
of a possible offender, and this stereotype can inherit content from
stereotypes of groups against which there is popular prejudice and which
is not evidence-based (Detecter 2008). The surveillance, as involved in behavioral biometrics, is according
to David Lyon (2001) a form of social sorting, of categorizing persons and groups, which accentuates
differences and reinforces the existing inequalities . We agree with Lyon that, unfortunately,
these categories are seldom subjected to ethical inquiry or democratic scrutiny,
despite their consequences for opportunities and choices in life . The reliability of
these algorithms is under suspicion because of the high risk of a false
error rate and a large number of fixed false images of persons. Behavior
is a loose and socio-politically contingent concept, as Juliet Lodge (2010:8) points out. She claims that
defining a certain type of behaviour as deviant or indicative of risky intent leaves
behavior subject to the arbitrary interpretation, political vagaries, politicoideological preferences and goals in power //. In this context, the following warning should be taken
(FIDIS 2009b). The main problem with profiling, besides data protection issues, is that

seriously: Categories, descriptions and models are routinely imposed on individuals identity information. We know what dramatic
consequences the availability of labels like jew, hutu, tutsi, and white, black and colored people in administrative

In addition to this
problem of stereotyping through arbitrary interpretation of deviant or risky behavior ,
management systems can have for those concerned (Manders-Huits and van der Hoven 2008:2).

another essential feature of behavioral biometrics is that it allows on-the-move authentication or behavior identification. Traits such
as the dynamics of facial expression or gait can be captured and analyzed covertly without any physical contact with the person and

intentions are attributed to a person

according to certain behavioral or physiological characteristics before this
person has decided to do any harm. We agree with Manders-Huits and van der Hoven (2008:56) that
this is problematic because it violates the persons right to be engaged in selfidentification,
the core of a persons moral autonomy . This argument follows from Bernard Williamss (1973) idea that
respect for moral autonomy implies taking into account the other persons selfidentification: we ought to understand the other persons aims, evaluations,
attitudes, thoughts, and desires. In other words, if we assess the behavior of a person, we have to put ourselves
thus without his or her explicit knowledge and consent. Usually

in his shoes, taking into account his beliefs, motives and intentions, life projects, among other concerns. In the case of behavioral
biometrics, identification of a person is performed from a third-person perspective without even attempting to interpret that

the main problem with behavioral

biometrics is that it does not make any attempt to take into account the persons
self-identification; the persons behavior or physical characteristics are interpreted
and viewed without any deeper knowledge of the persons own point of view . Thus, it
persons motives. Thus, from the ethical point of view, we believe that

may well be that the persons intentions or desires are misinterpreted.

The state surveils and categorizes biometric data to project

threats upon bodies and justify states of exception through
panic security.
Kroker 6 Arthur Kroker is Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory and Professor of
Political Science at the University of Victoria Born Again Ideology http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=549

the body, whether collective or

individual, is the object of a double anxiety: intense fear about surprise attack from an always threatening,
imminently dangerous external world; and ideological fantasies concerning the psycho-ontological threat
Slipping into the Bloodstream of the Body Politic In the new biometric state,

within, whether in the form of unidentified political dissidents who have managed to slip undetected as
sleeper cells into the bloodstream of the American body politic ; or individual bodies of the traveling public
which can never be absolutely eliminated as security threats because fantasies of uncontrolled mayhem,

The
sign-system of panic security has its privileged fetish objects -- scissors, shoes, belts, nail files -- just as much
as it has an impossible dream: bringing out of concealment the hidden intentionality of the potentially
threatening body by hyper-technological methods ranging from electronic pre-screening, biometric
scanning -- humiliating, probing, stripping, and imaging. Maximal preventative deterrence
for a guaranteed minimum of public security. The State of Suspicion "If you suspect it,
report it." Message on podium at press conference by British police, July 23, 2005 With this, we enter the era of
the new biometric state: a form of bio-governance which systematically links primitive collective
emotions of fear and anxiety with postmodern technologies of surveillance. While the aim of the new
biometric state is to immunize itself from direct internal and external challenges by means of the creation
of a bunker society fused together by fear; its ideological method is to foment in the mass psychology of
the population a constant state of suspicion, both by reporting any "strange behavior" of others, and monitoring
destruction, and apocalypse are so indigenous to the production of the spectacle of the nomadic traveler.

our own suspicious thoughts for possible signs of imminent subversion. In the citizen's army of the new biometric
state, individuals are thus expected to play the role of the policeman without as well as the policeman within. Not

the new
biometric state also goes on the attack: it engages in preventative wars as
ways of destabilizing potential sources of viral terrorism; and, finally, it becomes a bioterrorist itself -- garrisoning the world; creating zones of extra-juridical, extraconstitutional incarceration; installing secret torture prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia;
seeking to "Git-moize" the outside world now, and probably the domestic
population later. Quite literally, we live now under the terrorism of the sign of (absolute) security.
Possessing no definitive limits because of the objectively limitless character of the psychological
projections of fantasy, illusion, and anxiety upon which the dream of perfect security is based, the signs of
panic security can only expand in the future, exploding in relationship to the perception of imminent
danger; taking possession of every orifice of the anxious body, collective and individual. So it is that we enter into
content with the relative passivity and defensive nature of the bunker state or the state of suspicion,

the feverish, inventive imaginary of panic security where viral war replaces cold war, where the threat of terrorism
substitutes for the menace of communism, where preventative security measures are presented as protection from
surprise attacks, where traditional ideology is eclipsed by fears of viral invasion, and where Homeland Security is
the new Body McCarthyism of the 21st century.

Biopower necessitates the absolute destruction of the

population genocide, racism, and nuclear and biological
extinction are the endpoints of the biopolitical process
Foucault 75 [(Michel, Philosopher) Society Must Be Defended LECTURES AT
THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1975-76. Accessed from Rebel Library Studies]
We are, then, in a power that has taken control of both the body and life or that has,
if you like, taken control of life in generalwith the body as one pole and the
population as the other. We can therefore immediately identify the paradoxes that
appear at the points where the exercise of this biopower reaches its limits. The
paradoxes become apparent if we look, on the one hand, at atomic power, which is
not simply the power to kill, in accordance with the rights that are granted to any
sovereign, millions and hundreds of millions of people (after all, that is traditional).
The workings of contemporary political power are such that atomic power
represents a paradox that is difficult, if not impossible, to get around. The power to
manufacture and use the atom bomb represents the deployment of a sovereign

power that kills, but it is also the power to kill life itself. So the power that is being
exercised in this atomic power is exercised in such a way that it is capable of
suppressing life itself. And, therefore, to suppress itself insofar as it is the power
that guarantees life. Either it is sovereign and uses the atom bomb, and therefore
cannot be power, biopower, or the power to guarantee life, as it has been ever since
the nineteenth century. Or, at the opposite extreme, you no longer have a sovereign
right that is in excess of biopower, but a biopower that is in excess of sovereign
right. This excess of biopower appears when it becomes technologically and
politically possible for man not only to manage life but to make it proliferate , to
create living matter, to build the monster, and, ultimately, to build viruses that
cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive. This formidable
extension of biopower, unlike what I was just saying about atomic power, will put it
beyond all human sovereignty. You must excuse this long digression into biopower,
but I think that it does provide us with a basic argument that will allow us to get
back to the problem I was trying to raise. If it is true that the power of sovereignty is
increasingly on the retreat and that disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is
on the advance, how will the power to kill and the function of murder operate in this
technology of power, which takes life as both its object and its objective? How can a
power such as this kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong
its duration, to improve its chances, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for
failings? How, under these conditions, is it possible for a political power to kill, to
call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order to kill, and to expose not only
its enemies but its own citizens to the risk of death? Given that this power's
objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the power of death,
the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower? It
is, I think, at this point that racism intervenes. I am certainly not saying that racism
was invented at this time. It had already been in existence for a very long time. But
I think it functioned elsewhere. It is indeed the emergence of this biopower that
inscribes it in the mechanisms of the State. It is at this moment that racism is
inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. As a
result, the modern State can scarcely function without becoming involved with
racism at some point, within certain limits and subject to certain conditions. What in
fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that
is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die. The
appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the
distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are
described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as infe rior: all this is a
way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of
separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of
establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that appears to be a
biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of
races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it
controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of
racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed
by biopower. Racism also has a second function. Its role is, if you like, to allow the
establishment of a positive relation of this type: "The more you kill, the more deaths
you will cause" or "The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more." I

would say that this relation ("If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be
able to kill") was not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the
relationship of war: "In order to live, you must destroy your enemies." But racism
does make the relationship of war"If you want to live, the other must die"
function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the
exercise of biopower. On the one hand, racism makes it possible to establish a
relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or
warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: "The more
inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are elim inated, the fewer
degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more Ias species
rather than individualcan live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I
will be able to proliferate." The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I
live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the
death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degen erate, or the abnormal) is
something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer. This is not,
then, a military, warlike, or political relationship, but a biological relationship. And
the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be
done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are
threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. In the
biopower system, in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if
it results not in a victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the
biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race. There is a direct
connection between the two. In a normalizing society, race or racism is the
precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society,
you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first
line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone
to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower
mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State. So you can
understand the importanceI almost said the vital importanceof racism to the
exercise of such a power: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill. If the
power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must
become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a
power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments,
mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I
say "killing," I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of
indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death
for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. I
think that we are now in a position to understand a number of things. We can
understand, first of all, the link that was quicklyI almost said immediately
established between nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of
power. Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broad senseor in other words,
not so much Dar win's theory itself as a set, a bundle, of notions (such as: the
hierarchy of species that grow from a common evolutionary tree, the struggle for
existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit) naturally
became within a few years during the nineteenth century I not simply a way of
transcribing a political discourse into biological terms, and not simplv a way of
dressing up a political discourse in scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking

about the relations be tween colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, the
phenomena of madness and mental illness, the history of societies with their i
different classes, and so on. Whenever, in other words, there was a I confrontation,
a killing or the risk of death, the nineteenth century was quite literally obliged to
think about them in the form of evolutionism. And we can also understand why
racism should have developed in modern societies that function in the biopower
mode; we can understand whv racism broke out at a number of privileged
moments, and why they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was
imperative. Racism first develops with colonization, or in other words, with
colonizing genocide. If you are functioning in the biopower mode, how can you
justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations? By using
the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only
wage war on one's adversaries but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let
them be killed by the mil lion (and this is precisely what has been going on since the
nineteenth century, or since the second half of the nineteenth century), except by
activating the theme of racism? From this point onward, war is about two things: it
is not simply a matter of destroying a political adversary, but of destroying the
enemy race, of destroying that [sort] of biological threat that those people over
there represent to our race. In one sense, this is of course no more than a biological
extrapolation from the theme of the political enemy. But there is more to it than
that. In the nineteenth centuryand this is completely newwar will be seen not
only as a way of improving one's own race by eliminating the enemy race (in
accordance with the themes of natural selection and the struggle for existence), but
also as a way of regenerating one's own race. As more and more of our number die,
the race to which we belong will become all the purer. At the end of the nineteenth
century, we have then a new racism modeled on war. It was, I think, required
because a biopower that wished to wage war had to articulate the will to destroy
the adversary with the risk that it might kill those whose lives it had, by definition,
to protect, manage, and multiply. The same could be said of criminality. Once the
mechanism of biocriminal was called upon to make it possible to execute or banish
criminals, criminality was conceptualized in racist terms. The same applies to
madness, and the same applies to various anomalies. I think that, broadly speaking,
racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the
principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a
member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living
plurality. You can see that, here, we are far removed from the ordinary racism that
takes the traditional form of mutual contempt or hatred between races. We are also
far removed from the racism that can be seen as a sort of ideological operation that
allows States, or a class, to displace the hostility that is directed toward [them], or
which is tormenting the social body, onto a mythical adversary. I think that this is
something much deeper than an old tradition, much deeper than a new ideology,
that it is something else. The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its
specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is
bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power. It is bound up
with this, and that takes us as far away as possible from the race war and the
intelligibility of history. We are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to
work. So racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race,

