No Photography Allowed: A Sensorial Analysis of Violent Performative Acts in the Operation Streamline Courtroom

• In Event: Genealogies of Terror: Revisiting Violent Narratives and Vestiges of Disposability

Abstract

United States' (im)migration policies enact violent performative acts that define certain (im)migrant bodies as criminal. Operation Streamline (OSL) (2005), is an "assembly-line mass prosecution" program created by the Department of Homeland Security (Lloyd et al., 2014). Implemented in 2008 by the U.S. Border Patrol Tucson Sector, OSL functions in part by using practices of spectacle such as shackling as symbolic assertions of power by the state (de Genova, 2013). This paper argue that the State’s prohibition of photography is a violent performative act of erasure. Through an examination of sensorial registers of the OSL courtroom.

Presenter

• Gloria Negrete-Lopez, The University of Arizona