The Long Arc of Safety: A Review of Three Recent Works on the History, Logic, and Rhetoric of Security

Locked-up? Sent away? Interrogated? Quarantined? Tortured? These three texts, collectively and individually, give a powerful account of the obsession with safety in the United States (and also, in the case of hospitals and asylums, beyond). With careful analyses of historical movements, political rhetoric, and antidemocratic social policies, they argue, current systems of “containment”—whether in prisons, hospitals, asylums or ideals of citizenship and domesticity—carry with them long, and often surprising, racialized and sexualized histories. Turning our eyes in unusual directions and adding a few interesting and important twists to the usual finger-pointing, they push us as critical theorists to think carefully and with great nuance about the narratives we use to examine and indict contemporary forms of domination.

In A New Kind of Containment, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo have collected a powerful range of analyses of the new rhetoric and logics of “safety” at work in the post–September 11, 2001, United States. Taking 9/11 as their common point of departure, the essays in this collection expose the racialized and sexualized collateral damage of the “war on terror” in the United States—that is, on citizens and immigrants in the United States. The collection covers a wide range of topics: the intertwining rhetoric against terrorism and same-sex marriage (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo) and international LGBT violence (Gay); the racializing of terrorism as “black” and of same-sex marriage as “white” that divides antiwar efforts from LGBT movements to legalize same-sex marriage (Guerrero); the subtle aesthetics of the photos from Abu Ghraib that enact new racial codes to allow “grey zones” of violence in the name of war (Streamas); the colonial discourses of the war on terror as seen through the maligning of Ward Churchill—and, by extension, all of academia in the United States (King); the infantilizing of the United States, as seen in the racializing moralism of post-9/11 children’s literature (Lee); the racialized exceptionalism that runs through US history and enables a flaunting of international law in post-9/11 US interrogations of alleged terrorists, such as Jose Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri (Nicholls); the interlocking discourses of environmentalism and security, particularly as seen through the racializing of undocumented immigrants as “resource-depleters” (Urban); the containment of the immigrant, racialized body in the US military, particularly through the unnoticed and paradoxical patriotism of “green card soldiers” (Pacleb); and the history of the US split approach regarding Mexican migration and labor, traced from the early twentieth-century Bracero program through the emergence of images of drug dealers and terrorists to contemporary vigilantes at the US-Mexico border (Gordillo).

Taken as a whole, the collection effectively challenges any view that reads the US “war on terror” as primarily a matter of foreign policy. Particularly in the essays on same-sex marriage, children’s literature, green card soldiers, and the history of Mexican immigration, we come to see how far the “war on terror” reaches into the “interiority” of the United States—not as a geographic location, but as a psychic interiority that the biopolitics of the war on terror is slowly, but quite surely, manufacturing. The pairing with two of the most visible political movements of the twenty-first century—namely, the movement to legalize same-sex marriage and the anti-immigrant movement—shows quite clearly how the “war on terror” plays a central role in the internal policing of the US citizenry, shaping the racialized and sexualized discourses around domesticity and citizenship. As the essay on children’s literature then goes on to show, these are not “merely” political discourses: they aim...