the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign
power. The juxtaposition ofor the way biopower functions throughthe old
sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and
activation, of racism. And it is, I think, here that we find the actual roots of racism.
So you can understand how and why, given these conditions, the most murderous
States are also, of necessity, the most racist. Here, of course we have to take the
example of Nazism. After all, Nazism was in fact the paroxysmal development of the
new power mechanisms that had been established since the eighteenth century. Of
course, no State could have more disciplinary power than the Nazi regime. Nor was
there any other State in which the biological was so tightly, so insistently, regulated.
Disciplinary power and biopower: all this permeated, underpinned, Nazi society
(control over the biological, of procreation and of heredity; control over illness and
accidents too). No society could be more disciplinary or more concerned with pro
viding insurance than that established, or at least planned, by the Nazis. Controlling
the random element inherent in biological processes was one of the regime's
immediate objectives. But this society in which insurance and reassurance were
universal, this universally disciplinary and regulatory society, was also a society
which unleashed murderous power, or in other words, the old sovereign right to take
life. This power to kill, which ran through the entire social body of Nazi society, was
first manifested when the power to take life, the power of life and death, was
granted not only to the State but to a whole series of individuals, to a considerable
number of people (such as the SA, the SS, and so on). Ultimately, everyone in the
Nazi State had the power of life and death over his or her neighbors, if only because
of the practice of informing, which effectively meant doing away with the people
next door, or having them done away with. So murderous power and sovereign
power are unleashed throughout the entire social body. They were also unleashed
by the fact that war was explicitly defined as a political objectiveand not simply as
a basic political objective or as a means, but as a sort of ultimate and decisive
phase in all political processespolitics had to lead to war, and war had to be the
final decisive phase that would complete everything. The objective of the Nazi
regime was therefore not really the destruction of other races. The destruction of
other races was one aspect of the project, the other being to expose its own race to
the absolute and universal threat of death. Risking one's life, being exposed to total
destruction, was one of the principles inscribed in the basic duties of the obedient
Nazi, and it was one of the essential objectives of Nazism's policies. It had to reach
the point at which the entire population was exposed to death. Exposing the
entire population to universal death was the only way it could truly
constitute itself as a superior race and bring about its definitive regeneration
once other races had been either exterminated or enslaved forever. We have, then,
in Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which
has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the
sovereign right to kill. The two mechanismsthe classic, archaic mechanism that
gave the State the right of life and death over its citizens, and the new mechanism
organized around discipline and regulation, or in other words, the new mechanism
of biopowercoincide exactly. We can therefore say this: The Nazi State makes the
field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms
absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only

other people, but also its own people. There was, in Nazism, a coincidence between
a generalized biopower and a dictatorship that was at once absolute and
retransmitted throughout the entire social body by this fantastic extension of the
right to kill and of exposure to death. We have an absolutely racist State, an
absolutely murderous State, and an absolutely suicidal State. A racist State, a
murderous State, and a suicidal State. The three were necessarily superimposed,
and the result was of course both the "final solution" (or the attempt to eliminate,
by eliminating the Jews, all the other races of which the Jews were both the symbol
and the manifestation) of the years 1942- 1943, and then Telegram 71, in which, in
April 1945, Hitler gave the order to destroy the German people's own living
conditions.5 The final solution for the other races, and the absolute suicide of
the [German] race. That is where this mechanism inscribed in the workings of
the modern State leads. Of course, Nazism alone took the play between the
sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But
this plav is in fact inscribed in the workings of all States.

In order to disrupt the modern form of biopolitics, we return to an ethic of love and
care in order to rethink the normative body and a politics of difference
Saltes 13
[Natasha Saltes; Abnormal Bodies on the Borders of Inclusion: Biopolitics and the
paradox of Disability Surveillance, Surveillance & Society, 2013, 69-70]
Given the varied use of disability surveillance, how can we resolve the paradox of
promoting rights and preventing risk? In attempting to answer this question, I suggest not a
departure from biopolitics itself, but a departure from the underpinning
rationalization of eliminating abnormality and a return to the hidden foundation of
biopolitics, which Ojakangas describes as love (agape) and care (cura), care for
individual life (2005: 5). In distinguishing between Agambens (1998) conception of biopower as
bare life and Foucaults conception of biopower as optimizing life, Ojakangas argues that
the aim of biopower is not to reduce life, but to invest life through and through (Foucault
1978: 139 quoted in Ojakangas 2005: 14). He identifies the hidden foundation of care and love
as the origin of biopower noting that, historically, biopolitical processes were
embedded in the states inclination toward power , but were nonetheless carried out
with the aim of promoting the welfare, prosperity, health and happiness of the
population. He recounts the origin of biopower, pointing out that it emerged not only in the modern state, but in
Western religious ideology, namely Judeo-Christian tradition[s] of pastoral power described in the metaphor of the
shepherd watching over and protecting his flock (2005: 19). In his examination of biopower in the context of left

Ojakangas notion of biopolitics of care remarking that an affirmative

has at its core a biophilia, a love for living beings , that can be mobilized as a form of
solidarity to help combat injustice and inequality, and to make the world a better place (2011:
politics, Hannah takes up
biopower

1050 emphasis in original). However, Hannah recognizes that there are challenges in mobilizing and implementing
an affirmative biopolitics. He refers to the dilemma that Esposito raises, noting that the protection of life is often
carried out through authoritative processes that at times produce negative effects (2011: 1048). For Hannah,

negative effects can be attributed to a futurist biopower . As he describes it, a

biopower oriented toward the future is similar to biopolitics aimed at preventing risk
in that it seeks to ensure the survival of the Same in the future, at the expense of
an Other (2011: 1048). According to Hannah, biopolitics came to be viewed in a negative light
due to historical events marked by racist practices, eugenics and Nazi ideology , which
were carried out and rationalized under the purview of futurist investment (2011: 1048). However,
these

as Hannah acknowledges, biopolitics does not necessarily need to abandon concern

for the future. Rather, what it must abandon is the tendency to determine political
qualification by measuring the value of life according to ontological norms. The
notion that ontological abnormality poses a threat to the welfare, prosperity,
health and happiness of the population and therefore must be eliminated is
contingent on the conception of ontogenetic norms and its association with
productivity and progress (Finkelstein 1980; Oliver 1996; Davis 2006; Oliver and Barnes 2012). The
emphasis on bodily norms is what drives biopolitical agendas and is what results in
discrimination and exclusion of those deemed abnormal. For Ewald (1990), there is
no innate relationship between normal and abnormal. He maintains that the
establishment of norms is a relational process that often has little to do with biological
variations and more to do with how difference is perceived in society and constructed and
experienced as a handicap (1990: 157). Ewald points out that [i]f environmental requirements change,
performance does too, and along with them the location of the boundary between normal and abnormal (1990:

uncovering the hidden foundation of

an affirmative biopolitics requires rethinking the body according to normative
standards within a biomedical and pathological context to thinking about the body as a
situation lived and changeable (Peuravaara 2013). In theorizing the body according to conceptions
157). Shifting the boundary between normal and abnormal and

of disability and normality, Peuravaara (2013) contends that bodies are always situated and that situations are
constantly changing, which invariably shapes the lived body. Peuravaara follows Moi (2005) in asserting that the

Removing the
experience of disability in the context of the lived body involves adopting a politics
of difference that rejects dominant practices of ableism and values ontological
diversity (Loja et al. 2013: 191). It also requires rethinking spaces and the spatialization of
difference (Kitchin 1998; Hansen and Philo 2009). If underpinned by the hidden foundation of care
and love, biopolitical strategies can be used to promote rights whereby disability
surveillance, such as classifying and counting people with impairments, is not conducted as
a means of exclusion, but to achieve inclusion and to improve the welfare of both
lived body is part of society without being a mere product of society (2013: 414).

individual and collective life.

Thus we advocate for an ethic of social flesh

Social flesh is an ethical stance meant to incorporate care and
love into sociality in order to disrupt the current means by
which we view bodies. It achieves this by understanding the
means by which we all are physiologically connected to each
other and thereby disrupts the atomized vision of flesh present
in the status quo.
[Beasley and Bacchi, Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future Beyond trust, care and generosity
towards an ethic of social flesh,' 2007, 291-292]

Social flesh as a political metaphor involves an attempt to develop a new

ethico-political starting place for thinking critically about politics,
interconnection and sociality. In challenging neo-liberal conceptions of the
autonomous self/citizen and the thin eviscerated sociality this account invokes, it highlights
human embodied interdependence and brings together the socio-political and
embodiment. But what does this mean for undertaking social analysis? What techniques might such a political metaphor bring to bear? These are questions that we
expect to consider in more detail in future publications. Nevertheless, at this early stage we can see some methodological possibilities. In the Australian context we have suggested in
previous work on citizen bodies how social flesh might be deployed at the level of policy analysis. In particular we have identified distinctions made between those deemed to be
controlled by their bodies as against those conceived as having control over their bodies (Bacchi and Beasley, 2002). These distinctions are associated with differing levels of institutional
intervention for people accessing Australian health services. Women accessing health services linked to reproduction will be cast as controlled by body (hyperembodied), whereas

Significantly,
distinctions between those constituted as having control over their bodies and those
conceived as controlled by their bodies may transpose on to gender distinctions (as in the
case of reproduction), but the lens of embodied sociality is not another synonym for gender .
Women may be constituted, alongside men, as autonomous consumers (as in the case of cosmetic
women accessing cosmetic surgery will generally be perceived as decision-making, autonomous consumers in command of their bodies (hypo-embodied).4

surgery). The work of Martin Levine in Gay Macho (Levine and Troiden, 1998) provides another instance in which the political impact of differentiated body status does not entirely line up
with gender difference. Levines work points to the constitution of certain forms of masculinity, indeed hyper-masculinity, as hyper-embodied. Hence, far from signifying the invulnerable
atomized masculine self, gay macho is deemed an instance of controlled by body, in this case subject to sexual addiction and requiring professional therapeutic intervention. Manhood
is not always able to claim the status of an untouchable integrity and is not always therefore aligned with the sovereign subjectivity of modernity. Emily Grabhams

application of our work on citizen bodies and social flesh to intersex citizenship
reveals a related dynamic. Paralleling the ways in which reproductive women are reduced to the body and as a result subjected to higher degrees of
government oversight/intervention in their decision-making, the child who cannot be identified at birth as either male or female becomes their body . . . rendering them a physical site

In these examples the ethicopolitical ideal of social flesh provides a significant point of departure for
investigating forms of governmentality undertaken by the state, as well as
those arising in professionalized institutional settings, interpersonal
contexts and in relation to the citizen/self. This starting point enables us to imagine progressive democratic directions for
the future. Democratic directions The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for
democratic visions. Because it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied as
interconnected mutually reliant flesh in a more thoroughgoing sense than the
languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts of political
change as making transactions between the less fortunate and more privileged,
more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous . Social flesh is political metaphor in which
fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the vulnerable from the
worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth. A political ethic of embodied
intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the basis of a
democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that
rest upon extending altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional
arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up the
scope of what counts as relevant (Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention
that is open for an unusual level of intervention by medical practitioners and family (Grabham, 2007).

to the private sphere as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance
in future papers.

The means by which we understand the metaphorical

interactions of bodies influences the way we act in the world.
So, instead of viewing the portrayal of bodies as a fixed
substance in the material world, we prefer the ethic of social
flesh which sees the world as interconnected by both social
communication and flesh.
[Beasley and Bacchi, Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future Beyond trust, care and generosity
towards an ethic of social flesh,' 2007, 289-291]
While we concur in the postmodern renunciation of foundational fixity in relation to biology and society, we reject the tendency to slip into highlighting endless fluidity or to perceive

to reject
the portrayal of bodily matter as simply lying doggo in the face of the inscriptive pen of the social/symbolic, is not to embrace
bodies as asocial or to accept the notion of a material realm (distinct from an immaterial one?) as
somehow foundational and fixed. Butlers emphasis on plasticity seems to us not as useful here as the less heroic emphasis on contextually
acknowledgement of embodied sociality as necessarily heralding a return to biological/structural fixity. To note the specificity of the body, of bodily differences,

constrained variability and complexity we find in modernist sociological and cultural constructionism (Jackson, 2001; Bordo, 1998), as well as in postmodern-inflected writings by
corporeal feminists and feminist political philosophers concerned with bodily materiality and its social devaluation (Rothfield, 1996; Diprose, 1994, 2002; Young, 1990, 1997; Flax, 1983).

The notion of social flesh as a political ethic invokes a certain terrain of

epistemological debate, and one which operates across the supposed divide between modernist and postmodern frames of reference (see Beasley, 2005). In
this debate we situate social flesh as a vocabulary that tenaciously holds on to the

sensuous fleshliness of sociality as a means to invoke an acknowledgement of

interconnection and mutual reliance and the political implications of this . Evidently the
epistemological terrain does not just involve a question of content but also the function of social flesh as a contingent ethics, its function as a political intervention. The constitution of
social flesh as a political intervention produces three further relevant features, in terms of metaphor, method and proposals regarding democracy. Political metaphor As we noted in the

The languages of trust/respect, care,

responsibility and generosity are clearly intended as political interventions. Precisely because we have some doubts about
Introduction, this paper presumes a role for theoretical concepts and debate in political praxis.

these languages, the practices with which they are linked, and the political ideals they enunciate to symbolize imagined political futures, we propose the notion of social flesh as an
alternative language. We mentioned earlier Colebrooks view that we generate concepts to transform social life (2002), but such a perspective requires a little more clarification. Along

there is an important role for the Ideal in political thinking (2005), a role
for the creation of a political imaginary which acts as a counterfoil to the self-evident, natural
status of dominant neo-liberal political understandings and practices . As Diprose puts it, the development of this political ideal
is aimed at a justice that is not yet here (2002: 14), allowing us to imagine other future social landscapes and
how we might work towards them. In this context, we unapologetically propose the concept of social flesh as a political language, as a political
with Drucilla Cornell we suggest that

metaphor. Trust and care writers, in particular, would perhaps constitute their vocabularies as referring to actual existing practices and might be alarmed by any reference to metaphor

. However, social flesh the notion of embodied

interconnection is certainly as firmly an expression of existing social practices as
the more narrowly conceived languages of trust and care . Additionally, as we have already noted, trust and care
as inappropriately implying that all we need worry about is words

writers clearly do see their languages as interventions in the political arena, and thus their languages may also be viewed as political metaphors. The point here is that most often the
function of such vocabularies as political metaphors is not spelled out. Lakoff and Johnson state in this regard that, while metaphor is usually understood as a poetic device or rhetorical
flourish, it is on the contrary pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is

The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the
intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our
fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. . . . If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely
metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. (1980: 3) Lakoff and Johnson are at pains to point out that,

because the metaphorical concepts we live by are normally more or less automatic
rather than highly conscious and deliberate, interrogating such metaphors makes
them explicit and consequently provides an insight into how we live . We would add that the
connections between metaphor and sociality do more than reveal that metaphor is not a
purely cognitive issue. Instead metaphor appears as an engaged sensuous process
involving bodies and actions in the world and between people . Metaphor is thoroughly
political in other words, even if individual metaphors differ in their associations with and mobilization of the social. In this setting, interrogation of metaphorical concepts is not just
significant in considering the way in which we live presently, as Lakoff and Johnson suggest, but also offers a means considering the way in which we might live in the future.

