Thank You for Participating in Security

Abstract

Airport security procedures enact a performative repertoire of security policies and procedures that govern airport security. Using my own body to register the affective modes of airport security, I engage participatory critical rhetoric as a method to assess airport security’s repertoire of rhetorical performances. Affect is a particularly valuable concept for understanding the ways travelers are conditioned to comply with Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) directives as they move through security checkpoints. The screening processes perform acts of security that stand in tension with the resistive politics they enable. In this essay, I argue that security and resistance are performative modes (security performative and resistance performative) enacted in TSA’s airport security checkpoints. These modes produce a secured airport and a defiant public. Bodies that TSA “secures” enact affective states of security (and anxiety).

Keywords

participatory critical rhetoric airport security transportation security administration security theater performance

In mid-November 2011, I arrived at the airport for my flight to New Orleans for the annual meeting of the National Communication Association. As I went through security, I attended to the security screening process, opting out of the whole body imager and requesting a pat-down. I had been studying airport security practices for a while, but I had yet to actually opt out of whole body scanners. There in Salt Lake City, doing in situ fieldwork, I changed my own security routine and opted out. The experience was invasive; I was touched uncomfortably over the whole of my person. In the back of my mind, I could not escape the sense that many anti-TSA (Transportation Security Administration) detractors consider opting out as resistance. After the screening, I took out a small tablet and wrote about my experience.

Airports leave me grappling with the fleeting encounters between bodies and airport security regimes. These encounters exist in what D. Taylor (2007) calls the repertoire, “embodied memory, performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing” (p. 20). Security procedures enact a performative repertoire of security policies and procedures that govern airport security. Using my own body to register the affective modes of airport security, I engage participatory critical rhetoric as a method to assess airport security’s repertoire of rhetorical performances. During my time in airports, I experienced routine trips through metal detectors, trips through whole body imagers, and enhanced pat-downs.¹

These airport screening processes perform acts of security that stand in tension with the resistive politics they enable. In this essay, I argue that security and resistance are performative modes (security performative and resistance performative) enacted in TSA’s airport security checkpoints. These modes produce a secured airport and a defiant public. Bodies that TSA “secures” enact affective states of security (and anxiety). To support this contention, I develop my argument in five sections: First, I acknowledge airport security as performance. Second, I draw together work in participatory critical rhetoric and critical security studies to locate this essay’s methodological approach to studying airport security. Third, I define affect, security performative, and resistance performative as tools to address performances of airport security. Fourth, I turn to my own passage through airport spaces to consider security and resistance in airports. Finally, I consider the implications of my use of participatory critical rhetoric in the study of airport security.

Performing Airport Security

I read airport security as an accomplishment of communication, resulting from everyday cultural performances. Rather than seeing everyday life as predetermined, performances in airports are contingent and open to disruption. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contend that things can always be otherwise, “one’s potential becoming . . . [depends on] the extent that one deviates from the model” (p. 126). In his work on performance, Conquergood (1992) outlines three terms that reinforce a similar contingency: “This critical genealogy can be traced from performance as mimesis to poesis to kinesis, performance as imitation, construction, [and] dynamism” (pp. 83-84). Here, mimesis refers to performance as “faking, not making,” poesis refers to “making not faking,” and kinesis refers to “breaking and remaking” (pp. 83-84). In acknowledging poesis and kinesis, performances and communication exert material force in the making and breaking of society.² With attention to poesis and kinesis, this essay contends that resistive action by airport travelers produces material accomplishments in the world. This resistance can be fleeting (sneaking seven ounces of toothpaste on a plane) or durable (resisting TSA’s gender norming of trans bodies, leading to the agency’s cessation of calling trans passengers anomalies; Brydum, 2015).

This essay draws heavily on concepts from performance studies. Entwining rhetoric and performance is a long-standing critical approach. Recently, Pezzullo (2014) challenged rhetoric and performance “. . . to continue to pursue more nuanced and worthwhile perspectives about embodiment, proxemics, play, identity, ritual advocacy, and more” (pp. 97-98). Similarly, Calafell (2014) reminds us that theories of performance enhance the theory of rhetoric with “more complex approaches to embodiment, resistance, and cultural nuances . . .” (p. 115). These perspectives hail rhetorical critics to be more aware of issues of their own embodiment and of ephemeral rhetorics during the act of criticism. By contending that airport security is a set of performances, I address the affective nature of these rhetorical exercises. I turn to participatory critical rhetoric to provide the methodological grounding for this effort.

Participatory Critical Rhetoric and Critical Security Studies

In this section, I argue that participatory critical rhetoric (Middleton, Hess, Endres, & Senda-Cook, 2015) enables me to assess live, affective rhetorics in airports in ways occluded by other approaches to the study of rhetoric. Later in this section, I draw upon research in critical security studies as well as existing scholarship on airports. I argue that participatory critical rhetoric offers an important supplement to existing methods in critical security studies. First, I will explore the importance of studying ephemeral rhetorics.

