The politics and poetics of airport (in)security rhetoric: Materialism, affect, and the Transportation Security Administration

This dissertation examines the affective rhetoric of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). After the events of September 11, 2001 airport security was transitioned from a private enterprise to a federal agency. TSA screens millions of passengers daily and costs taxpayers billions of dollars annually. This dissertation argues that the affective dimensions of airport security make resisting TSA difficult in airports and that online resistance to TSA often uses violent and counterproductive discourses.;This dissertation is grounded in practices of rhetorical criticism and argues for a materialist orientation to rhetoric. Specifically, it argues that rhetorical criticism has been bifurcated between systems of representation (rhetoric is an approximation of the material world) and materialist rhetoric (rhetoric has force and consequence in the world). This project draws from critical/cultural studies and performance studies to investigate the ways material rhetorics articulate with force to bodies. Additionally, the affective dimensions of rhetoric are explored. This approach to rhetoric forms the method of criticism used to study TSA. A variety of artifacts are mapped and critiqued in this dissertation including airport security checkpoints, images produced by TSA whole body imagers, enhanced pat downs conducted by TSA, TSA training materials, videos of TSA conducting security screenings and online comments reacting to those videos, and field notes from travels through airport security checkpoints. Specific attention is paid for the ways these artifacts evince the impossibility of politics at airports and the fraught relationship between TSA and TSA detractors in online discussions about TSA. This study also examines the relationship among these artifacts.;Finally, this dissertation attends to the intense embodied relationship between TSA and passengers. It argues that airport (in)security includes controlling the affective dimensions of air travel. TSA performs routines of security that establish appropriate affect for passengers and when those affects fail TSA fails to secure airports. Failures by TSA encourage violent rhetoric by TSA detractors who advocate dismantling the administration.