Social flesh is a political metaphor intended to challenge the adequacy of dominant

neo-liberal and the several alternative understandings of social life considered in this paper, in
order to both reconfigure how we see that social life and to allow us to imagine it
otherwise. Everyday life and forms of governance, including policy, rely upon an
assumed metaphorical vocabulary, upon political concepts concerning values and views of the good, upon what Foucault describes as a
certain problematization (1991: 86; 1985: 115). Neoliberalism may thus be considered as an ethos or ethical ideal, articulating a political knowledge, a politics of
truth (Dean, 1997, in Larner, 2000; Lemke, 2000). To contest the dominant metaphorical vocabulary requires
the development of an other political vocabulary . In common with Bessant et al. we believe in the value of political talk.
We create and use words to make things happen (2006: 16, 1819). In countering neo-liberalisms
politics of truth as the naturalized dominant form of knowledge/power , we aim precisely to
refuse the constitution of real/material and conceptual as distinct realms that
divide practices embodiment from metaphor-discourses and by contrast enjoin their interplay. Such a perspective is
necessarily democratic since acknowledging the pervasive and everyday connections between the real/material and conceptual knowledge challenges the institutional authority of
expert conceptual knowledge and resists the exclusion of lay perspectives (Williams and Popay, 2005: 123). Clearly, as this instance suggests, the account of social flesh as a political
metaphor evokes practical implications, and so we turn to methodological and democratic considerations.

AT:

At: Historical Analysis

Turn this argument: just because we dont directly create
a historical analysis, doesnt mean that we dont
participate in one. The truth is that we track biopolits as
(use a card from below)
Biometrics was established by Western scientists to demarcate
non-white bodies as other and degenerate, legitimizing
colonization and spreading internalized racism among minority
groups
Nishiyama 14 (Hidefumi, PhD Candidate in the Department of Politics and International
Studies at University of Warwick and has a BA in Sociology and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths,
University of London, and a MSc Sociology (Research) from London School of Economics, Towards a
global genealogy of biopolitics: race, colonialism, and biometrics beyond Europe, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space2015, volume 33, pages 335-336, HC)

Contemporary (post)colonial studies have advanced Foucaults articulation of

biopolitical racism by identifying an important and inextricable relationship between
the emergence of modern racism and colonialism (Rasmussen, 2011; Stoler, 1995). The emergence of
eugenics and the theory of degeneration that Foucault refers to for his articulation of modern racism are in fact hardly separable
from colonial practices. For example, the colonial racialisation that had been articulated by Arthur de Gobineau and other social
Darwinist scholars incorporated into the discourse of the Pan-German Leaguecan explicate an impact of colonialism on internal

Moreover, the term eugenics itself is arguably born

of colonial strategies: Francis Galton, Darwins cousin who coined the term eugenics, articulated racial
differences under the discourse of civilisation in the context of colonialism, for example,
in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius. It was also Galton (1892) who proposed a biometric technique
namely, fingerprintingto inscribe racial knowledge (see also Cole, 2002). Galtons fingerprinting was
by no means exceptional; in fact, the biometric articulation of racial knowledge was prevalent among 19th-century racial
scientists who constantly used biometrics to diagnose the abnormality or
degeneracy of colonial bodies (Pugliese, 2010).These accounts of the constitutive role of colonial subjugation are
state racism in Nazi Germany (Rasmussen, 2011).

significant in the context of Foucaults relative silence on the role of colonialism in his articulation of biopolitics, but the operation of
19th-century colonialism should not be reduced only to such European racial othering. European colonisation in the 19th century did

simply entail dichotomous racial subjugation; modern racism should not be

reduced to a binary strategy that inscribes the civility of Europeans and the
barbarism of European colonial others. It also entailed the generalisation of norms of modern European race
thinking beyond the context of its colonisation. The biopolitical strategy of modern racism was not a singular
phenomenon, just as 19th-century colonialism was not a singular phenomenon. Rather, they were plural and multiplied,
which made non-European modes of colonisation such as that in Japanpossible.
not

Whiteness has a historically instituted power that underlies

technology like biometrics #infrastuctural whiteness
#historical contingency of whiteness
Pugliese 7
[Joseph Pugliese; Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the Racialized Zero
Degree of Nonrepresentation, 108-110]

In The Light of the World, a chapter committed to disclosing the manner in which the racial category of whiteness
informs the technologies of photography and film, Richard Dyer argues that [a]ll technologies are at once technical
in the most limited sense (to do with their material properties and functioning) and also always social (economic,
cultural, ideological)._ He then proceeds to track the manner in which photographic media and, a fortiori, movie
lighting assume, privilege and construct whiteness (White, 89). Focusing on the complex interplay of various
technological elements, including film stock, different types of lighting, and camera apertures, Dyer shows how
technologies of photography and film were developed taking the white face as the touchstone (White, 90). In the
process, he explains why, for instance, in school photos the black pupils faces look like blobs or the white pupils
have theirs bleached out (White, 89). I want to transpose Dyers illuminating analysis of the racialized, specifically white, elements that inform the technologies of photography and film to the imaging technologies of digital
facial scans and finger scans. Before I proceed down this track, however, I want to problematize Dyers conceptualization of whiteness. Throughout his book White ,

Dyer deploys a con- cept of whiteness that is

predicated on a totalizing, ahistorical, and essen- tialized understanding of the
category. This is succinctly encapsulated in Dyers argument that what he is studying [is] whiteness qua
whiteness . . . whiteness itself (White, 4). As I have argued elsewhere, in deploying such a
totalizing and ahistorical conceptualization of whiteness, he proceeds to range
freely across a wide spectrum of historical contexts, genres, and media, and, in the
process, generates an anachronistic schema in which, for example, a fifteenthcentury painting by Giovanni Bellini participates in the same symbolic articulation of
whiteness as does Sylvester Stallone in Rambo ._ In the discursively untenable move of situating,
under the ahistori- cal rubric of whiteness, a Bellini painting in a politically and ideologically
equivalent relation to Rambo, Dyer effectively erases that complex geneal- ogy that marks the
fraught relationship of Italian immigrants to the category of whiteness in the United States. In examining whiteness

I want to pose whiteness in infrastructural terms , that is,

as an element that is indissociable from the effective operations of a particular
technology. In posing whiteness as infrastructural, I am not suggesting that this racial
category is some sort of ahistorical and essentialized datum , what Dyer terms whiteness
qua whiteness; rather, I will argue that whiteness be read in terms of a racial
category that is historically situated, marked by the specificity of particular media
and technological apparatuses, and cali- brated by identifiable discourses, laws, and
conventions. In talking of an infrastructural whiteness, I will be drawing attention to the very structurality of its
infrastructure; in other words, I want to bring into focus what effec- tively gets invisibilized
when technologies are represented as ideologi- cally neutral conduits of data
rather than ideologically inflected construc- tors of knowledge. If whiteness is to be
invested with any power, it must be capable of a potentially infinite process of
situated, historical repeatability. Couched in Derridean terms, Dyers conceptualization of whiteness
in contemporary biometric technologies,

qua whiteness is in itself divided and multiplied in advance by its structure of repeatability._ Viewed in strictly
rhetorical terms, the figure of diacope (repetition of a word [whiteness] with one word [qua] in between) constitutes
its logic of signifi- cation, as it already underscores its (infra)structure of repeatability and its openness to alterity
with every instance of transposition/iteration across diverse media and contexts. In other words, the very qua of
whiteness, its assumed essence, is dependent upon its structure of repeatability, where its every iteration entails
that something new takes place. I stage this brief deconstruction of Dyers essentialized concept of whiteness not

the power of
whiteness resides in the fact that it is never, because of its very structure of
repeatability, essen- tially identical to itself. In not being strictly identical to itself,
while simulta- neously being capable of potentially infinite iterations, whiteness can
be seen to be invested with a power historically to mutate, adapt, and, in the
process, arrogate different technologies, bodies, races, and ethnicities in its situated
repetitions. If this colonizing flexibility, and imperial inventive- ness, constitutes the
power of whiteness as a racial category, then it also exposes whiteness to risk.
Precisely in not being identical to itself because of its (infra)structural iterability,
whiteness risks dissolving those very pli- able borders that enable its flexible
in order to indulge in a series of rhetorical flourishes but to underscore the manner in which

positional superiority, to draw on a Saidian turn of phrase. This marks, in other words, the urgent
need always to put in place legislation (for example, the White Australia policy_), laws (for example, the
one drop of black blood rule in the United States_), and other regulatory mechanisms designed to
control and govern its categori- cal purity in the face of historical forces and agents
that may attempt to contest, contaminate, and miscegenate its illusory pristine
status.

AT: Settler Colonialism

Specificity DA (link turn) - the normalization and segregation
of bodies via biometrics was used to justify appropriating
native land dismantling how state power functions via
biometrics key to addressing specific instances of violence ie
sovereignty claims and authenticity testing
Pugliese 12 (Joseph Pugliese; Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics pp.
43-44)
a test that both produces race, through the invasive dermographic
inscription of the anthropologist's thumbnail across the body of the subject, and
racialised subjects, through the resultant identification of the subject's racial "blood
quantum." Race is here scientifically produced through the deployment of an apparatus of knowledge (anthropometry);
through the mobilisation of an observational method (the clinical gaze, calculated to remain
neutral and scientifically detached in the face of the objectified subject of inquiry );
through the deployment of a disciplinary code of normativity (which sets the colour-gauge for the
Operative here is

normative reaction of skin that has been inscribed by the anthropologist's thumbnail); and, finally, through the application of
techniques of verification (the visible chromatic effects of a dermographic inscription, once measured against the normative colourgauge, will disclose hidden "blood quanta"). The question of race is here literally and symbolically resolved through a form of writing
on the body with the stylus of the anthropologist's nail, producing an intextuated body, literally a racial dermography that can only
be decoded by the scientist. Hrdlicka's (1939, 39)

test is premised on the notion of "markedly

differing circulatory or blood reaction in the fullbloods and in those with white
admixture." "White" blood, in this biopolitical schema, will tell. Whiteness, in keeping with its position at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy, is invested with a more sensitised quality ("the skin reac-tion will be more durable") against the more muted and
dusky effects of the non-white "fullbloods." As such, as Hrdlicka (1939, 39) concludes, "this test is both easy and decisive, for legal
as well as scientific purposes." There is more at stake, however, in Hrdlicka's test than the production of race and racialised
subjects. As absurd as Hrdlicka's test might appear in a contemporary light, it is in fact fundamentally constituted by an historically
contingent scientific logic or rationality, what Foucault (2003, 55) would term the "rationality of technical procedure." The rationality
of technical procedure that underpins this test also invests it with the politico-juridical status that enables it to be put to work on
behalf of the colonial state, the U.S. Department of Justice in particular, and its biopolitical laws. This anthropometric test must be
seen as a scientifico-legal technique of domina-tion producing instrumentalised subjects that are, in turn, subjugated to the
biopolitical laws of the state. Situated within the U.S. history of biopolitical regimes of racial segregation based on "blood quantum"
lines, the "legal purposes" to which Hrdlicka alludes, refer to the U.S. government's admin-istration of Native American lives and

The General Allotment Act formally legislated

Native American identity on the grounds of biological racism through its construct of
"racial blood." The separation of "fullblood" from "mixed blood" Native Americans that this Act enabled was used in order to
deter-mine the allotment of tribal lands according to "blood quantum standards." As Paul Taylor (2008, 146) notes , the "blood
quantum" segregation of Native Americans played a crucial role in the colonial
expropriation of Indian land: "Since whatever land was left over could be sold, there
were substantial economic interests to be served by finding as few j` fullblood']
Indians as possible." Hrdlicka's test for "blood quanta" had its equivalents in the Australian colonial context, where white
land under the General Allotment Act or Dawes Act (1887).

anthropologists worked in the service of the biopolitical state in order to identify and segregate "mixed blood" Indigenous children
from "full bloods." Working in the field, and deploying another set of anthropometric technologies, including colour filters that, once
placed against the skin of the subject, scientifically determined their "blood quantum" status, Australian

anthropologists

were instrumental in the state production of colonial assimilation

and the resultant Stolen

Generations (see Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their

children of mixed parentage were, under this biopolitical program, forcibly removed from their parents and placed either in State-run
homes or farmed out in conditions of servitude to white domestic households or
pastoral stations. Once again, one of key colonial effects of this devastating biopolitical program was to reduce the number
Families 1997). Aboriginal and Tones Strait Islander

of Indigenous claimants to their expropriated land.