D. Taylor (2007) differentiates between two sources of knowledge, “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)” (p. 19). The archive is the preferred epistemological source, whereas the repertoire “enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (D. Taylor, 2007, p. 20). Owen and Ehrenhaus (2014) note, “The ‘archive’ characterizes much of rhetorical analysis, whereas the ‘repertoire’ is a hallmark of performance studies” (p. 77). This essay blurs that bifurcation and focuses on the repertoire of airport security by utilizing participatory critical rhetoric. Middleton et al. (2015) define participatory critical rhetoric as “an umbrella term to describe a range of research practices in which rhetoricians engage . . . in extended forms of interaction, participation, and observation with the rhetorical communities they study” (p. xvi). I adopt this approach to bring a rhetorical lens to everyday enactments of airport security. Participatory critical rhetoric provides a method to assess the fleeting moments in which travelers make contact with the State.

Participatory critical rhetoric has rapidly become an important means for studying in situ rhetoric (see Hess, 2011; McHendry, Middleton, Endres, Senda-Cook, & O’Byrne, 2014; Middleton, 2014; Middleton et al., 2015; Middleton, Senda-Cook, & Endres, 2011; Senda-Cook, 2013). This approach is not the first from rhetoric to engage fieldwork; however, it provides a central theoretical thrust for how such a project might proceed.³ Middleton et al. (2011) offer three procedural steps: (a) Critics should account for and bring their commitments to the field, (b) critics should gather artifacts for criticism using a variety of rhetorical and qualitative data-gathering techniques, and (c) critics should engage in rhetorical critique of the artifacts they collected from the field to gain “insights from the interstices of lived experience” (p. 400). I engage participatory critical rhetoric to examine affective, performed, and rhetorical phenomena. By triangulating affect, performance, and rhetoric in situ, this essay deepens the potency of participatory critical rhetoric’s charge for rhetorical critics to locate in performance studies,

a critical set of tools for rhetorical critics to make the leap from stable, finished texts that represent past rhetorical actions to rhetorical practice that is unfolding in the presence of those critics and whose consequence may not be fully known . . . (Middleton et al., 2011, p. 23)

It is the performed liveliness of airport security that demanded participatory critical rhetoric.

This study developed in two parts: First, I initially entered the field to identify tensions present in TSA checkpoints. I participated in airport security at Salt Lake City International Airport (once) and New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International Airport (once). My stay in Salt Lake lasted almost one-and-a-half hours, a product of my own travel anxiety that forces me to get to security early. My time in New Orleans was much shorter; after a wait in line of nearly forty minutes, and after my screening, I needed to rush to a distant gate. These experiences identified a tension between security and resistance in airports. This tension warranted further exploration to help explain why this dynamic emerges and how it functions in airports. Subsequent fieldwork was conducted at Anchorage’s Ted Stevens International Airport (once), Chicago Midway International Airport (once), Chicago O’Hare International Airport (once), Denver International Airport (once), Las Vegas McCarran International Airport (once), Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport (once), Ogden-Hinckley Airport (once), Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (twice), Phoenix–Mesa Gateway Airport (once), and, most routinely, Salt Lake City International Airport (six times). After each encounter moving through TSA security checkpoints, I would sit down and write field notes about my experience. I would try to write wherever seating was immediately available. In some airports, like O’Hare, gates immediately across from security helped focus my observations and keep me near security. Other times, my schedule demanded that I board my flight almost immediately, and I had to write my notes mid-air. I would note my own affect, my physical experiences, and the rhetorics I encountered (durable signs and announcements, my own stammering, etc.). I would produce an average of seven hundred and fifty to one thousand words per trip through security. I focused my notes on public aspects of these spaces. In particular, I noted the flow of passengers through lines, the spaces where passengers could congregate before and after security, the physical objects (ropes, bins, mats, and, though rare, even holograms) that were available to interact with, the constraints scanning devices provided to bodies, and my own affect as I experienced these procedures. Later in this essay, I reproduce some of these notes as part of my analysis.

After emerging from the field, I returned to my notes to engage in productive criticism. Ivie (1995) argues, “productive criticism, itself a rhetorical performance, is deliberatively creative” (p. 2). This type of criticism “intentionally produces a strategic interpretation, or structure of meaning, that privileges selective interests . . . in specific circumstances” (p. 2). Productive criticism supports my aim to perform a social critique of airport security focused on the affective rhetoric of TSA by helping me locate TSA’s rhetorical appeals and structures that condition affect, making them sensible after I have left the field. Participatory critical rhetoric enables me to bring my own critical commitments to the field (a skepticism about State power in airports), engage in embodied research (experiencing security through fieldwork), and leave the field to continue the work of rhetorical criticism. This essay seeks to include participatory critical rhetoric in the domain of methods for critical security studies specifically and to consider how it interacts with qualitative research methods more broadly; thus, I next examine existing work on critical security studies.

