Editors’ Note: Security, Safety, Safe

This issue is not primarily about safety as a state of being, but rather about safety as a rhetoric, and as a practice of power relations. This issue uncovers the discourses of safety—safety promised, safety precluded, safety guaranteed for some people by suppressing others. This “Safe” issue is about how the logics and technologies of safety can render human beings less secure.

Safety is not the basic state to which we are restored when external threats are removed. Rather, it is a reward for compliance with cultural and political directives. It is a way of thinking about bodies and public spaces and identities that relies on separating the victim from the perpetrator, the normal from the perverse, the “us” from the “them.” Safety is a mesh through which only certain particles can fit. Meanwhile, if “safe” is a promise, “risk” is a tool. It works to mobilize people, as well as to separate them. Does vaccination endanger children by exposing them to toxins, or does nonvaccination endanger children by making them vulnerable to disease? Brown’s article shows that the rhetoric of danger in this debate spurs behavior on both sides; cross-accusations make everyone feel unsafe. Similarly, Dawson’s clever review argues that films warning about the dangers of global climate change and environmental damage function to express and then assuage anxieties, instead of arousing activism.

Who is the most endangered? “Safe” presents three examinations of the iconic figure of victimhood, the young white woman alone in New York City. Hengehold, Hickey, and Johnson each demonstrate how media and advice manuals over the past century have demanded that women curtail their mobility and eradicate their options. The gendered rhetorics of safety can be devastating, teaching women that they are inherently vulnerable and that whatever happens to them is their own fault. Perhaps Safe, the film reviewed by Jason Tougaw, can be read as a commentary on this iconic victimhood.

If the idea of the white female victim has had disproportionate power, the body of the person of color has been legible only in terms of danger. In Levine’s “In His Own Home,” we hear the frightening repercussions of a cultural distrust of black masculinity in domestic space, the violence apparently required to enforce the man’s relation to the home. In Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo’s dissection of the public image of Michelle Obama, we see that when an African American woman fails to be the “Mammy,” she has nowhere to go but the dangerously sexual “Jezebel.” The cultural scripts of blackness have no space for the safe.

What about the people aligned with “danger” in public discourses of safety? In their unforgettable account of the individuals engaged in hazardous-waste cleanup, Casper and Moore restore the bodies glossed over by national alliances and state contracts. Meanwhile, in Jackson and Meiners’s exploration of prison policy, we see how the state mobilizes public feelings like disgust, anger, and fear in order to justify policing. Perhaps most chilling is Dagmar Herzog’s account of the Nazis’ murder of thousands of disabled subjects—and description of how impatience with the cognitively disabled continues today.

In short, this issue makes it dismayingly clear that young white women in the city are almost always coded as victims, while black men and women are constantly affiliated with violence, and workers, prisoners, and the disabled continue, disturbingly, to be regarded as disposable. To this list of people denied the status of victimhood, or indeed of personhood, one might add those whose desires, bodies, loves, nationalities, and identifications are not recognized by the state. Winnubst’s review essay reminds us of the important difference between security and safety, and the critical work currently sharpening that distinction.

In the innovative “Eruptions” section, our speakers turn the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority’s post-9/11 warning (“If You See Something, Say Something”) back on itself, addressing structural threats, particularly the economic and racial inequalities that threaten us profoundly. Does injustice count as “something”? And can we really “say something” to the forces engaged in enforcing that injustice? In the Alerts...