AT: Framework
Confining the resolution only re creates the same discourse
that reinforce the hierarchal status quo
stannard (matt, Department of Communication and Mass Media
University of Wyoming Portraying the Ruling Class: Argument Fields
and the Material Antecedents of Policy Debate
https://web.archive.org/web/20010214083809/http://debate.uvm.edu/s
tannard300a.html)
The repetition of particular discursive rituals reinforces
normative assumptions behind those rituals and, in turn,
strengthens the institutions upon which they are modeled. For
Foucault, these normative assumptions are reinscribed upon
consciousness through their rhetorical performance. As Ronald
Greene states, "(t. Fo)he ability of rhetoric to generate a 'publicity
effect' implicates the materiality of rhetoric in a process of
surveillance." The "surveillance" is a metaphor for the
enforcing norms of discourse. Enforcement occurs through the
subject's assumption of responsibility for the reproduction of
discourse and its concomitant ideology Foucault writes that the
speaker who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows
it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he (sic)
makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in
himself the power relation which he simultaneously plays both
roles: he becomes the principle of his own subjection. Thus, as
Greene puts it, the rhetoric of reasoning is a kind of human
technology, critical to the organization of governing
institutions and their norms. As a field, which draws its norms
from a more materially powerful field, the debate community
generates an argumentation aligned with competing dominant
discourses. Dominant classes, over-represented in the state
apparatus, utilize media and scholarship to define the terms of
social problems, which they then (discursively) proceed to
solve. In policy debate, teams rhetorically draw upon dominant
class media and scholarship to define problems which,
hypothesizing the use of legal and political tools, they then
purport to solve. The similarity between the two is, of course, skewed by the
competitive and "utopian" nature of debate. Frequently, debaters propose plans and
speculate on outcomes that go against conventional wisdom. Robert Rowland's
important prioritization of debatability over "realism" chronicles the cognitive

separation of policy debate and conservative conceptions of "the community." But

Rowland does not address this as a political separation. Neither he, nor other
debate scholars, asks why the "real world" is limited in the way it is. Instead, he is
concerned with making debate slightly less bound by realism than the dominant
discourse of the policy field upon which it draws. Although "it is important that the
debate process have application to the real world," lest it "become a modern
version of the second sophistic," Rowland concludes that realism "is logically
subordinate to debatability." But the primary purpose of this subordination is
pragmatism, not criticism. Rowland writes that in argumentation it is primarily the
pragmatic goals that matter . . . (it) is the means to the end of problem-solving; it
has no intrinsic nature aside from fulfilling this pragmatic purpose. What Rowland,
perhaps unconsciously, guards against is the idea that debate can be critical of the
blind spots of policy making. To guard against this, he invokes the very pragmatism
that characterizes dominant discourse. Without a more radical notion of the "real
world," debate remains uncritical: the aspects of the Second Sophistic Rowland's
own analogy warns against. In policy debate theoretical assumptions

guide hundreds upon hundreds of rhetorical and logical

gestures in a manner similar to the very specialized, often
ritualistic, guiding assumptions of legal practice. Law
legitimizes class rule when it successfully mediates political
conflicts. It adopts and refines an internal logic whose
utilization hides law's external ties to privileged classes. Legal
and political discourse provides a mystifying mass of problems
and principles, constantly moving "within, and moved by,
[law's] relation to the problems posed for it by the social
structure." Its chief rhetorical device, however, is also its device
of materialization, policy making. "The history of law is the history of this
relation as it is mediated by the legal profession, the legislature and the law
enforcement agencies." Marxist legal critic Nicos Pulantzas offers an institutional
critique that synthesizes the rhetoric and the materiality of law. Law as

declaration organizes consent. Its representative rhetors offer

it as the only desirable, material reality available to the
oppressed, thereby reproducing this ideology in the
consciousness of all actors, administrators and the
administrated. ...although law places an important (positive
and negative) role in organizing repression, its efficacy is just
as great in the devices of creating consent. It materializes the
dominant ideology that enters into these devices, even though
it does not exhaust the reasons for consent. Through its
discursiveness and characteristic texture, law-regulation
obscures the politico-economic realities, tolerating structural
lacunae and transposing these realities to the political arena

by means of a particular mechanism of concealmentinversion...The dominated classes encounter law not only as an
occlusive barrier, but also as the reality which assigns the
place they must occupy. This place, which is the point of their
insertion into the politico-social system, carries with it certain
rights as well as duties-obligations, and its investment by the
imagination has a real impact on social agents. Policy debate
is certainly an "investment by the imagination" in the field of
policy making. The consent to the inevitability of institutional
directives serves to socialize the debater into the norms of a
class-divided society. The argumentation skills learned in competitive debate
are often touted as tools for eventual critical advocacy in students' post-debate
lives. Gordon Mitchell, however, has argued that theories of such empowerment are
lacking. Similarly, the advent of the "kritik" or critical analysis in policy debate has
been offered as an alternative to pragmatic policy advocacy. However, the very
novelty and strength of the "kritik" stems from the accepted normalcy of policy
making as the ruling paradigm for evidence-based debate. Both critical analysis and
advocacy outside of debate remain at the margins of the activity, a reproduction of
the marginalizations of such analysis and advocacy in the larger society. Critics
might blame debate's inability to empower students on its ontological commitment
to objective truth, binary oppositions, and rationalism. Again, these are ideas rather
than structural realities. The misappropriation of rationality and truth by
disproportionately powerful institutions makes the ideas of rationality and truth
more convenient targets than are their material antecedents. It is easier for critics
to attack the notion of truth itself than to attack the distortion of truth-seeking
methods by ruling institutions. Deference to these institutions and their appointed
experts is still a central feature of traditional argumentation and debate. Moreover,
reliance on mass media sources, the journals of elitist think tanks, and public
relations-manufactured press services all serve to construct a particular possibility
of argument in policy debates. The advent of electronic research databases has
exacerbated this conservatizing tendency since most of these databases are
mainstream in content. To summarize, I am suggesting that discursive inequalities
and marginalized identities are not the only objects of criticism in policy debate.
These problems are symptoms of the reproduction of the policy field, a field which,
in its institutionalized materiality, produces and contains both inequality and
marginalization. The field of policy debate is a ritualized and enhanced reproduction
of this larger material institution. Debaters are taught, through pedagogy and
reward, drawing from policy literature and traditional (uncritical) notions of
governing, to imitate the ruling class. Inequality and marginalization are part of the
structure governing such imitation.

AT: Black Nihilism

Sexton Indict
Sexton epistemology is erroneous and prevents inter-sectional
progress by erasing the history of modern racial ideas through
the concept of monoraciality
Spickard 9 (Paul, professor of history and Asian American studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and
the Critique of Multiracialism (review), American Studies, Volume 50, Number 1/2,
Spring/Summer 2009, pp. 125-127 Project Muse)
With Amalgamation Schemes, Jared Sexton is trying to stir up some controversy . He presents a
facile, sophisticated, and theoretically informed intelligence, and he picks a fight from the start. His title suggests
that the study of multiraciality is some kind of plot, or at the very least an illegitimate enterprise. His tone is angry
and accusatory on every page. It is difficult to get to the grounds of his argument, because the cloud of invective is

For Sexton (as for the

race is about Blackness, in the United States and around the world .
That is silly, for there are other racialized relationships . In the U.S., native peoples
were racialized by European intruders in all the ways that Africans were, and more: they were nearly
extinguished. To take just one example from many around the world, Han Chinese have racialized
Tibetans historically in all the ways (including slavery) that Whites have racialized Blacks and Indians in the
United States. So there is a problem with Sextons concept of race as Blackness. There is
also a problem with his insistence on monoraciality. For Sexton and the others, one cannot
be mixed or multiple; one must choose ever and only to be Black. I dont have a
problem with that as a political choice, but to insist that it is the only possibility flies
in the face of a great deal of human experience, and it ignores the history of how
modern racial ideas emerged.
so thick, and because his writing is abstract, referential, and at key points vague.
Spencers and Gordon)

Methodology Indict
The logic of social death replicates the violence of the middle passage by
locking blackness into a subjecthood of devastation and cutting black
bodies off from pursuing a politics of belonging
Brown 2009 professor of history and of African and African American Studies
specializing in Atlantic Slavery (Vincent, Social Death and Political Life in the Study
of Slavery, http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/documents/brownsocialdeath.pdf)
But this was not the emphasis of Pattersons argument. As a result, those he has inspired have often conflated his

Seen as a state
of being, the concept of social death is ultimately out of place in the political history
of slavery. If studies of slavery would account for the outlooks and maneuvers of the
enslaved as an important part of that history, scholars would do better to keep in
view the struggle against alienation rather than alienation itself. To see social death as a
exposition of slaveholding ideology with a description of the actual condition of the enslaved.

productive peril entails a subtle but significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing

enslaved Africans and their descendants never ceased

to pursue a politics of belonging, mourning, accounting, and regeneration. In part, the
enslavement as a predicament, in which

usefulness of social death as a concept depends on what scholars of slavery seek to explainblack pathology or
black politics, resistance or attempts to remake social life? For too long, debates about whether there were black
families took precedence over discussions of how such families were formed; disputes about whether African culture
had survived in the Americas overwhelmed discussions of how particular practices mediated slaves attempts to
survive; and scholars felt compelled to prioritize the documentation of resistance over the examination of political
strife in its myriad forms. But of course, because slaves social and political life grew directly out of the violence and
dislocation of Atlantic slavery, these are false choices. And we may not even have to choose between tragic and
romantic modes of storytelling, for history tinged with romance may offer the truest acknowledgment of the tragedy
confronted by the enslaved: it took heroic effort for them to make social lives. There is romance, too, in the tragic
fact that although scholars may never be able to give a satisfactory account of the human experience in slavery,

If scholars were to emphasize the efforts of the enslaved

more than the condition of slavery, we might at least tell richer stories about how
the endeavors of the weakest and most abject have at times reshaped the world.
The history of their social and political lives lies between resistance and oblivion,
not in the nature of their condition but in their continuous struggles to remake it.
Those struggles are slaverys bequest to us.
they nevertheless continue to try.

Solvency Extension: Embracing mere existence allows for a

politics predicated on love and friendship which affirms the
humanity of other apart from politicized identity categories
Enns 7 (Diane, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and Peace Studies,

McMaster University, Political Life Before Identity, Theory & Event 10:1, Project
Muse)
While this mere existence does not constitute an enviable condition for Arendt, she betrays some ambivalence towards it. She protests that inalienable human rights and the dignity that
they confer, must be independent of human plurality and remain valid even for those expelled from the human community (OT 298). Whether it is possible, Arendt states, to articulate a
sphere of human rights that is above the nation, guaranteed by humanity itself, is open to question. She argues that some kind of organized political community is necessary for all
human individuals, yet nevertheless commits herself to thinking about the possibility of rights guaranteed by this naked condition of life beyond law, rights and polities -- for human
rights must remain valid for mere existence, she states, the right to have rights must be guaranteed by humanity itself (OT 298). Thus while she considers naked life to pose a great
danger to the common, political world -- it perhaps threatens our political life in an even more terrifying way than the wildness of nature once threatened man-made cities -- and even
asserts that the production of such mere existence forces people into conditions of savagery and barbarism (OT 302), she alludes to the potentially affirmative conditions of this status

mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by

birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can
be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and
sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love , which says with Augustine, "Volo ut sis (I
want you to be)," without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme
and unsurpassable affirmation. (OT 301) In Agamben's notion of bare life, we again find a certain ambivalence; one that I will argue can only be
when she relates it to love and friendship: This

understood in the context of a revised understanding of the meaning of politics. Like Arendt in the above passage, Agamben opens his series of texts on political life, community and
sovereign power, by referring to a singular relationship between mere existence and love. He writes that "

love is never directed toward this or

that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect
the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one
with all of its predicates, its being such as it is. "28 It is this "being-such" that is always
hidden when we consider relations of belonging to this or that property or class. In other
words, when we think of an individual as defined by this particular identity or that, as
black or white, male or female, Muslim or Christian, what is denied or hidden is this
being-such with all of its predicates. What happens in friendship and love that alters the tendency (and sometimes the imperative) to simplify
and essentialize the identity categories to which we belong? In friendship we cease to see the other as white or as
black, as gay or straight, able or disabled, female or male. At least, we are aware of
these particular identifying categories of a companion, but exist in relation with him
or her in a state of "forgetfulness" of, or "indifference" to, this reduction to one
singular category. It is when pushing a wheelchair-bound friend into an airport and noting with annoyance the infantilizing treatment to which one's intelligent and
dignified friend is subjected by well-intentioned airport employees, that she becomes disabled. This is not to deny the unique obstacles her disability places before her on a daily basis,
but to acknowledge how devastating this lack of the state of forgetfulness can be, as the loved one with all of her predicates becomes reduced to one identifiable category. In using such
terms as forgetfulness or indifference, I am attempting to find a language to describe this effect of loving or seeing the other with all of her predicates, her being such as it is -- an "I want

It isn't blindness to disability, color, or gender, but recognition of and

appreciation for the bare existence or life of the other, against which the skin color,
genitalia or degree of muscle coordination responsible for designating us as this or
that identity become relatively insignificant. Insignificant for the love we bear him or
her, which is not the same as saying insignificant in the sense that another's
struggle to live with dignity in the face of discrimination is ignored.
you to be" without reason.