Critical security studies are methodologically diverse but united by an overriding interest in issues of local, national, or global security. Two broad approaches to critical security studies have emerged. First, rhetorical scholars have worked from a variety of perspectives in security studies (Bean, 2009, 2010, 2013; Hasian, 2010; Mitchell, 2006; B. Taylor, 1996, 2002). These scholars utilize textual criticism and ethnographic scholarship (note the methodological diversity) as a means of entering security studies. Second, critical security studies has emerged as an umbrella area of scholarship outside of, and beyond, rhetorical and communication scholarship (Salter, 2008, 2013b; Salter & Mutlu, 2013). This scholarship uses critical qualitative methods to study security-related phenomena (Adey, 2007, 2010; Salter, 2007; Salter & Mutlu, 2013). This essay sits precariously beyond the research methods of any one of these existing approaches. On one hand, it exists within the rhetorical tradition the first group occupies. However, this essay neither engages in textual analysis (in the rhetorical tradition) nor ethnographic analysis. Middleton et al. (2015) note that participatory critical rhetoric owes an intellectual debt to ethnography but “also provides new avenues of exploration for ethnographers seeking to underscore the relationship between advocacy, identity, and performance” (p. 22). In that vein, this essay focuses on the relationships among performance, rhetoric, and affect. On the other hand, critical security studies, as codified by Salter and Mutlu (2013), neglect the rhetorical tradition in favor of other critical and qualitative methods. Textual analysis is depicted primarily as critical discourse analysis, and in situ analysis remains ethnographic or performance based. By using participatory critical rhetoric, the methodological umbrella of critical security studies is widened, the bifurcation between rhetorical and qualitative approaches is eroded, and the approaches are synthesized.

Specific analyses of airports show similar methodological stratifications. Research on airports includes postpositivist inquiry (Francis, Humphreys, & Fry, 2002; Gkritza, Niemeier, & Mannering, 2006; Leone & Liu, 2005, 2011), critical security studies (Adey, 2007, 2010; Frowd & Leite, 2013; Salter, 2013a), and communication and/or critical cultural studies (Amoore & Hall, 2009; Currah & Mulqueen, 2011; Hall, 2015; Magnet & Rodgers, 2012; McHendry, 2015; Redden, 2012). I engage in participatory critical rhetoric to demonstrate its utility for qualitative researchers by making the repertoire of airport security practices palpable and open to rhetorical inquiry. Airport security lines are infused with rhetorical exchanges (e.g., messages disseminated, interactions, and attempts at persuasion and identification), and it is important to consider those efforts using methods of rhetorical criticism. In short, although both critical and qualitative methods exist for doing critical security studies and some methods of rhetorical analysis exist as well, participatory critical rhetoric opens ephemeral security practices to study by rhetorical scholars—in particular by synthesizing the intellectual heritage of critical qualitative research (ethnography) and rhetorical inquiry (textual critique). This shift is integral for expanding the ways qualitative scholars and rhetoricians interested in the field can approach rhetorical phenomena. By using participatory critical rhetoric to study airport security, I engage rhetoric, performance, and affect enacted in the repertoire of the airport. In the next section, I define affect, which functions as a critical term for understanding TSA’s rhetorics.

Performances of Affect

Affect is integral to understanding TSA’s rhetorics. Seigworth and Gregg (2010) define affect as “synonymous with force or forces of encounter” (p. 2). Force is subtle; “affect more often transpires within and across the subtlest of shuttling intensities: all the miniscule or molecular events of the unnoticed” (p. 2). For Massumi (2002), “affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique” (pp. 27-28). In this case, affect is the capacity of airport security to prepare your body for search and deference to TSA via a variety of rhetorical strategies. Deleuze’s tautological notion of affect as the capacity to affect and be affected emphasizes that affect is a capacity to both act and to be acted upon. A substantial literature has developed on Deleuzian theories of affect.⁴ Probyn (2010) explains that, for Deleuze, affect is a system of bodily capacities and intensities in relation to other bodies. Here, a body need not be a human body; the non-human world of airports (scanners, barriers, bare floors, and glass enclosures) spur affect(s) as well. The affected and affecting body materially experiences airport security rhetoric through the sensations it produces, such as being touched by TSA personnel, experiencing cold linoleum on your feet after removing your shoes, and the anxiety of wanting to get the performance of security right to avoid further inspection.

Performances of airport (in)security secure the affective states of passengers who travel.⁵ By being scanned, having our identification checked, or submitting our luggage for X-rays, we become accustomed to security—and (dis)comforted by its presence. TSA’s security structures suggest their function as security, regardless of their effectiveness. del Rio (2012) argues, “Affect precedes, sets the conditions for, and outlasts a particular human expression of emotion” (p. 10). Emotionality is a particular expression or range of expressions conditioned by cultural stimuli. Affect precedes that conditioning, allowing emotionality to occur—in airports, emotionality would be a range of reactions to TSA, along with an affect that conditions you to feel and believe your flight is secure. Notice here how individual emotions (anxiety, stress, and fear) are enabled and constrained in the affective field generated by TSA. Their procedures make these expressions possible. For example, one can feel safe and secure or outraged and imposed upon by TSA procedures, but TSA’s affective structures still largely secure participation. For example, TSA personnel generate affects that induce deference to authority. Pressed blue shirts, patches, police-like badges, nylon barriers, and official signs prepare the body for State authority and its enactments of pre-existing rhetorical codes that require submitting to authority. These affective dimensions help accomplish security by the State. These affects condition the public to listen to TSA agents and to co-perform security procedures.

