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Abstract

Since 9/11, biometric identification technologies have been naturalized as indispensable to airport securitization, heralded under the guise of accuracy, objectivity, and dependability. While cast as apolitical and asocial tools for counterterrorism, mounting scholarly concerns have revealed that biometric identification systems reproduce social hierarchies, disproportionately misidentifying and targeting marginalized subjects. This thesis takes technologized and securitized airport checkpoint as a paradigmatic site through which to interrogate the epistemological underpinnings of transparency. In so doing, I analyze how contemporary biometric regimes are not merely about (mis)recognizing bodies, but about actively producing normative legibility through racialized assemblages of power, identification, and surveillance. I interrogate how security infrastructures rely on technical standardizations of identity calibrated to whiteness, producing normative frameworks that (re)produce and materialize the “transparent body”, a normative figure deemed secure, coherent, and governable, while casting non-normative bodies as opaque, excessive, suspect and forced into intensified scrutiny and exposure. Drawing on Black feminist theory, queer/trans studies, and critical surveillance studies, this thesis critiques the ontological and epistemological through which recognition and subjecthood are made intelligible within Western regimes of governance. Rather than appealing to liberal paradigms of inclusion, this thesis instead advances opacity as a critical analytic through which to unsettle the racializing epistemologies that structure transparency. Against the regulatory violence of recognition and legibility, this project reads opacity as resistance, a modality that disrupts the state’s biopolitical and necropolitical operations to know, to name, and to render life governable.