The negs individualized call for self-overcoming

disenfranchises those made victims of institutional oppression
the ghettoization of urban minorities requires collective
action that attacks social and economic barriers to becoming.
Stark, 1995 [Barbara, Professor of Law @ Hofstra Law, Urban Despair and
Nietzsches Eternal Return: From the Municipal Rhetoric of Economic Justice to the
International Law of Economic Rights, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, 28.2,
pgs. 207 213]

What if Americans knew that the next thirty years would merely repeat the
preceding cycle? What if we knew that the "empowerment zones" proposed
in the 1990s would be no more effective than the "enterprise zones" of the
1980s or the "model cities" and the "war on poverty" of the 1960s?72 What if
we knew that the stories of abuse and neglect, of broken promises and
broken lives, would be repeated every generation?73 What if we knew that
our children's lives, like our own, would be spent in violence and hardship?74
Who would not succumb to what Cornel West describes as the "nihilism that
increasingly pervades black communities"?75 As Professor West explains:
Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there are
no rational grounds for legitimate standards for authority; it is, far more, the
lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness,
hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a
numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward
the world.76 In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche77 challenged the
notion of historical progress and the hopefulness embedded in that notion, as
well as the idea of any "rational grounds for legitimate standards for

authority." His doctrine of the eternal return posited time not as linear
progression, but as a cycle:78 The shepherd ... bit with a good bite. Far away
he spewed the head of the snakeand he jumped up. No longer shepherd,
no longer humanone changed, radiant, laughing^2 Nihilism is overcome by
affirming that the only meaning is the meaning that we create: I taught them
to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been. To
redeem what is past in man and to re-create all "it was" until the will says,
"Thus I willed it!Thus I shall will it!this I called redemption and this alone I
taught them to call redemption.83 Although Nietzsche scholars and other
philosophers offer wide-ranging interpretations of the eternal return,84
Richard Rorty's explication of self-overcoming is the key here: The drama of
an individual human life, of the history of humanity as a whole, is not one in
which a pre-existing goal is triumphantly reached or tragically not
reached. . . . Instead, to see one's life, or the life of one's community, as a
dramatic narrative is to see it as a process of Nietzschean self-overcoming.
The paradigm of such a narrative is the life of the genius who can say of the
relevant portion of the past, Thus I willed it,' because she has found a way to
describe that past which the past never knew, and thereby found a self to be
that which her precursors never knew was possible.85 The idea of selfovercoming or self-invention"finding a way to describe the past which the
past never knew*86is familiar to most Americans.87 It happens all the time
in United States politics and law.88 Americans only notice it when it is done
clumsily and the strings show, as they did, for example, when President Bush
claimed, "We won the Cold War." For the urban poor, however, selfovercoming is problematic. First, the African-American urban poor cannot opt
out of what Professor West describes as "a system of race-conscious people
and practices."90 Second, partly because of racism, self-overcoming is
necessarily a collective activity for the urban poor. Professor Bell Hooks has
observed: "[N]o level of individual self-actualization alone can sustain the
marginalized and oppressed. We must be linked to collective struggle, to
communities of resistance that move us outward, into the world."91 In the
1960s, the civil rights movement explicitly drew on the independence
movements of the formerly colonial Third World states,92 a larger
"community of resistance that [moved them] outward into the world." In the
1990s, the urban poor can reaffirm that link by claiming the international
human rights already won for them by the larger "communities of resistance"
of which they areand have always beena part. By doing so, they can find
"a way to describe that past which the past never knew and [find
themselves] to be [that] which [their] precursors never knew was
possible."93

Exts/Extra Cards:

Ext: (inherency?) Harms occurring in the squo

The US uses biometric technology as a means of
securitizing beyond the border, effectively deploying
epistemic, empirical and scopic violence.
Puliese 5
[Joseph Pugliese; In Silico Race and The Heteronomy of Biometric Proxies:
Biometrics in the Context of Civilian Life, Border Security and Counter-Terrorism
Laws, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 28-30]
In an extraordinarily prescient text, written on the cusp of the World War II, Levinas
lucidly articulates a vision that, symmetrically, prefigures the contemporary US
imperialist subject driving such operations as the Biometrics Automated Toolset and
the War on Terror,' its 'Axis of Evil' and its unilateral slogan 'You are either with us or
against us': The bourgeois admits no inner divisions... [s]he is concerned about
reality and the future, for they threaten to break up the uncontested equilibrium of
the present where sIhe] holds sway [ou il possede]. [S]He is essentially
conservative, but there is a worried conservatism. The bourgeois is concerned with
business matters and science as a defense against things and all that is
unforeseeable in them. [Her/]His instinct for possession is an instinct for integration,
and [her/]his imperialism is a search for security. [S]He would like to cast the white
mantle The director of the CIA, Porter Goss, in an address to employees at the CIA's
headquarters in Langley, Virginia, speaks of this drive to peace through war: 'Our
nation is at war. It's a cold fact. I wake up every morning thinking that...I go to bed
every night thinking, "What did I do today to help us advance the war?" I hope it's
the same thought you have.1' 00 The US and its allies advance their 'white mantle
of internal peace' through a war of terror designed to subjugate the antagonism of
an other who intransigently refuses to comply with the unilateral violence of the
imperialism of the same. The US Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge,
enunciates the violent dynamics of this imperial search for security through the
deployment of war: 'Outlining a series of initiatives implemented to make the
country more secureRidge said the reason terrorists have lashed out in Iraq and
elsewhere is not because the United States is failing in its efforts to defeat
terrorism, but because it is succeeding. "These successes remind us why we fight,"
he said, "because every single victory in a faraway land makes us safer here at
home."' The attenuating fable of the 'faraway land' serves to relegate the lived
reality of the lands in the violent grip of US imperial war, Iraq and Afghanistan, to
the status of innocuous myth. The imperial scope of this search for security
manifests itself in the colonising outward sweep of the US military: ' "That's why," '
explains Ridge, ' "we work so hard to extend our zone of security outward. So that
our borders are the last line of defense, not our first line of defense. And that's why
we built security measures that begin thousands of miles away". ' 0 2 Articulated
here is the doctrine of 'Manifest Destiny,' recast in terms of imperially securing
other lands as geopolitical 'buffer zones' for the US nation-state. The imperial
subjugation of the other knows no limits in its search for security: 'our' border is
always already established through the violent arrogation of the other's space;

thousands of miles away, in the faraway land of the undifferentiated other who is
always already 'our' enemy, "our' enemy because other, 'our' first line of defense is
'their' zone of violence, war and insecurity. The 'white mantle' of imperial
propaganda, however, will designate this violent space as the crucible of
democracy and freedom; in the words of President George Bush: 'as freedom takes
root in Iraq, it will inspire millions across the Middle East to claim their liberty as
well. And when the Middle East grows in democracy and prosperity and hope, the
terrorists will lose their sponsors, lose their recruits, and lose their hopes for
turning their region into a base for attacks '03 on America. 1 In the violent
exercise of imperialism in search for security, biometric technologies have been
assigned their particular roles in order to establish, in the words of the director of
the CIA, 'a truly global capability... with more eyes and ears everywhere.'104
Lieutenant Colonel Kathy De Bolt, Deputy Director of the Army Battle Laboratory at
Fort Huachuca, Arizona, explains the aims and goals of the biometric system that is
being developed in order to realise this truly global capability of eyes and ears
everywhere: the Biometrics Automated Toolset - 'Any place we go into - Iraq or
wherever - we're going to start building a dossier on people of interest to
intelligence.... We're trying to collect every biometric on every bad guy
that we can.' In the desire to establish a biometric archive on 'every bad guy'
'everywhere' is encapsulated the dream of an imperial disciplinary machine that will
automatically individuate the face of the other. Lieutenant Colonel Kathy De Bolt
elaborates: 'When they come into our checkpoints, we can say, "You're this bad guy
from here".'106The self-evidence of the 'bad,' the imperial reach of the
'everywhere,' and the unerring system of capture that biometric systems promise all signify the delusional search for security through the relentless exercise and
deployment of violence: epistemic, empirical and scopic. Iraq or wherever, the
imperial machine of state will generate geopolitical and racialised signs of infinite
substitution that will supply the ground for a biometric inventory of 'every bad guy'
'everywhere.'

Ext: General impact:

Normative identities such as able bodied, white, and cisgender
are used as origin points to classify bodies into schemas
Browne 13
[Dr. Simone Browne; Dark Sousveillance: Race, Surveillance, and Resistance, a
talk given on December 9, 2013, hosted at the Graduate Center, CUNY by the
Digital Praxis Seminar and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsMFdiLsqbg, 26:08-33:51, video published
March 21, 2014; transcribed by Ameena Ruffin]
biometrics is the idea that the body will reveal the truth about
the subject despite the subjects claim. So the idea that I might say my name is Rob Ford, but my
bodywhether its my DNA, my fingerprint, my iris scan, or some other piece or part of my body
will reveal my true identity. So with the concept of digital epidermalization,
Im suggesting here that biometrics research and development continues to
rely on certain practices of what Im calling prototypical whiteness, as well
as prototypical maleness, prototypical able-bodied-ness, prototypical youthness,
as well. This speaks to the ways in which biometric information technologies are
sometimes inscribed in racializing schemas that see certain bodies privileged, or at
least whiteness might be privileged or lightness in some of these enroll
measurements and enrollment processes. So Im going to look here at a few
findings in research and development coming out of the biometric industry
Simply put,

to kind of make sense of this for you all in the audience because I think that these research and
development publications tell us a lot about industry concerns and specifications

tell us a lot about who these technologies, or what kind of bodies these
technologies, are designed to suit best. And so one such study examined how facial
and they also

recognition technology could be employed in a multi-ethnic environment to classify facial features by

race and also by genderyes thats Will Smith right there. So a technology like this could be

applied, for example, in shopping malls, casinos, amusement parks, or

something like the photo-tagging application that might be used in Facebook or so. So the
authors of the study found that, when they programmed the gender
classification system generically for all ethnicities, the system was
inclined to classify Africans as males and mongoloids as females. So the
racial nomenclature of mongoloid is seemingly archaic, I know, but not
uncommon in some of the R and D coming out of this industry. With this
gender classification system, what happened here is that Black women were read
as male most of the time and Asian men were read as female most of the
time with this particular study. In this way it mirrored earlier pseudoscientific
racist and sexist discourse that sought to define racial categories and
gender categories in order to regulate these artificial boundaries that can
never be fully maintained. Think here of the Black woman as surrogate man or the feminized
Asian man. Interestingly, in this particular study, the gender classifier was made
ethnicity specific for the category African and they found that images of the African
female would be classified as females 82% of the time and while that same African classifier would find
images of Asian females 95% of the time and for what they call Caucasoid females 96% of the time.
This is a study that came out around 2010. These kind of languages of Caucasoid, Mongoloid as
well. So meaning that with this particular female classifier when its calibrated to

detect Black women, African classifiers better suited as classifying Asian

women as well as Caucasian women or White women. So using actor Will Smiths face as a
model for generic Black masculinity, the studys authors are left to conclude that the accuracy
of gender classifier on Africans is not as high as on Mongoloid or Caucasoid.
Another studyIm going to talk a little bit about failure to enrollthis came out in 2009 a Nikon
camera, and the idea that some bodies fail to enroll in these technologies. And these things change
once these failures reveal themselves and sometimes through twitter and public ways like this. In
another study we can see how epidermalizationand what I mean by that is the

imposition of race on the skinis present, for example, in comparative testing with
control groups with higher failure to enroll rates than others. The study statesIm just going to read.
This is a popular quote thats often used in people that research biometric
technologies, but it says here: Elderly users often have very faint fingerprints
and may have poorer circulation than younger users. Construction workers
and artisans are more likely to have highly worn fingerprints to the point
where ridges are nearly nonexistent. Users of Pacific Rim/Asian descent
may have faint fingerprint ridges, especially female users. What his quote is
telling us is that the elderly; people who come in contact with corrosive or caustic chemicals, such as
mechanics, or nail technicians, or manicurists, often have unmeasurable fingerprints. Think of
message therapists too, or people that have heavy hand-washing n their job like nurses or people in
the healthcare profession. This should lead us to ask questions about can these

technologies be calibrated to determine gender and race or class

differentiation. In the same study that I just quoted, the authors note that facial
scan technology may produce higher failure to enroll rates for very dark
skin users because of the quality of images provided for the facial scan
system by video cameras are often optimized for lighter skinned users. So
what research and development is telling us is that certain technologies
come to privilege whiteness, or at least lightness in the ways in which they are
lit in the enrollment process, or at least how some bodies are lit in the enrollment
process. So you can see the logic of prototypical whiteness operating here
and also with this Canon cameraIm sorry, Nikon camera. With this the possibilities of racializing
surveillance are revealed. This is especially so in facial recognition technologies calibrated only to find
matches from within specific racial and gender groupings leading to higher failure to enroll rates for
some groupings. So the application of surveillance technologies in this way

leads to questions concerning the idea that Can gender and race, which are
social constructs, be specified by these technologies or programmed so ?
And also, How do transgendered people fit within this algorithmic
equation? So they are unaccounted for in the algorithm. These research and
development reports and articles make clear theres a certain assumption
that with these technologies that categories of gender identity and race are
clear-cut and that a machine can be programmed to assign gender
categories or what bodies and body parts should signify. Such
technologies can then possibly be applied to determine who has access to
movement and stability and to other rights. So given this theres important questions
that I think need to be asked, such as: How do we understand the body once its
converted into data? What are the underlying assumptions with
surveillance technologies such as passport verification machines, facial recognition software,
and fingerprint template technology? Well theres the notion that these technologies
are infallible, that theyre objective, and that they are based on
mathematical precision without error or bias on the part of the computer

programmers who calibrate the search parameters of these machines or

on the part of those who read these templates to make decisions.