Passengers’ (and TSA agents’) bodies experience affects of airport security. Body and affect are connected. del Rio (2012) explains, “[t]hus, the performing body presents itself as a shock wave of affect, the expression-event that makes affect a visible and palpable materiality” (p. 10). Although the body expresses emotive capacities, affect is an actualization of the material conditions of airport security on the body. The experience of airport (in)security may produce different emotions; however, airport security functions in part to generate affective dimensions via ritualized security.⁶

Calling forth appropriate affects is a key element of TSA and passenger performances. Performing these affects as part of doing security is suggestive of a concept used by critics and the public to describe TSA security: “security theater.” Security theater is the use of “countermeasures [that] provide the feeling of security instead of the reality . . . They’re palliative at best” (Schneier, 2003, p. 38). Some instances that Schneier highlights include posting armed National Guard troops in airports (even though their guns lack bullets) or tamper-resistant packaging. In either case, they offer few actual security measures. Schneier does recognize, however, that security theater may provide some actual good because the appearance of security countermeasures reassures a public that something is being done.

Security theater enacts a pervasive and pejorative view of performance as mimesis—faking not making. Schneier’s (2003) definition insinuates that TSA makes travelers feel safe while ignoring effective security needs. However, security involves affect along with regulating what can be brought into airports. Stoler (2009) reminds us, “Statecraft [is] not opposed to the affective, but [is] about its mastery” (p. 71). Similarly, airport security is not opposed to the affective but is about its mastery. Two issues become apparent in the use of security theater as a critique of TSA. First, Schneier’s term is meant to differentiate effective measures of security from merely affective sensations of security. In the public lexicon, the term is often used to describe all of TSA’s activities, without regard to Schneier’s distinction. The term’s public usage lacks the bite Schneier gives it. Second, the notion of theatricality embedded in the term eases a false dichotomy made between effective and affective security. Affects of security are not mere theater. D. Taylor (2007) argues that there is a strong bias against theatricality because people want to get real. The affective states enacted through performances of airport security resist this quick dismissal of the theatrical dimensions of security. Security cannot be permanently achieved; security is accomplished in part by generating and regulating affect. Dismissing TSA security as mere theater too quickly denies the role individual affects play in performing airport securitization. To be clear, I am not arguing that we ought to welcome security precautions that have little material effect. However, I want to (re)map the discursive field that surrounds security theater with the concepts security performative and resistance performative. In doing so, I locate new ways of talking about the affects performatively generated by TSA’s rhetoric.

Security performative and resistance performative are ways of critiquing airport security as “thought in action.” Strine (1998) contends that performatives are “the historically situated interplay of performance’s contractual, provisional nature; its condition of social reflexivity and critique; and, its improvisational and transformational potential forms the energizing, destabilizing center of performance as a focus of study” (p. 313). In other words, performatives are performances that produce action in the world. Security performatives are poesis, demands that material changes come to pass in moments when bodies negotiate contact with the State. An example of a security performative is the demand to raise one’s arms in a whole body imager. This makes security material as the command realizes its force on a passenger’s body.

Resistance performatives are acts of kinesis intended to break and remake the flows of power in security checkpoints, even only momentarily. Resistance is both macro and micro in scale. In the everyday politics of airport security when passengers waste time, attention, and resources, they are engaging in resistance.⁷ In airports, the resistance performative is complex. One example is coordinated mass protests to refuse to use TSA whole body imagers. However, it can also include passengers’ desires disguised as compliance with TSA regulations, like my own fieldwork.

Resistance performatives can also bolster security performatives; resisting the use of whole body imagers and opting for a pat-down may still support the logic of TSA security. These performatives can overlap and are not mutually exclusive. However, the affective grain of resistance performatives work toward constructing and/or (re)constructing the space of airport security checkpoints, whereas security performatives work toward generating affects that support an (in)security apparatus. Security performatives and resistance performatives are consubstantial concepts that call into action one another at a moment of performance. Security performatives at TSA checkpoints are unstable, making resistance performatives possible. In the next section, I explore the affective rhetoric of TSA’s security procedures through the use of participatory critical rhetoric.

Tacit Admissions

TSA has moments of self-awareness that demonstrate its security performatives. A sign in Austin–Bergstrom International Airport reads “Thank You for Participating in Security” (Katiekills, 2011). This sign acknowledges TSA’s reliance on travelers’ participation in performances of airport security. At General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, an airport sign reads “Recombobulation Area.” This sign designates space for disoriented passengers to reassemble themselves. In effect, the sign admits that security requires passengers to come out of sorts in enacting scripts unique to airports. These archival artifacts are tacit reminders about the embodied and affective nature of airport security.

Each encounter with TSA has its own rhythms. My field notes speak to this variability. Also, my fieldwork only captures a small range of experiences possible in an airport due to my own privilege as passenger. Elderly passengers, disabled passengers, passengers with medical prosthetics, women, and transgendered passengers can all face increased scrutiny in their encounters with TSA. For example, in March 2012, a TSA agent spilled the contents of a passenger’s colostomy bag over them during screening (Baskas, 2011). In Texas, TSA agents exposed the breasts of an underage woman (Travis & MacFarlane, 2012). In addition, trans travelers face especially difficult conditions because TSA relies on government identification standards and scanning technology and pat-downs that use a sex-based, cisgendered framework. In short, TSA’s botching of screening because of poor training, mistakes, and other systemic problems in the screening process are significant issues. These errors, though egregious, are rare in official reports. About 0.001% of passengers filed official complaints in 2011 (Stoller, 2013). That low quantitative number, however, should not be used to dismiss the importance of such encounters or the larger systemic issues they represent with TSA. Even my own experiences demonstrate some of the struggles passengers encounter with TSA security procedures.

