Of discursive passports and checkpoints
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.26690Keywords:
checkpoint, gender, mobility, passport(ing), sexualityAbstract
This commentary advances the notions of passports and checkpoints as heuristics through which to theorise the external and internal push and pull of identity and desire within specific regimes of normativities and geopolitical imbalances. More specifically, passporting happens when normative regimes of representations issue what one could call discursive passports – that is, institutionalised identity bundles, which sediment over time, defining individuals as specific ‘types’. Such discursive passports are no less harmful than their material counterparts because they can constrain people’s access to resources in more pervasive and far-reaching ways than their identity documents do. On the other hand, checkpoints are interactional moments in which people police themselves and others in everyday interactions. Checkpoints can be 1) external, when one’s discursive positionings or emotional expressions are questioned or even blocked by other people, or 2) internal, when people police their sense of belonging and affective practices such as desire.
References
Agha, Asif (2005) Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 38–59. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.38
Cameron, Deborah and Kulick, Don (2003) Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cashman, Holly (2018) Sexuality and bilingualism. In Kira Hall and Rusty Barrett (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212926.013.22
Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John (2003) Ethnography on an awkward scale: Postcolonial anthropology and the violence of abstraction. Ethnography 4(2): 147–179. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24047807
EasyPass (n.d.) Website. Retrieved 12 July 2023 from https://www.easypass.de/EasyPass/EN/What_is_EasyPASS/home_node.html
Foucault, Michel (1988) Technologies of the self. In Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault 16–49. Cambridge, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
Keshavarz, Mahmoud (2016) Design Politics: An Inquiry into Passports, Camps and Borders. PhD thesis, Malmö University.
Kiesling, Scott F. (2011) The interactional construction of desire as gender. Gender and Language 5(2): 213–239. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v5i2.213
Mazzarella, William (2004) Culture, globalization, mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 345–367. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143809
Milani, Tommaso M. and Levon, Erez (2019) Israel as homotopia: language, space, and vicious belonging. Language in Society 48(4): 607–628. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404519000356
Milani, Tommaso M. and Levon, Erez (forthcoming) Theorizing checkpoints of desire: multilingualism, sexuality and (in)securitization in Israel/Palestine. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism.
Rampton, Ben and Charalambous, Constadina (2020) Sociolinguistics and everyday (in)securitization. Journal of Sociolinguistics 24(1): 757–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12400
Ritchie, Jason (2010) Queer Checkpoints: Sexuality, Survival and the Paradoxes of Sovereignty in Israel-Palestine. (PhD thesis) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Weizman, Eyal (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso.
Williams, Raymond (1977) Structures of feeling. In Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature 128–135. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