The categorization of characteristics in the form of data leads

to the ignoring of gender and other social inequalities #social
sorting #disability #biopower
Saltes 13
[Natasha Saltes; Abnormal Bodies on the Borders of Inclusion: Biopolitics and the
paradox of Disability Surveillance, Surveillance & Society, 2013, 65-66]
The pervasiveness of surveillance and its inherent discriminatory characteristic of
identifying and classifying certain individuals and groups as risky have given rise to the
notion of surveillance as social sorting. According to Lyon, surveillance as social sorting centres
on the social and economic categories and the computer codes by which personal data is
organized with a view to influencing and managing people and populations (2003: 2). It is the
process of predicting and preventing risk by classifying subgroups of society
deemed to pose a threat (Lyon 2003). Lyon attributes social sorting and digital discrimination to the
prevalent use of networked technology (2003: 8) and the rising attention paid to the body itself as a source of
surveillance data (2007: 55). The concept of social sorting and the emphasis on the body
as a source of data is especially relevant in the context of disability surveillance in that
the collection and documentation of information about the body reduces people with
impairments to impaired bodies and further still to impaired data. The data double therefore can become disabled in much
the same way as the individual insofar as it is not perceived, viewed, monitored and treated equally as non-impaired data doubles. The data double itself

The
implication of this is that the abnormality of the body is extended to the digital and
what serves to mark, label and stigmatize the body in the physical environment now
has the ability to mark, label and stigmatize the body digitally. Referring to electronic patient records (EPR) as an
may include biometric details or other forms and fragments of information that allude to or signify the embodiment of impairment.

example of the digitalization of the body, van der Ploeg considers the data they contain to be extended forms of unique identifiers due to the personal

The increased use of biometric identifiers in EPRs (as well

as in other contexts such as immigration) are superimposing traditional forms of identifiers such as name and
birth date as they are considered a more reliable representation of identity (van der Ploeg 2003). In
information they contain, including biometric data (2003: 62).

challenging the gendered neutrality of surveillance, Monahan argues that representations of data render a disembodied and highly abstract depiction of

surveillance systems artificially abstract

bodies, identities and interactions from social contexts in ways that both obscure
and aggravate gender and other social inequalities (2009: 286). He considers the embodied consequences that
the world by removing social context (2009: 286). Monahan contends that

arise from surveillance practices that operate on a level of abstraction (2009: 286). Building from Monahans argument on the socially de-contextualized
collection of data and applying it to disability surveillance provides a useful means with which to contextualize the consequences of conducting disability
surveillance within a biomedical perspective. A useful starting point is to consider the ways in which certain surveillance strategies such as biometric
technologies separate the social from the body. Biometric technologies operate by capturing physiological markers of bodies including fingerprints, face or
voice recognition, iris and handwriting authentication. The data produced by the body is then used to verify identity (Maddern and Stewart 2010).

biometric systems do not only verify identity, but they also play a significant
role in assigning identities. This is worth considering in light of the governments reliance on biometric data, which stems from the
However,

belief that biometric technology is infallible (Maddern and Stewart 2010).

Ext: racism impact

Biometric technologies are calibrated to the norms and
parameters of white bodies, thereby physically and rhetorically
otherizing those outside of whiteness.
Pugliese 7
[Joseph Pugliese; Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the Racialized Zero
Degree of Nonrepresentation, boundary 2, Summer 2007, 114-116]
This racialized zero degree of nonrepresentation must not be viewed in terms of
some mystifying technological anomaly or glitch. On the contrary, I would argue that particular
biometric technologies are infrastructur- ally calibrated to whiteness that is,
whiteness is configured as the univer- sal gauge that determines the
technical settings and parameters for the visual imaging and capture of a
subject. I will draw on the term calibration as it effectively encapsulates the three key levels of signification that inscribe the
operation of whiteness in biometric technologies. On one level, to calibrate a technology is to
graduate a gauge of any kind with allowance for its irregularities .__ As universal gauge,
whiteness is the absolute stan- dard within certain biometric technologies, targeting
the capture of white subjects but also allowing for a degree of white variations in
skin tone and colorthat is, allowing for a certain range of irregularities that may
fall outside this standard. These irregularities, however, are circumscribed within a clearly
delineated zone of whiteness and its various chromatic variations. Outside of this diffuse, gray-scale zone of
whiteness reside non- white subjects who are literally beyond the pale. As I have demonstrated, this degree of
allowance literally cuts off when biometric imaging technolo- gies are confronted by
subjects whose biometric detailsfor example, their dark skin colorare so irregular as to fall
outside the technical parame- ters set for image capture . Here the term irregular
graphically illustrates the disciplinary power of the white gauge in determining the
normative standards of imaging technologies. In such instances, nonwhite subjects, in literally failing to
appear before the biometric system despite their physical presentation, are dispatched to the outer limits of
nonappearance, to the zero degree of nonrepresentation . Calibration perfectly resonates with this
imaging economy in that it is a term that effectively belongs to the lexical set of camera settings: a camera operator has a
repertoire of calibrations at hand when filming; these calibrations operate at the level of lighting, aper- ture, and lens focus. On

the process of calibrating a technology means not only to establish a set

of graduations or markings but also to generate a classification .__ The calibration
to whiteness of biometric[s] systems, in other words, not only determines the universal gauge of these imaging
technologies, it also implicitly reproduces the legendary racial system of classification and
hierarchy that places whiteness at the apex followed , in a graduating scale, by Asians and
blacks.__ Within Western economies of visual representation, this racial hierarchy has systemically
guaranteed the nonrepresentation of nonwhites within a wide spectrum of visual media, including
film and television. Finally, the semantic core of calibration is derived from the term caliber.
Caliber refers to a degree of social standing or importance, quality, rank; stamp,
degree of merit or importance.__ In the context of the calibra- tion to whiteness of biometric technologies, the
term caliber underscores questions of power and hierarchy that inflect the physical
settings of imag- ing technologies, as whiteness assumes the gauge of merit or
importance that determines who may or may not be visually captured within the
calibrated zone of representation. I have spent some time here unpacking the infrastructural calibration to
another level,

whiteness in facial-scan technologies in order to interrogate ongoing, doctrinal assertions in the scientific literature that biometric
technologies are to be celebrated because of their objectivity and impartiality in process- ing racial and ethnic subjects. For

example, Woodward et al. argue, The technological impartiality of facial recognition . . . offers a sig- nificant benefit for society.
While humans are adept at recognizing facial features, we also have prejudices and preconceptions. The controversy surrounding
racial profiling is a leading example. Facial recognition systems do not focus on a persons skin color, hairstyle, or manner of dress,
and they do not rely on racial stereotypes. On the contrary, a typical system uses objectively measurable facial fea- tures, such as
the distances and angles between geometric points on the face, to recognize a specific individual. With biometrics, human
recognition can become relatively more human-free therefore free from many human flaws. The technological impartiality of
facial recognition can be main- tained only by continuing to invisibilize the infrastructural calibration to whiteness that inscribes

this calibration to whiteness

constitutes simply another example of racial prejudice and preconception in that it
biometri- cally discriminates between white and nonwhite subjects. The untenability
of arguing that facial recognition systems do not focus on a persons skin color is
graphically exemplified when one considers that it is precisely a nonwhite subjects
skin colorspecifically, the degree of epidermal and chromatic saturation to blacknessthat will determine
whether he or she will be situated outside the operating parameters of a biometric
systems image-acquisition zone (of whiteness), despite its inbuilt allowance for chromatic
irregularities. The consequent invocation of objectively mea- surable facial
features and the distances and angles between geometric points on the face, put forth by Woodward et al. in order to prove
their argument for technological impartiality, clearly resonates with the lan- guage of such discredited
nineteenth-century racist scientific disciplines as anthropometry , craniology, phrenology,
and so on (as racializing and racist disciplines all predicated on the so-called
objectivity of geometry in the measurement and classification of human bodies ). In the
specific facial-scan systems. Contra Woodward et al., I would argue that

discourses of the sciences, whenever the specter of race is evoked, inevitably the discourse of mathematics, specifically of
geometry, is mobilized in order magically to transcend the prejudices and preconceptions of the observer that are in danger of
contaminating their object of inquiry. Through this sleight of hand, the human elements that labor to construct the racialized
software of biometric systems are effectively effaced, leaving a human-free geometry to carry out its impartial scanning of
subjects.

Nonwhite bodies are not recognized or represented by

biometric technologies. This nonrepresentattion ensures racial
homogeneity and the denial of knowledge and power.
Pugliese 7
[Joseph Pugliese; Biometrics, Infrastructural Whiteness, and the Racialized Zero
Degree of Nonrepresentation, boundary 2, Summer 2007, 121-124]
nonwhite subjects may stand in front of a facial-scan system and
simply not be found (Biometrics, 66) situates these individuals within a nonlocus (they are no
place, even as they occupy a particular spatiotemporal location) constituted,
digitally, by a zero degree of nonrepresentation. This zero degree of nonrepresentation operates at
both literal and metaphorical levels. Literally, despite the corporeal presence of a subject, there
appears to be no subject as far as the facial-scan system is concerned;
metaphorically, the nonwhite subject is reduced, within the binary logic of biometric
algorithms, to a negative: in pixel values, black- ness is, predictably, equivalent to the negative
degree of zero, where whiteness is inscribed with the positive value of one (Pixels with
value one and zero are called white and black respectively__). Viewed in this context, nonwhite subjects are
marked by a failure of the very animating logic of the visual image, as they fail to
possess, in Barthesian terms, any indexicality or evidential force;__ rather, they do not even
appear in their appearance before the facial-scan device, and therefore
they are neither present nor can they be represented. And I am aware that I am deploying
The fact that certain

here, in the context of digital imaging technolo- gies, a seemingly anachronistic term in drawing upon indexicalityas a term
exclusively used to describe predigital, analog imaging technologies (for example, analog photography traces the light that
emanates from an object onto a chemically treated film, generating an analogous or indexical presentation). Yet, I would argue that

despite the fact that digital imaging constructs images out of numerical codes that

may have no indexical or causal relation to the photographed object, the very logic
of biometric tech- nologies designed to identify or verify subjects is still predicated , in
theory if not software practice, on establishing a type of analogous or indexical, and thus
evidentiary, relation between subjects who are scanned and their stored templates .
This racialized FTE inflects not only established biometric technolo- gies such as finger- and facial-scan systems but emergent
biometrics such as the iris scan. Iris-scan systems are designed to create templates based on the imaging of a subjects iris. Yet, as
Nanavati et al. explain, Locating

the iris-pupil border can be challenging for users with very

dark eyes, as there may be very little difference in color as rendered in the technologys 8-bit grayscale imaging (Biometrics,
80). I would argue that there is encoded in the phrase users with very dark eyes a
racialized group of nonwhite subjects . This is made evident when this phrase is juxtaposed against scientific
literature dedicated to isolating, within the domain of for- ensic pathology, for example, distinct racial
characteristics for the sake of body identification: The eye colour is useful in the
Caucasian race (negroid and mongoloid races virtually all have brown irises ).__ The
problem that some subjects irises may have very little difference in color to help
with the task of differentiation resounds with all the force of that Caucacentric clich that laments that black and Asian faces all look
alike, as they seem to possess very little congenital markers of difference .