In the following pages, I offer selections from the fieldwork I conducted. These notes are what remain of those repertoires where TSA security was enacted. I have divided these pages into two columns. The right column contains fragments of field notes constructed for rhetorical critique. The smaller column on the left analyzes these rhetorical artifacts. The two work in concert to enact productive rhetorical criticism, the last step in doing participatory critical rhetoric. This format allows my experiences to intersect my critical eye. My experiences and my analysis tell two stories of being in airports at one and the same time.⁸

In early March 2010, I traveled from Salt Lake City to Phoenix and on to Anchorage and then back to Salt Lake City a few days later.

Given all the pressure security performatives place on our bodies, other passengers create social pressure to perform security efficiently or suffer their sighs and nudges. Redden (2012) describes these experiences as emotional taxes. Passengers are co-performers as we collectively enact the performances of the security checkpoint.
The speed of airport security stems resistance. My body was complying before I had thought about doing anything differently. The structures and affects propelled me forward. My concerns came after my compliance. In TSA queues, passengers hurry up and wait; once at the front of the line, compliance is obliged.

At the start of the security checkpoint I hand my ID to the employee who checks my documents. She looks behind her, noticing I can’t proceed yet. There is a small wait because the woman ahead of me has a baby, stroller, and car seat in addition to her own belongings. The TSA employee thanks me for not being impatient while waiting for the mother with child ahead of me. She even pantomimes the body motions of an impatient person—she slowly slides her hands down to her waist and then sighs loudly before chuckling. She hands my ID and boarding pass back to me and tells me to have a nice flight.
I proceed forward, rushing to get my belongings ready for the X-ray machine. My shoes come off, then my belt. I notice how grainy the floor is—the texture of the carpet is rough through my socks. My liquids need to be removed, as does my laptop computer. I feel rushed as the man behind me not too subtly nudges my belongings forward. These nonverbal cues help to remind me to do security faster. Meanwhile, the woman with child has yet to be scanned so I have nowhere to go.
In all the commotion and rush I forget to remove my hooded sweatshirt. The TSA agent stops me, my baggy sweatshirt seems to be a potential threat and he requests to search me by hand. His demeanor is professional and friendly, and even the scent of his fruit flavored gum seems to provide an atmosphere of ease. It is rather strange that the small scent of gum relaxes me, but it humanizes our interaction.
Nonetheless, I am experiencing dissonance. I know I have provided no cause for such a search yet I comply without a second thought. My body and my intellect are at odds with one another. These performances are part of my area of study, a so-called expertise, and yet I even thank the agent after he pats me down. Even as thoughts of doubt linger my body was finished with its compliance and the urgency to get through it was enough to stifle any questions.
The pat-down is satisfactory and I am reconnected with my belongings. Feeling rushed to clear this secure area as I hurry across the floor with my belongings, I glance back and notice the mother with her child has been selected for a secondary screening. She is being searched while balancing her infant child in her hands. Is she a threat? I will never know.

The movement of other passengers, barriers, and conveyor belts; the stress; and official directives all provide affective contours along which bodies move through the security performative. These procedures become intensified (affective) with the stress of crowds and time. In Phoenix, I left the sterile part of the airport so that I could return through a TSA checkpoint before my flight to Anchorage.

Security performatives are physically demanding—standing, waiting, and enduring the stress of the coming encounter can take its toll.
Consistently, I noticed that many TSA employees are surprised when I respond to their casual questions. They seem surprised when I am polite while opting out of scanners. That I lack the kind of negative experiences some report with TSA likely has everything to do with my own body politics—White, male, young, able-bodied.⁹

Unlike Salt Lake, this security line is unruly. TSA seems wholly unprepared for the number of passengers attempting to clear security. The line has spilled out into the waiting area and passengers seem frustrated. The man in front of me looks at his watch, then his ticket, and back to his watch—he is impatient.
A TSA officer is walking through the line and moving barricades to attempt to move the line into an orderly queue. Two passengers approach him and request to be moved to the front of their line because of their flight times. The agent refuses. The line moves slowly and I am getting more anxious, worried my flight may leave without me. I can feel the stress of wait times and security materialize in my body—my shoulders tense up and my back begins to ache.
I am overcome with a sense of dread as the line crawls forward. Seeming to respond to the swell in the line, additional agents open up another line and we seem to be moving much faster. My time comes and the woman who checks my ID is incredibly friendly. With a smile she asks, “How are you?” I respond by saying I am doing well and ask how her night is going. She looks surprised, as if most don’t bother to respond. After checking my ID and my boarding pass I continue on my way.
I enter the line that seems to have the fewest people, though it is painfully clear all three lines are beyond overburdened. I get my belongings on the table and even remember to remove my sweatshirt this time. There will be no need for a pat-down, as I think I have complied with all the proper regulations. My worry about time is foremost on my mind and I will, at this point, do almost anything to get to my gate without further hassle.

