The Body-That-Is-Not-One: Exception and Belonging on the US-Mexican Border in The Bridge

This paper discusses the ways in which the 2013-14 TV series The Bridge/America interferes with current border politics and the creation of "bare life" (Agamben) at the U.S.-Mexican border. By engaging its viewers with the state and status of individual and communal bodies in the borderland region and using the corpse on "The Bridge of the Americas" – the "body-that-is-not-one" – as symbol and trigger for its investigation, the series presents a powerful critique of national border politics and their results: the precarity of human lives on the thresholds to the Global North and the states of exception that exist at the U.S.-Mexican border. However, as a cultural artifact, the series also symptomatically reflects the tensions and debates that inform the border as a highly charged terrain in contemporary national, transnational, and cultural politics and imaginaries.