Once again, the old colonial

problem of racial homogeneity, and the seeming uniformity in the colour of hair,
eyes, and complexion of the Indian races (SI, 71), is actively at work here. Nanavati et al. proceed to
elaborate on one of the potential limi- tations of iris-scan technologies: the ability to locate distinctive features in very dark irises.
Iris-scan technology is based on 8-bit grayscale image capture, which allows for 256 shades of gray; features from very dark irises
may be clustered at one end of the spectrum (Biometrics, 37). This one end of the spectrum is analogous to what Thandeka, in

Transposed to the context of

biometric technologies, the nonwhite zone is constituted by a racialized
color spectrum that falls directly outside a digital grayscale image-capture
system calibrated to whiteness. Within the parameters of this system, very dark irises literally fall beyond
the grayscale pale. What becomes apparent when discussing the ongoing racialized infrastructural
dimensions of these technologies is the manner in which they so clearly reproduce
the binarized racial zones of the larger Cauca- centric culture . I have already drawn attention to
another context altogether, aptly terms the non-white zone._0

the ontological/epistemo- logical racial split, and their attendant economies of knowledge/labor, that these new digital technologies
reproduce. I want to elaborate on this split by resignifying Thandekas concept of the nonwhite zone in the context of biometric

Biometric technologies such as the finger scan, facial scan, and iris scan are to be found
throughout institutions and businesses primarily con- cerned with securing physical
and/or symbolic access to important sites and/or information . As such, biometric
technologies have the power to de- termine who may or may not enter and access
critical sites of knowledge/ power. The calibration to whiteness that inscribes
the infrastructure of some of these biometric technologies functions,
when situated in this context, to reproduce the type of stratified physical
and symbolic zones of racialized exclusion that continue to pervade such
multiethnic, multiracial nations as the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In the context of
everyday life, this digital segregation divides into the three fundamental categories that
constitute the practical application of biometric systemsit can preclude a subject
in terms of gaining logical access to data or information, physical access to
tangible materials or controlled areas, as well as identifying or verifying the
identity of an individual from a database or token (Biometrics, 144). The racialized practices of segregation that I have been discussing dovetail perfectly with what David Lyon, in his analysis of surveillance
post-9/11, terms digital discrimi- nation, which consists of the ways in which the flows of personal
data abstracted informationare sifted and channelled in the process of risk
assessment, to privilege some and disadvantage others, to accept some as
legitimately present and reject others, and this is increasingly done in advance of any
offence. It is precisely in this context of hypersurveillance of targeted racial- ized
technologies.

subjects that I would argue against nave celebrations of the type of failure of
biometric representation that I have addressed. At a recent con- ference, for instance, after the delivery of a version of
this essay, a number of responses from the audience argued that it was a good thing that cer- tain subjects seemingly escaped the
imaging capabilities of some biometric technologies. Biometric noncapture of a subjects image was viewed as a type of positive
loophole or escape clause from contemporary systems of identification and surveillance. As I have attempted to demonstrate, this
view entirely disregards the critical question of equity of access within civic spaces/institutions and the manner in which FTE
systemically precludes particular racialized subjects from accessing both physical sites and knowl- edge/power. Moreover, I term

this celebration of failure of representation [is] as nave precisely because it is

predicated on a liberal-humanist under- standing of contemporary systems of
surveillance, where the question as to whether one gets visually imaged or not
remains merely a question of choice. I would argue, on the contrary, that visual
surveillance, in the con- text of omnipresent closed-circuit television, automated
teller machines, and other related technologies, is always already at work.

Ext: Harms to Trans Bodies

Biometrics seeks to calcify identity, forcing it into a static
position that doesnt allow it be fluid between time and points
of being.
Currah & Mulqueen 11
[Paisley Currah and Tara Mulqueen; Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and
Transgender Bodies at the Airport, 12-15]
If the current securitization of identity at the U.S, airport is effectively organized
around ensuring who passengers are not, biometrics holds out the promise that a
passengers identity can be affirmatively established and so makes the link between
identity and identification secure. Biometric technologies involve capturing unique
information about a particular individuals body or behaviorfingerprints, gait
signatures, iris patterns, facial structure, voice patterns, DNA, for instanceand
digitizing that information, storing it, and retrieving it to compare against the
information extracted on the spot from the body of the individual presenting herself
for identity verification. As the missing link between the immateriality of
information flows and networks, and the materiality of individual embodied
existence, van der Ploeg writes, these technologies informatize the body by
transforming it into a machine readable identifier (2009: 86-87; see also Magnet
2011; Puar 2007: 175). In the quest for perfect information, then, policymakers
imagine that the body itself will not just provide, but actually be the perfect piece of
information. Of the possible epistemological sources of human identitywhat one is
(a body), what one says about oneself (a narrative), what one does (a performance),
and what one has in hand (a token)it is the is-ness of the body that reigns
supreme in the quest for perfect information (Ajana 2010). Documents may be
fraudulent, individuals cannot be trusted to vouch for themselves or to maintain a
consistent presentation of self, but the body, it is assumed, cannot be forged and
does not lie. Most significantly, while the body might age, succumb to disease and
injury, its core elements are thought to be stable over time. What verifies legal
identity, or reidentification in the lexicon of philosopher Marya Schechtman, is the
sameness of body between one time and another (1990: 71).

Biometrics falsely assumes gender as a permanent identifying

attribute of the body which disregards the unique of trans
identity
Currah & Mulqueen 11
[Paisley Currah and Tara Mulqueen; Securitizing Gender: Identity, Biometrics, and
Transgender Bodies at the Airport, 12-15]
At the time of writing, the TSA has not yet installed biometric technologies for routine passenger identity
verification. But, according to a joint press release by the Department of Homeland Security, which houses the TSA,
and the Department of State, the next generation of international travel documentse-passports that contain a
contactless chip to which biometric and biographic information is writtenwill further strengthen international
border security by ensuring that both the document is authentic and that the person carrying an e-passport is the

person to whom the document was issued (Department of Homeland Security 2006). Plans are afoot to offer
biometrics for flight crews and airport personnel, and for frequent travelers as well. However, there is one piece of
biometric data, we suggest, already in use at the airport: gender. In an examination of debates about the criteria for
gender reclassification on New York City birth certificates, Currah and Moore have shown how gender operates as a
biometric identifier in the eyes of vital statistics officials (2009: 114, 124).

While ones classifi- cation as

M or F on identity documents is not a unique identifier , as most pieces of biometric data are
understood to be, the assumption that the classification of M or F is a permanent feature
of the body underlies the rationale for its use in identity verification. Identity is not
simply a matter of who one is but also what one is : the question who is this person? leaches
constantly into the question what kind of person is this? (Caplan and Torpey 2001: 3). As an apparently
permanent attri- bute of the body,

ones gender classification is shared with too many others

to be used to verifty who one is, but it can help , it is
assumed, to determine who one is not . That gender is an essential piece of information to collect is made
(about half the population normally)

clear in the TSAs rationale for including it in the Secure Flight program. When the Department of Homeland
Security asked for public comments on the proposed program in 2008, one person or organi- zation suggested that
the TSA eliminate the gender requirement . . . and instead require passengers to submit information regarding
their ethnicity, race, or national origin. TSA officials responded by pointing out that many names are not gender
neutral. Additionally, names not derived from the Latin alphabet, when translated into English, do not generally
denote gender. Providing information on gender will reduce the number of false positive watch list matches,
because the informa- tion will distinguish persons who have the same or similar name (Department of Homeland
Security 2008: 64034). While the individual who submitted the comment certainly might have meant that gender
need not be a metric of identity at all and it is odd and somewhat suspect that this individual or organiza- tion
saw race or ethnicity as a better piece of datathe TSA apparently did not ever consider leaving a passengers
gender classification out. As officials made clear in the rationale above, that M or F needed to be included in the
identification details was never in doubt: its response focused on how that piece of information would best be
ascertained indirectly through associations with names or directly through requir- ing disclosure. But the Secure
Flight program does not just use the M or F on the identity document to screen passengers against the no-fly lists
and to eliminate false positives. If this were all that happens, gender would not be deployed as biometric data, as
unchanging information from the body. It would, instead, share the same epistemological status as ones name and
date of birth, the other pieces of lexical information gath- ered: provisionally useful but ultimately unattachable to
an individual body, resting instead on a giddy spiral of other identity documents. In fact, TSA agents do use
gender as a fixed piece of biometric information about an individual, one that can be checked against the
passenger in front of them. That is, the security apparatus does n ot just require the M or F on the document to be

the TSA agent looks at the M or F

on the passengers identity document, looks at the passenger, and then decides if
the M or F corresponds to the passenger. Again, as biometric information, ones gender classification
compared with information in govern- ment watch lists; at the airport,

cannot be used to verify iden- tity, to allow an agent to say with certainty who one is. But it can and is used to make

In the case of some transgender people at the airport,

sometimes who the passenger is not is: herself .
a decision about who a passenger is not.

The deployment of gender through security mechanisms

constitutes the securitization of gender that seeks to stabilize
and objectify the identities of transgender people.
Currah and Mulqueen, 11
[Paisley Currah is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York, and Tara Mulqueen is from Birkbeck,
University of London, Law Department, Graduate Student, "Securitizing gender:
Identity, biometrics, and transgender bodies at the airport," Social Research, 2011,
17-21.]
What complicates the passage of a transgender individual through airport security is that her identity is not obvious in the way it is
expected to be by the TSA. A United Nations human rights special rapporteur pointed out that counterterrorism

measures that involve increased travel document security, such as stricter procedures for
issuing, changing and verifying identity documents, risk unduly penalizing

transgender persons whose personal appearance and data are subject to

change (United Nations 2009: 19). Yet, the transgender experience at the airport is more than
just an exception. The biometric use of gender should not be seen as just a policy
decision that, however unjustly, limits the freedom of a very small minority of individuals. It
also shows how particular notions of gender come to be stabilized through their incorporation into larger systems of organization
and control. In actuality,

how gender is defined in any particular context depends

not on what one might think

gender is, but on what it does in that context: there is no unitary notion of gender to which an individual simply
does or does not conform. It is not only personal appearance and data that change, but the very concept of gender. In shifting our

in what situations, where

and when does a particular thing happen, how does it happen, and so on? A
concept, as we see it, should express an event rather than an essence (1995: 14). As an event, the
concept of gender is bound to the particular context in which it occurs , whether it be the
airport, the doctors office, or the courtroom. Likewise, there is no coherent, singular state authority policing gender
analysis this way, we can, following Deleuze, ask a more productive set of questions:

definition, but different authorities: indeed, the state is just as messy and diffuses a concept as gender (Currah forthcoming). That
different state actors dispersed across the U.S. federal system of government have different requirements for changing gender
markers on identity documents illustrates this point. Sometimes genital surgery is required, sometimes not. But instead of fixating

we might see these arbitrary and conflicting rules for gender

reclassification in another light: not as perplexing contradictions but instead as
expressions of different state projects: one centered on recognition, the other on
distribution. The concept of assemblage, from Deleuze and Guattari, provides one way of
understanding how the contingent, chaotic, and epistemologically ungroundable
concept of gender can be deployed in security mechanisms as if it were a tangible
hard fact. Assemblages can be understood broadly as functional conglomerations
of elements in which each element gains meaning in its relation to the others in
the assemblage (Currier 2003: 203). The security assemblage at the airport is a
convergence of many parts, from technologies and security strategies to bodies and
social norms; it is, like the airport itself, a messy system of systems, embedded within numerous networks and social
on what gender really is, how it ought to be defined,

spheres (Salter 2008: xiii). The airport security assemblage prevents certain individuals and materials from reaching the plane,
while it also allows the maximum number of people to pass through unrestricted, so as not to inhibit the flow of commerce (U.S.

Gender can be seen as one of many flows or forces that come into the
assemblage: it is not invented in the airport assemblage, but reconfigured by it in
specific ways. As Haggerty and Ericson explain, flows exist prior to any assemblage, and are
fixed temporarily and spatially by the assemblage (2000: 608). In the context of an ever more
uncertain and unknowable world of possible risks, gender anomalies are cause for heightened
suspicion and scrutiny. Gender, in the security assemblage at the airport, is deployed as a
biometric, a piece of data tied directly to the body. This securitized variant of
gender, operationalized in the assemblage, is more than just a norm from which
transgender individuals constitute an exception. As Currier points out, a self-identical body (or object)
GAO 2010: 10).

cannot be identified prior to, or outside of, the field of encounters that articulate it within any specific assemblage; instead,

through the assemblage, something new or other is created (2003: 331). At the airport, the
something other for gender is what we are calling its securitization. The
securitization of gender is doubly useful in conceptually grasping what happens to
gender at the airport. Following Roses observations about the securitization of identity, we have used
securitization to describe how gender becomes an object of state (and
increasingly private and privatized) surveillance through the two TSA programs. In that sense, the
security in securitization reflects forms of control associated with sovereign power
barriers, bans, prohibitions, punishments, searches by uniformed personnel, interrogations. But identity in general and
gender in particular are also securitized in another sense as a form of risk management, as
techniques for governing the future (Valverde 2007: 163). Risk management is not only a central mechanism
of governmentality, but also of capital. In fact, it may be that the financial analogy is the most apt here. In finance, securitization
involves the bundling of disparate pieces of debt into financial instruments. And what is debt? Debts are obligations, promises to

Securitization is, as Randy Martin explains, the future made present

the disparate
identities/bodies/ documents that fall under the rubric of gender are provisionally
stabilized into objects that will hold steady over timea promise of identity as
future sameness. The TSA recommends that transgender people , especially transgender people
in transition, carry letters from their doctors. These letters generally affirm the genuineness of the
individuals attachment to the new gender, and, in doing so, become forms of security . Likewise, the evidence
required to change the gender classification on an identity documenttypically affidavits from physicians attest to the
permanence of the new gender in the future . Just as the securitization of debt attempts to turn promises
repay at some point in the future.

(2007:18). In the security systems assembled by the Transportation Security Administration,

about the future into tangible commodities in the present, the securitization of an individuals gender tries to render uncertainty
about the future more predictable. Foucault pointed out in a 1978 lecture that to manage contingency, the temporal, the
uncertain . . . have to be inserted within a given space (2007: 20). Security is comprised of spatial arrangements that create a

While identity as
being, as narrative, as process, is a temporal category, the body in our case the gendered
bodyis figured as spatial, something that can be known by the presence or the lack of
certain configurations of flesh. To pass through airport security without issue, an individuals gender
is securitized by attempting to turn the body into not such a source of information
but a promise about the present and the future. As individuals flow through the
systems of surveillance and control in the airport, transgender people with their
incongruous and unexpected histories, documents, and bodies often find themselves in the uncomfortable
interstices between spatial and temporal registers, between stasis and change,
between what one is and what one says or does .
milieu that can manage or lessen the impact of whatever unpredictable events the future holds.