Fear of missing a flight helps to ensure compliance, ensuring that passengers get the performance right. This is an asset of the security performative.
There is a monumental amount of stress with no outlet built into airport checkpoints. This affective charge is a feature of the security performative.

There is an overwhelming sense that everybody is rushed, the person behind me keeps shoving their items into mine as I try to get my possessions back together. I am annoyed. A single line divides into three screening checkpoints, and then is recombined into a single area with no benches or places to put belongings except for the end of the security line. I cannot find any place to gather my things—the flow from line to line, from scanner to screener all seems to be disorienting. The stress and frustration makes me want to lash out at the person behind me who thinks shoving his stuff into mine will really make me want to go faster, to lash out at the person who designed this space, to lash out at the staffing decisions that created this mess to begin with—instead I sulk to my gate and discover that my flight is delayed and I sit for another thirty minutes before my six hour flight.

A few days later, after my conference in Anchorage, I am exhausted and in need of sleep. My skills as a field researcher feel dulled—too many panels and too few hours of sleep—but nonetheless, I arrive at security ready to collect more data.

Beyond agents, ultraviolet (UV) lights, nylon barriers, scanners, and walls are all key non-human elements that structure the security performative.

I am exhausted and admittedly slow as I proceed through the security checkpoint. I have no interest in dealing with this routine for the third time in as many days. The three hours of sleep I have gotten each night has dulled my perceptive abilities. Nonetheless, I do my best to focus. Aside from my own personal fatigue there is little stress at the checkpoint. I am somewhat surprised at how overstaffed the checkpoint appears. Three lines are open even though it appears only a handful of passengers are present.
TSA officers here lack the ease and pleasant attitude I encountered in Salt Lake City and Phoenix. It’s not that they are rude or unpleasant; they seem efficient but come off as cold. The officer holds my ID under a UV light to check for a watermark, the guard goes back twice. She furrows her brow, staring intently at my name. She almost seems distrustful—she takes her pen and follows along my name on the boarding pass ensuring every letter matches. She is

As part of the affect/emotion connection, I am always searching for a friendly TSA employee to reassure me—knowing full well that their reassurance has everything to do with the security performative.
The moment of flirtation between the woman and the agent underscores TSA detractors’ lingering fear of the sexualization at airport security.

thorough—and apparently now convinced I belong on the other side of the checkpoint she lets me proceed.
It takes me forever to get my shoes and belt off, to remove my jacket, take my laptop out of its case, and display my liquids in a quart size generic Kroger plastic bag. There is no rush, and since my flight does not leave for three more hours I am not compelled to hurry. A young TSA agent is helping push my belongings to the scanner. She seems much more easy-going than her colleagues. She smiles and seems to be the friendly face I could not find before.
The passenger behind me gets held up—her sweatshirt raises suspicion and a female TSA agent (the same one who helped me) comes over to pat her down. After she has been searched by hand, the male employee controlling the metal detector offers a flirtatious gaze in her direction, joking that she was searched because she was from Colorado. She smiles back and is polite but the advance seems to be one way. As we talk, the TSA agent goes back to monitoring the machine.
Relaxing at my gate, my encounters with TSA are not complete. TSA has begun patrolling my gate area. I am not sure what to make of their presence. They have moved from the constructed space of the security checkpoint. Their presence seems undisruptive and innocuous. Was this routine?

Anti-TSA detractors often focus on the sexualization at airport security. The flirtation I witnessed indicates the possibility of sexual politics in airport checkpoints. Pat-downs bring TSA agents in close proximity to passengers’ sexual organs. This contact is not a priori sexual. However, it can trigger affects (feelings, fears, traumas and memories) of sexually charged encounters.

An example of the fear of sexualization at TSA checkpoints comes from children’s rights advocates. They argue that TSA pat-downs on children use similar touching games pedophiles use. Tencer (2014) explains, “Children ‘don’t have the sophistication’ to distinguish between a pat-down carried out by an airport security officer and an assault by a sexual predator” (para. 4). These fears have been sustained by growing concern that TSA hires and retains pedophiles, culminating in a Congressional investigation (Blackburn, 2012). These fears are powerful and meaningful but linger out of reach in my own experiences.

One of the difficulties of my own frequent repetition of security rituals is that I began to notice that I would lose subtle differences in each experience. Gradually, I would alternate going through the advanced imaging scanners and opting out for pat-downs. This led to experiences of TSA reinforcing its security performatives.