Ext: Ableism impact

The use of biopolitics submits non-normative bodies to
surveillance and subjectification to the category of disabled.
This subjectification to categories is then used to not only
dehumanize but oppress these individuals
Nguyen 15
[XuanThuy Nguyen, Mount Saint Vincent University; Genealogies of Disability in
Global Governance: A Foucauldian Critique of Disability and Development, Foucault
Studies, June 2015, 76-77]
The implicit assumption on which the definition of disability in the terms of DALY relies, that is, the implicit assumption of DALY
according to which disability is an opposite of health, manifests what Campbell calls ableism.43 Ableism is an organising

As a conceptual tool, ableism transcends levels of

constructing norms through the structure, procedure, institutions, and
values of civil society. Located within complex genealogies of knowledge that emerge in
the modern context, ableism operates through concrete systems of knowledge. These
systems of knowledge operate in global institutions as ways of governing the
disabled population through the biopolitics of health . As a management technology in
neoliberal governance, DALY constructs the biomedical model of disability through the
government of the populations health that is constitutive of forms of power . DALY
modes of surveillance, exercised by the state and local institutions, reinforce technologies of
selfgoverning, as the individuals health status becomes a condition for the
measurement of his or her productivity in a neoliberal state. This process of
objectification and subjectification makes the individual subject to, and dependent
on, the institutional treatment of disability as a category of illness, objectified
through the existence of impairments. The government of impairment , through the
constructions of DALY, exemplifies how neoliberalism has governed the populations in the
global South by constructing disability as medical, psychiatric, and behavioral
problems; furthermore, DALY can be theorised as an instrument of global health that constructs
knowledge about individuals through its biomedical, technical, and economic
rationalities, that is, an instrument of global health whose forms of knowledge construct
ableism through a normative belief that impairment is inherently negative .
Thus, impairment should be ameliorated , and where possible, cured or eliminated.44 In fact, the
rationalities of the GBD and DALY, as shown, illuminate this ableist ideology. Within modern capitalist societies, a
deepseated assumption works to eliminate socalled disorder or imperfection . Thus,
the problems taken to be associated with impaired bodies must be
monitored and controlled through the institutional objectification of
diseases and illnesses. Impairmentwithin this global and local cartography of health surveillanceis
seen as an opposite to the ideal image of healthy population, and thus,
must be corrected or removed in order to maintain the stability of the capitalist social
order. The biomedical model in governing public health reflects the dominance of the
individual pathology, a rationality of development in the government of health
and disability in the development context.
framework rooted within a specific historical condition.
governance,

Biopower is a means of control. Biometrics is a biopolitical tool

for the norm to establish [clarify what is meant by
problematization of life].
Maguire 12
[Mark Maguire, Visiting Assistant Professorship in the Department of Anthropology,
Stanford University, Biopower, racialization and new security technology, Social
Identities, September 2012, 605]
Biopower, then, is does not offer an all-encompassing and totalizing concept but rather a powerful tool with
which to begin to investigate human life as a site of problematization, an object of
political thought and the subject of technological interventions (see Rabinow & Rose, 2006, p.
198). From this starting point, it is possible to get closer to understanding the how life was problematized in
the late nineteenth century by scientists and administrators and the ways in which
biometric security offered useful knowledge for the government of individuals and
populations. Biometric technologies offered identity verification at the level of the
individual in a world in which bodies and populations were configured by racial
thought. While overt racial theory has largely disappeared from contemporary
scientific projects in this field, a survey of biometrics in the contemporary moment
shows the remarkable persistence of racialization in security discourse today . From the
theatres of war in which biometrics are used to ensnare bad guys, to efforts to join up affective computing with surveillance
technology, the concept of biopower provides a starting point from which to
investigate the ways in which security assemblages are imbricated with processes
of racialization, and investigate the ways in which seemingly post-racial science is
also being folded into governmental calculations . Biopower involves statistics, profiles, a multitude of
useful knowledge, monitoring, surveillance, and the ordering of space; birth and death rates sciences concerned with biosocial
creatures and technologies that seek to identify individuals both have as their object life itself.

Biometrics is ableist and leads to exclusion by classifying

disabled bodies as abnormal, unhealthy, and carrying risk.
Saltes 13
[Natasha Saltes; Abnormal Bodies on the Borders of Inclusion: Biopolitics and the
paradox of Disability Surveillance, Surveillance & Society, 2013, 55-56]
Surveillance Studies has made significant contributions to discussions on human rights by documenting practices of
discrimination based on characteristics such as race (Poudrier 2003; Glover 2008, 2009; Browne 2012), gender
(Monahan 2009; Koskela 2012), and class (Gilliom 2001; Maki 2011). Yet surveillance practices associated with the
embodiment of impairment and the experience of disability have been largely ignored. This omission is perplexing
given the emphasis that Surveillance Studies places on the normalizing technologies of power used to monitor,
control and regulate behaviours and mobilities of certain bodies. The absence of a discussion on impairment and
disability in Surveillance Studies is also curious given the prominence accorded to the monitoring and regulation of
the body in relation to social norms in the work of Michel Foucault. While Foucault has examined the biopolitical
arrangements through which health and welfare of the population is advanced, there is a dearth of literature that

the research
of leading disability scholars have explored the myriad ways people with
impairments are subjected to social exclusion, inequality and oppression and how
these practices are framed within biomedical perspectives of disability (see, for example,
examines the connection between impairment, disability, surveillance and biopolitics. To date,
agenda

Oliver 1990a, 1990b; Rioux and Valentine 2006; Barnes and Mercer 2010; Oliver and Barnes 2012). Few have

the biomedical perspective of disability is used to

rationalize biopolitics and to sustain a surveillance regime that excludes people with
ventured toward an analysis of how

impairments. This paper seeks to address this gap by introducing the concept of disability surveillance.
Building from a widely accepted definition of surveillance proposed by Lyon (2007), I define disability
surveillance as the practice of collecting, documenting, monitoring and classifying
personal data that pertains to the embodied characteristics and attributes of
impairment. In order to avoid conceptualizing disability surveillance in purely disempowering terms, my aim is
to highlight the ways in which surveillant practices oscillate between biopolitical practices of
social control that exclude people with impairments in order to prevent perceived
economic risk and practices of counting and classifying people with impairments in
order to promote rights. I argue that this paradox stems from contradictory and
inconsistent definitions of disability used by various sectors of the Canadian
government. When disability surveillance is carried out in ways that pathologize and
exclude people with impairments in order to limit access to resources and/or
citizenship, disability tends to be defined in terms of a functional limitation and
people with impairments are seen as those with non-normative bodies that pose a
risk. Disability surveillance that operates on perceived notions of risk are carried
out under biopolitical rationalizations that aim to promote the health and prosperity
of the population through social sorting processes that involve identifying and
categorizing abnormality through the collection of medical data. In identifying the
operation of biopolitics in Canadian immigration policy, I look specifically at s. 38(c) of the Immigration and Refugee
Protection Act, commonly referred to as the excessive demand clause, as an exclusionary mechanism of power
that denies immigration applicants with certain health conditions and impairment on the presumption that they

biometric
technology at the border contributes to the experience of disability by assigning the
identity of abnormal to people with impairments who do not conform to the
systems ableist design.
would impose undue costs on health and social services. I also look at the ways in which

Disability is constructed as the antithesis of the normalized

body.
Saltes 13
[Natasha Saltes; Abnormal Bodies on the Borders of Inclusion: Biopolitics and the
paradox of Disability Surveillance, Surveillance & Society, 2013, 56-58]
The first task in providing a discussion of disability surveillance is to provide a definition of disability. In recognizing
that disability has contested and nuanced meanings (c.f. Finkelstein 1980, Oliver 1990a, 1990b; Shakespeare and

offer a definition of
disability that takes multiple perspectives into account and propose that disability is
an experience that emerges from the intersection of physical, sensory, and/or
cognitive difference or impairment with social interaction and processes that result
in exclusion, discrimination, disadvantage, marginalization, segregation, or
oppression. As a relational experience, disability is ontologically, spatially, temporally,
materially, discursively, culturally, socially, politically and economically contingent
(c.f. Kitchin 1998: 343 and Thomas 2002: 47). It is prudent to mention that while my
understanding of disability does not deny the embodied experience of difference
and impairment or the role the body plays in the experience of disability I do not
define disability in terms of a functional limitation . This is important to note given that disability
Watson 2001; Tregaskis 2002; Thomas 2002, 2004; Reeve 2002; Galis 2011), I

scholars continue to disagree on the extent to which the body and impairment should be considered in defining
disability. For the scope of this paper, my intention is not to provide an overview of these competing views, but

rather illustrate how disability

came to be understood within a normative paradigm as an

abnormality and the implications this has for people with impairments . Debates
surrounding definitions of disability have raised questions as to appropriate language and terms. The term people
with disabilities is considered people first language and is widely used in an effort to emphasize the individual
rather than the disability. However, some disability scholars reject this term. Barnes and Mercer (2010) prefer to
use disabled people to distinguish impairment, as a medically classified biophysiological condition, from
disability, which denotes the social disadvantage experienced by people with accredited impairment (11). Yet, for
some, this term is also problematic. To identify as a disabled person is to identify as a member of an oppressed
group (Lawson 2001). Shakespeare and Watson point out that some people with impairments do not identify [A]s
disabled, either in terms of the medical model or social model. They downplay the significance of their impairments,
and seek access to a mainstream identity. They do not have a political identity because they do not see themselves
as part of the disability movement either. (2001: 20) In an effort to avoid conflating disability with impairment
and in recognizing the complexity surrounding identity politics, I use the term people with impairments to refer to
individuals with body difference or body variation that result in functional limitations or are perceived by others to

Although I define disability as a relational experience to

describe the intersection of the body with the social, and not to refer to functional
limitation, I use the term disability surveillance, rather than impairment
surveillance, to emphasize the paradoxical outcomes and purposes wherein some
surveillant practices directed toward people with impairments produce the
experience of disability while other surveillant practices are carried out in an
attempt to prevent the experience of disability . The emergence of a positivist understanding of
result in functional limitations.

ontological normality can be traced back to the nineteenth century and attributed to the work of two key
statisticians. In the 1830s, Adolphe Quetelet extended the law of error principle to the body by proposing the
concept of the average man. The implication of Quetelets work was profound in that it provided the discursive
and statistical backdrop from which the concept of the norm emerged. The statistical process of relating
individuals to others can perhaps best be illustrated through the principle of the normal distribution. According to
the normal distribution principle, the majority of the population should fall below the arch of the standard bellshaped curve (Davis 2006: 6). Individuals with attributes that diverge from the arch are therefore considered
abnormal. However, in recognizing that not all traits that deviate from the arch are undesirable and that some are
actually preferable, Sir Francis Galton modified the bell curve in such a way that it would reflect a ranking of

idea of the body as that

which can be compared, measured and improved spurred the widely held notion
that there is a normal way of being. The genesis of normal was further reinforced
by the rise of capitalism marked by industrialization and urbanization and a shifting
mode of production. In an economy organized around factory work that required
able bodies, disability came to be understood as a functional limitation defined in
terms of a deficit or defect and understood through comparative measures as an
abnormality that presents a burden to society (Finkelstein 1980; Thomas 2002; Oliver and Barnes
2012). The social response was that of segregation through institutional arrangements
and medicalization geared toward treatment and rehabilitation (Finkelstein 1980; Thomas
2002; Oliver and Barnes 2012). In his critique of the medicalization of disability, Oliver (1990a) argues that [t]he
whole medical and rehabilitation enterprise is founded upon an ideology of
normality and this has far reaching implications for treatment. Its aim is to restore
the disabled person to normality, whatever that may mean (under The Medicalisation of
Disability). By the twentieth century, the biomedical perspective of disability gained
widespread acceptance and while it has since garnered notoriety by disability rights
advocates and proponents of the social model, it continues to be the dominant
approach with which disability is defined and understood by various branches of
government and institutions.
desirability (Davis 2006). Following the work produced by Quetelet and Galton, the

Ext: Solvency
[racism impact specific] Biometrics leads to racism and codifies
the biopolitical project academic discussion is key
Rabinow and Rose 3 [(Paul Rabinow, Department of Anthropology, UC
Berkeley; and Nikolas Rose, Department of Sociology, London School of
Economics and Political Science) THOUGHTS ON THE CONCEPT OF
BIOPOWER TODAY]
At the turn of the new century, however, race is once again re-entering the domain
of biological truth. At a certain moment, when it became clear that humans shared
over 98 percent of their genome with chimpanzees, and that inter-group variations
in DNA sequences were greater than intra-group variations, it appeared that
genomics itself would mark the terminal point of biological racism (perhaps even
species-ism). But this humanitarian dream proved to be short-lived. A new
molecular deployment of race has emerged seemingly almost inevitably out of
genomic thinking. Critics denounced the model of a single genome that
underpinned the Human Genome Project, fearing that it would establish a white
male norm. The first move here was cast as ethical: as the initial proposer of this
work, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza put it ito explore the full range of genome diversity within
the human familyi and ito help combat the widespread popular fear and ignorance
of human genetics and O make a significant contribution to the elimination of
racismi (Micharek 2000: 5-6). Despite the critics, this effort to ensure the
recognition of diversity in the framing of scientific truth as an essential dimension of
genomic knowledge was later adopted by the Human Genome Project (HUGO) and
funded by the European Community (from 1992) and later the United States Federal
government National Institute for Health