The rituals of airport security create a kind of self-policing both in airport spaces and before we reach them. My body is ready for this ritual by what I am and am not wearing, by what I have brought and not brought to the airport. This is the security performative par excellence.	[October 2012] In Las Vegas, I enter the screening after a week of vacation. I’m a bit demure at the prospects of returning home. In the checkpoint my hand slips along the back of my belt—I can feel the worn out leather meeting the cold metal of the buckle—my instinct to remove my belt actually occurred about eight feet too early because I have yet to reach the gray plastic bins for my possessions and the other passengers around me have yet to prepare their bodies. As I reach the conveyor belt for the X-ray machine I hold up the line just a little bit by waiting for my bags to enter before proceeding. You are supposed to wait until your bags enter before you move on, but for some reason there is always some impatience at lingering for your possessions to enter the machine. I always find the huffs and sighs and other nonverbal cues of the passengers behind me provide as much persuasion to move along through security as TSA does. I am traveling with my partner and so I have a buffer from the impatient angst of those around me, but nonetheless, their breath and bodies wear on my refusal to hurry on through this ritual—those expressions only grow louder when I refuse the millimeter wave scan.
Unlike the most vocal and strident anti-TSA activists, even when I refuse certain TSA directives, I have never felt threatened or intimidated. I have encountered agents who would have preferred me not opting out. However, I want to nuance a difference here: Some seek out aggressive encounters with TSA. Others end up in them because of botched security encounters or because of systemic problems—passengers who are non-White, disabled, elderly, queer, transgendered, or otherwise struggle with the structure’s procedures.	As I declare quietly but clearly that I don’t want to go through the millimeter wave scanner, the TSA officer, a tall and stocky gentleman who looks to be in his late thirties, replies curtly, “Fine, wait here, it will be a while.” He directs me through the metal detector and then has me stand just past the detector while I wait for someone who can pat me down. This is the first time I recall encountering hostility from TSA. I can see my partner collecting my belongings from the X-ray machine; it is somewhat disconcerting that nobody stops her. Then moments later another officer in his late forties or early fifties with cropped dark hair directs me to an area about fifteen feet from where I am for a pat-down. The pat-down itself seemed in every way routine—touching certain places with the fronts of his hands including my arms, back and legs, more culturally sensitive places are touched with the back of his hands, my inner thighs until he reached my testicles, my buttocks. He ran his hands around the inner waistband of my pants. All of this is fairly standard and often, I must confess, can even tickle—a strange thing for me to admit both as a researcher and as an adult. However, to my periphery something slightly different is occurring; I can see a supervisor circling my pat-down, his sweater a signal of his increased authority. He barely caught my eye on his first pass, but I noticed him making eye contact with me. Then moments later he circles back around and I notice he is directly blocking my view of my partner. He speaks: “Are there any concerns you have that I can address?” I think “Where to start? Perhaps I should ask him about panoptic space and TSA.” But before I can answer he is more direct and there is a sense of hostility in his tone, “Is there any particular reason you are opting-out today?” My reply was a bit of a dodge, “No, there is no one specific reason I am opting-out.”
	I can tell he is displeased, but I am also confused by his presence here. About twenty seconds later my pat-down is concluded and he tells me to have a nice flight. I return the gesture by telling him and the man giving me a pat-down to have a nice day. As I walk over to collect my belongings
	my partner tells me she was recording the pat-down with her cell phone and he saw her (once he saw her, he made sure to obstruct her view of me and mine of her). The use of proxemics in this checkpoint is fascinating. The ability of the supervisor to separate the two us by using the space between us shows an adept spatial strategy.

Resistance to TSA often requires becoming “matter out of place” (Douglas, 1984, p. 50). However, TSA’s “layers of security” are adept at coping with matter that is out of place. When I opt out of a whole body scanner, I may inconvenience a particular TSA employee, but the assemblage remains secure. When I opt out for research, I am performing a sort of resistance performative. However, the security performative is already prepared for such acts. Here, both resistance and security are enacted at the same time. Resistance is also safe for me to perform because of my own body politics. As a cisgender, White, heterosexual male, my modest resistance rarely meets much retribution. It is tempting and too easy to forget that even with careful training and a critical eye, my journeys through airports are categorically different because of my embodied politics. Even my male-pattern baldness staves off attention, styling your hair in a bun can alert whole body imagers. Othered bodies are transformed by the security performative into matter out of place because they confound TSA security and exceed the smooth functioning of its performance.

Likewise, macroresistance activities have struggled because of geographical sprawl and checkpoint design. Opt-out days are supposed to jam the system by having passengers commit en masse to opt out and overwhelm the ability of screeners to pat-down everyone. We Won’t Fly (a now defunct passenger rights group) targets the day before Thanksgiving (a busy travel day) for opting out (“For Basic Human Dignity,” n.d.). With airports already at capacity, opting out is a resistance performative—resetting the grounds upon which security can operate. We Won’t Fly informs passengers to “Say ‘I opt out!’ Tell your friends, family and community so they know how to protect themselves, too. Be prepared for delays and intimate TSA groping” (“For Basic Human Dignity,” n.d.). Although some reports claim that “National Opt-Out Day” overwhelmed airports and caused TSA to revert to metal detector screenings instead of whole body imaging and enhanced pat-downs, TSA claims otherwise (“Opt Out Turns Into Opt In,” 2014). These activities struggle for success. Even if activists are located in the same city, they may fly at different times on the same day or different days of a given week. TSA initially responded to such acts by co-opting them, “Anybody can opt out . . . adults, children, Klingons, etc. . . .” (“Will Children Be Screened By Whole Body Imagers?” 2009). As security concerns have heightened, these resistance performatives have receded. In addition, TSA’s security performatives reshape themselves to account for these challenges; TSA now reserves the right to refuse opt-outs. In this case, TSA brings these resistance performatives into the logic of security performatives.

In the previous section, I drew upon my experiences in airports to map the affective dimensions of the security performative in TSA airport security checkpoints. These experiences offer space for initial, though not final, considerations of the resistance performative—ways of doing security differently. It is worth noting that these examples of resistance performatives are few and thin compared with security performatives. This speaks to the limits of my own encounters and the power of TSA’s security performatives. TSA security operates in a way that dominates affect; from agents to space, airport security expects the body to perform. This does not mean that resistance is impossible or hopeless but that consequences for transgression are high, affectively charged and embodied.

Conclusions and Implications

TSA’s security repertoires are inherently unstable. This instability makes these rhetorical enactments difficult to locate, trace, and analyze. Participatory critical rhetoric affords the methodological tools to approach these practices as they happen and make them available to rhetorical critique. In this section, I examine three implications based on my analysis. First, I examine how my blending of qualitative research techniques and rhetorical criticism to examine TSA security and resistance performatives highlights synergies between qualitative methods and rhetorical analysis made possible by adopting participatory critical rhetoric. Second, I articulate how this essay advances critical security studies through my use of participatory critical rhetoric. Third, I examine the performative implications of TSA’s rhetoric.

First, my analysis participates in the groundswell of interest among communication scholars in synthesizing the critical insights made available by qualitative and rhetorical research practices. The growth of participatory critical rhetoric suggests exigency for rhetorical critics to address ephemeral rhetorical acts. Live rhetorics, as I argue above, enact a repertoire that is an intermediary between the not-yet-invented and the durable archived rhetorics of the past. Exploring the process by which some acts are preserved for the archive, whereas others remain temporary and fleeting, is an exciting potentiality for the intermingling of qualitative and rhetorical research practices. More than that, by synthesizing these research practices and demonstrating their differences and similarities, scholars have a larger pool of research practices with which to approach live rhetorics. Qualitative and rhetorical researchers can get into the interstices of rhetoric as it occurs in the everyday through the mobilization of critical participatory rhetoric. The everyday becomes palpable and material to rhetorical analysis.

TSA’s airport security practices mark a particularly good case study for this argument because of the play among the elements of the archive and repertoire. TSA security is a performative and participatory act. The affect of airport security, and the negotiations that occur to accomplish security, cannot be located in the sum of durable rhetorical archives (training manuals, protocols, signs, and empty structures). Although these are valuable resources to critique, they are incomplete. These archivable artifacts gain urgency and force when they are enacted across the bodies of travelers in TSA checkpoints. Airport security is performed and embodied, its procedures structure what bodies can do, and its affects are constrained and often fleeting. Critical research on TSA, as I have cited throughout this essay, has emphasized the role of the body. Participatory critical rhetoric provides a means to assess bodies in such a living and dynamic space. TSA requires travelers to actively participate; such activity requires research practices that are invaluable for an active researcher engaging in live rhetoric.

Second, this essay explores the use of participatory critical rhetoric as a research methodology in critical security studies. The above analysis points to the ways certain rhetorical features of TSA’s efforts in airports accomplish security practices through affect. Middleton et al. (2015) note, “Critics . . . may find it difficult to account for affect’s role in persuading or constituting reality” (p. 75). Participatory critical rhetoric provides the means by which my body became open to studying these affects. Recognizing security as a material construction of reality, in part through affective rhetoric, is vital. Developing methods for studying security that can attune the critics (and their body) to such enactments is also essential.

Middleton et al. (2015) declare, “rhetoric exists beyond rationality” (p. 75). Affect as a rhetorical strategy is powerful in this capacity. Dismissals of TSA as security theater, literature on the oppressive power structures of TSA, and resistive efforts against TSA all stall against the monotony of TSA’s affective rhetoric. This dimension of TSA’s security is fundamental for understanding the way the agency has ensconced itself in the rituals of American air travel. More than that, my analysis points to rhetorical features that persuade and hail certain types of material relations in airports. Participatory critical rhetoric, with its focus on live rhetorics, makes these practices, and other security practices that exist ephemerally, open to analysis in critical security studies.

Third, my analysis of airport security demonstrates the ways rhetoric is material and palpable. In airports, a sincere desire for safety mixed with anxiety over how to perform is harnessed. In checkpoints, bodies engage in a series of performative struggles. Such performances cannot be deemed mere theatricality, instead, they exercise a much larger consubstantial effort in (re)making the culture of airport security. Air travelers and TSA mutually engage in routines of airport security, and are enjoined in mutual affects that are part of the work of airport (in)security. Although my fieldwork is isolated to my own experience, it is nonetheless an account of affect produced by airport (in)security. Conflicting desires for and against these routines are present. For me, TSA is a mass mobilization of a new surveillance assemblage that has tested the legal, rhetorical, bodily, and affective limits of our contact with the State. The creation of such an agency presents a paradox. On one hand, resistance in such spaces is curtailed by the need to secure airports. On the other hand, my commitment to a radical politics of difference knows that inequality in power is at work here.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, Danielle Endres, and Aaron Hess for their efforts in putting this special issue together. Their efforts undoubtedly made this a stronger piece of writing and criticism. An earlier draft of this article was part of my dissertation in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. I thank Len Hawes and Mary S. Strine for their work on this project over the years.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

George F. (Guy) McHendry, Jr. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Creighton University. He received a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Utah and researches rhetoric and performance in airport security discourse.

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